aim

The reality is that newspapers have never sold the news to readers — readers pay for the distribution platform on which that news is printed, i.e. the paper itself and the packaging involved. 

… The Internet cannot be put back in the genie’s bottle, nor can it be limited to serve the State and Elites like the police forces, financial system, etc. The Web has a simple ontological imperative: creatively destroy monopolies and every effort to limit information, dissent and feedback. To the degree the Central State is a monopoly that limits information, dissent and feedback to protect itself, it too will be dismantled by the Web.

The Central State and financialization are the buggy whips of the coming era. Those depending on making buggy whips in 1901 decried the rise of automobiles, but their resistance to the tides of change did not stop or even hinder those tides.

For the past 60 years, financial security flowed from the Central State and the various monopolies it enforced or controlled. For the past 30 years, wealth flowed from the relentless financialization of the U.S. and global economies. Those cycles are ending, and whatever financial security is possible going forward will flow from self-reliance, self-organizing social capital, and decentralized social and technological innovation.

It boils down to a simple choice: either ride the tide of creative destruction of failed/ depleted models or be washed away by the tide.

The values of technologists have been baked into the infrastructure, but it’s also possible to change the ecosystem through cultural practices.

-danah boyd

What will replace them?  The same medium that already killed off the encyclopedia, the telephone directory and the atlas: the Web.

The Beyoncé tumblr is a public relations triumph, emphasizing that while Beyoncé may not “run the world,” as one of her most famous songs suggests, she certainly runs her own image. In a time when image control is increasingly elusive, it’s a feat worthy of praise. And while Beyoncé has worked hard to elide the tremendous labor required to construct such an image, my hope is that I’ve helped make that labor — and the discursive and semiotic layers that fuel it — visible. Making things visible doesn’t mean killing the pleasure they evoke, it just makes them more nuanced. I can still look at those photos and want to hang out. But now I don’t feel nearly as bad that I can’t.