sarah zedig! 🍉🐐

oh god I don't know I mean it's practically all I think about anymore but I don't know that I'm any closer to an answer.

there's a few things I DON'T think will take over. this big rss push is cool and broadly good but it doesn't solve what I see as the two most fundamental problems: discoverability and monetization. without solving the problem of 1. how do people who aren't already huge and successful get seen and 2. how do you make it easy for people to send money to those artists, I think you have an ultra hobbyist web of mostly blogs that have 10-100 readers and which slowly die out, and I think that because that's what already happened as ad revenue dwindled and the systems that encouraged people to read blogs and made it possible to find new ones collapsed or were shut down. boy google has a lot to do with a lot of different aspects of this huh? that's interesting, and maybe suggests that there's a bit more of a future in "breaking google up". I think it'd relieve a lot of pressure. but again you still need something to replace the broken up fragments of google that serve those purposes. and you'd need to tackle the problem of a censorious banking and payment processor system and the rot happening at patreon which is a whole other issue.

I mean there's the easy answer: I'm a communist so of course I think the true hope is for the working class to seize their destiny as the protagonists of history, shatter the chains of class relations, and democratically manage the economy. and that's not even like, just glib! one of the biggest lessons of the last few years (also, centuries) is that you can't just decide not to experience the market pressures of the capitalist system. everyone's compelled to seek profits that can be put back into revolutionizing production because everyone ELSE is doing that and trying to out compete you. so, that really undermines a lot of the noble aspirations of cooperatives off the bat.

BUT then I swing back the other way and think, like, ok look at Cohost. I think you can either approach Cohost's failure from this defensive standpoint of "well they couldn't have done anything different!" which I think probably feels very comforting in the moment but on reflection is horribly demoralizing. it suggests there really is no way forward but towards decline and ruin. (I've seen posts preferring infrastructure going away after two years to eventually being "enshittified" which is about as "doomer" as you can get.) if you're touting how miraculously good cohost's conversion rates were, though, I feel like it's worth considering: could this have actually worked?

one of the original sins of the project was a weird polite fiction around the issue of "free labor" for example. users of the site were doing all sorts of infrastructural labor. like I think I only ever saw random posters talk about the method to add cohost as an app. that's how I used cohost on my phone, but cohost relied on some random posts to disseminate that information. even if you won't accept things like "the production of css crimes that get the site a bunch of tech press" as labor (which to be clear obviously is imo), those kinds of major psas were important labor, which wasn't treated as such because, I guess, no one was being asked to do it, and no one was, critically, being promised any sort of democratic governance considerations in return for this labor. so, the relations on the site were, at the end of the day, completely identical to something like Google+, or the magic the gathering official forums I was on as a teenager. the userbase had no meaningful say over whether the site lived or died, beyond feeling a personal compulsion to contribute so that it might. BUT AT THE SAME TIME because this "no free labor" thing was a core principle, I guess out of a reactive response to FOSS community dynamics (fair enough! they're ass!), this labor couldn't be organized or mobilized in a crisis.

this is a practical contradiction of organizational structure not something woven into the tapestry of fate by the Norns.

and even then, I actually don't even know if this was an insurmountable contradiction! you know what might have actually papered over this contradiction well enough for the site to keep running long term?

a fucking tip system that could have compensated this kind of fuzzily defined volunteer labor. STRIIIIIIIIPE!!!!!!!!

like I'm talking about flaws of planning here but let's be real, payment processors just pulling the rug out from under the entire project is, idk, not something you can really plan for. so I do have sympathy and if I'm in a more depressive state of mind it's easy to say that as long as these processors have us all by the balls we might just be stuck with an AOLification of the internet, walled sanitized gardens as far as the eye can see. I've had some conversations with folks too about alternative processors and the field is Not Great. what do we do? uhhhhhhhhhh I refer you again to the Doctor Who clip of the Soviet soldier repelling literal vampires with the strength of his faith in the Revolution.

I can't help but think though that cohost was tantalizingly close to what we want. a bunch of structures that actually baffle direct competition (numberlessness! no quote tweets! no easily searchable reblogs!). an architecture oriented towards expressiveness. a limited search tool based on tags that WAS on its way to being a somewhat mature, useful system. I don't want to litigate artist's alley here but I think there were good ideas there. and generally, stuff on here DID, at least in my experience and the experience of other artists I know, reach its audience, and even result in people spending money on that art. yes, the cool independent website thing is neat and exciting! but I was finding those cool independent websites through cohost. I sure don't find them through google anymore! cohost provided an ideal mix of:

1. systems that leveled the playing field vs the Winners Win More structures of other centralized platforms
2. systems that enabled active discoverability vs the passive Get Served Slop structures of other centralized platforms ("The Algorithmic Timeline")
3. the sketches of systems of payment that, based on how many commissions and patreon backers and so on seemed to come from cohost, might genuinely have worked out if not for some design failures and external industry and regulatory uppercuts.

what if you could weld the stuff cohost did right, the stuff that made it so important infrastructurally, to a cooperative structure for creators as well? Comradery has a cooperative structure that puts programmers and artists on a level; that seems at least interesting even if they're faced with the same payment processor issues as everyone else. the comicad network is trying to rebuild a project wonderful style system of cross promotional adspace bidding, which has the limitation of like, capital just sorta circulating within the system but might help the discoverability problem IF mass users could be convinced to take actual agency over their online experience. the Cartoonist Coop is experimenting with a model where membership means volunteering your time, which seems like maybe a better way of addressing the "free labor" problem. they're also trying to organize like, broadly, a union despite (for complicated legal and historical reasons) not being able to unionize or call strikes rn on the comic companies. would it be possible to extend this model further across disciplines and build counter-infrastructure? [pulling a curtain back to reveal a huge cork board covered in red string] AND THEN WE START TALKING TO THE FARM WORKERS ABOUT COLLECTIVIZING THE LAND-

or, here's a wide swerve, we could actually start talking again about public funding for the damn arts or having an actual welfare state. you know it was just accepted in britain for a long time that an artist would be on the dole for a few years while they developed their art practice? you know how much media before the 2000s was made with the DIRECT financial support from various western governments, before someone got the bright idea that if everything was handed out in the form of TAX CREDITS instead, that would act as a filter so only existing large media corporations would be able to take advantage of that kind of welfare? this is a totally different approach from basically everything discussed above but it should be part of the conversation and it makes me crazy that it basically never is.

the total acceptance of libertarian organizational principles online also drives me up the wall. FOSS for example is enamored of this idea that it's ok for each project to be some guy's little ideological fiefdom because, uh "you can always fork the code yourself". or the way creative commons winds up reifying a really restrictive interpretation of intellectual property by suggesting that we should only touch that culture which has specifically been licensed to us (why else have a No Derivatives license unless you believe that fanfiction ISN'T naturally legal under existing fair use?). so many proposals amount to "well what if we made a better Marketplace" or "what if we regulated away The Monopolies so small businesses could enter the Marketplace", and there's really very little engagement with an actual socialist vision for the web. like, comicad seems cool, but it is at the end of the day another marketplace you know? and just adding a tip system to cohost was sort of similar, a short term solution that doesn't lead us closer to socialized internet. maybe there's a better way, but the horizon of discourse is just SO narrow and SO driven by the fantasy of Choosing To Be Better. oh god sidenote remember all that Smart Contract bullshit a few years ago where people would write code on the blockchainTM that supposedly provided a governance structure, and mostly projects just collapsed or had their wallets drained when the founders rugpulled everyone or fell into bitter infighting? jeepers creepers.

I really think we're just taking the very first step down this road, if we've even got our shoes on. and maybe I'm the wrong person to ask because I look at the solutions on offer and I'm like ok so at what point do we start occupying buildings or rebuilding the food system or or or. I'm not joking or doing a bit, I'm sincerely a communist! so in terms of short term solutions there's probably a lot more stuff that COULD work that I'm also gonna be grumpy about because it's not shattering the millennia old shackles of Class Division.

there's this Legendary Pink Dots song that's mostly this monologue by Edward Ka-Spel where he's listing off all these hopes, that the horrors aren't inherent to humanity, that it's just this god we have yet to topple, that we can ultimately find peace and harmony... and at the end he's like, "I want to believe all these things/I want to believe all these things and more!/but you've caught me at a bad moment. and I can't. :/ "

that's about where I'm at psychologically these days lmao.