Saved by Ben Warren
A Rural Missouri Town Fights Big Tech, and Itself
This hardening will reveal the root problem. Despite many people contributing to the tools and services that now dominate our lives, most people have no stake in them. To cite just one example, the four million people who drive for Uber probably own less of the company combined than a single dentist in New Jersey with Vanguard in their portfolio.
Yancey Strickler • The Ownership Crisis
This makes me sad: the part of the Internet that fills me with the most optimism are platforms like Shopify and Stripe and Substack that make it possible for individual entrepreneurs to try and build their own businesses with world-class tools at their disposal; making it hard to utilize those tools primarily benefits established companies and apps... See more
Ben Thompson • Platforms in an Aggregator World
While not-for-profit projects do exist, it seems increasingly rare for participatory worlds to avoid commercialization, especially when attention is the primary currency of the internet.
Dirt • Dirt: Worldbuilding, Pt. 2
It’s a real doozy. Everything we do online to create content these days is reliant on Google, the company, as an arbiter of what makes content “good”, which is really the decision of maybe a few hundred PMs and developers (now at home) in California, and entirely dependent on what’s going to continue to make Google profitable instead of what’s actu... See more