A Rural Missouri Town Fights Big Tech, and Itself

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

If you want to sell a product online, publish a game, or distribute a new app you built, you must pay a tax to one of several dominant aggregators. “Real estate” on the internet can therefore be much more competitive than it is in the physical world, where you pay a market-based rent, but foot traffic comes for free.

My humbler assertion is that 2020 has punctured my confidence that the internet cannot encroach on the benefits of urban density and proximity. Going forward, many fledgling companies may agree, as they find that the city in the cloud essentially acts as a more accessible version of the city on the Earth, eerily reproducing its forces of agglomerat... See more

Both Bluesky and Lemon8 are designed to be black holes. We are all of us craving something new, places and spaces online that we can go to feel good and have fun and be inspired. These are normal human things to want; people want to be around each other. But it is almost impossible to create or maintain that kind of space if your company's goal is

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