what a world could have been with micropayments and creator<->consumer support. i mean i see patreon (or even onlyfans) as something akin to it which is lovely? but also drowned out by the noise brought about by google/facebook/etc platforms which have brought about so much noise to what used to be such a cozy, weird lil cyberspace.
Right? That was one of the more surprising aspects of Gates’s essay, especially because if you read it, he seems confident that micropayment tech would be in place imminently and would become the norm. Having a user’s wallet connected to browsing almost sounds like Web3! Gates must have been having conversations with people at the time to give him that insight and confidence. I might research that at some point—reporting on the internet that might have been and what happened there.
I mean the late 90s internet did have information superhighway megalibrary alley-vendor vibes and it was hard to imagine what Google SEO + Facebook + general enshittification (thanks Cory Doctorow for the term) would do to its economic potential.
And yeah! I still have some hope somebody will do something cool with Web3 - I imagined actual journalism done by lovely humans like yourself marked with public key encryption to indicate this is thoughtfully produced, along with interlinking reputation and trust scores happening awhile back, but with deep fake AI video becoming mainstream maybe that might actually happen? I think you would really like the books Daemon and Freedom (TM) by Daniel Suarez - Freedom is moreso about the decentralized society that exists within global capitalism after the events of Daemon, where a program executes after its programmers' death which attempts to overtake the global financial system. 😎
what a world could have been with micropayments and creator<->consumer support. i mean i see patreon (or even onlyfans) as something akin to it which is lovely? but also drowned out by the noise brought about by google/facebook/etc platforms which have brought about so much noise to what used to be such a cozy, weird lil cyberspace.
Right? That was one of the more surprising aspects of Gates’s essay, especially because if you read it, he seems confident that micropayment tech would be in place imminently and would become the norm. Having a user’s wallet connected to browsing almost sounds like Web3! Gates must have been having conversations with people at the time to give him that insight and confidence. I might research that at some point—reporting on the internet that might have been and what happened there.
I mean the late 90s internet did have information superhighway megalibrary alley-vendor vibes and it was hard to imagine what Google SEO + Facebook + general enshittification (thanks Cory Doctorow for the term) would do to its economic potential.
And yeah! I still have some hope somebody will do something cool with Web3 - I imagined actual journalism done by lovely humans like yourself marked with public key encryption to indicate this is thoughtfully produced, along with interlinking reputation and trust scores happening awhile back, but with deep fake AI video becoming mainstream maybe that might actually happen? I think you would really like the books Daemon and Freedom (TM) by Daniel Suarez - Freedom is moreso about the decentralized society that exists within global capitalism after the events of Daemon, where a program executes after its programmers' death which attempts to overtake the global financial system. 😎
Ooh I'm definitely adding Suarez's books to the top of my reading list, thanks!
very interesting take, Chris. Thanks for sending