Sublime

This idealistic dream brings to mind Marc Andreessen’s recent confession that the “original sin” of the internet was not building a payments layer into the browser. The paid communities you investigate are an attempt to remedy that sin and ground cyberspace in the material/economic systems that support our livelihoods.

Always remember that anything you post to the Internet has now become public. “The Internet is a copy machine,” writes author Kevin Kelly. “Once anything that can be copied is brought into contact with the Internet, it will be copied, and those copies never leave.” Ideally, you want the work you post online to be copied and spread to every corner o

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But even with all their flaws, the existence of dozens of massive, collectively-maintained, curated and organized libraries of communal culture are still something like a miracle of the web. Tellingly, these kinds of sites rarely get launched these days, and the ones that have survived all follow a fairly common set of patterns. They often start as... See more

The internet is not only a network of cables, servers, and computers. It is an environment that shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants and their use.