This is the final week of class in the History of the Digital Future seminar that I teach at GWU.
The main theme that my students learned from 30 years of internet history?
“Big money ruins everything.”
Today it reads like a warning.
#WIREDarchive
The main theme that my students learned from 30 years of internet history?
“Big money ruins everything.”
Today it reads like a warning.
#WIREDarchive
The trouble with the 90s web isn’t, I think, that it was commercialized.
It’s that Netscape went public for SO MUCH MONEY, setting off a five year financial boom, which in turn set up insane valuations that could never be justified.
The scale of the money was ruinous.
It’s that Netscape went public for SO MUCH MONEY, setting off a five year financial boom, which in turn set up insane valuations that could never be justified.
The scale of the money was ruinous.
The trouble with Web 2.0 wasn’t evident at first. It was a ton of decentralized creators doing cool stuff!
But as the money got big, the incentives got skewed.
YouTube was made worse once the money from succeeding in the creator economy got big.
But as the money got big, the incentives got skewed.
YouTube was made worse once the money from succeeding in the creator economy got big.
The story of how surveillance capitalism ate the world is a story of companies like Facebook and Google desperately trying to justify their valuations.
The harms of Amazon all fall into the category of “just extreme, unrestrained capitalism.”
The harms of Amazon all fall into the category of “just extreme, unrestrained capitalism.”
In the early ‘10s, the “sharing economy” devolved into “gig economy.”
It wasn’t that there was no money in the sharing economy. It was that the BIG money — the 1,000x returns—was in creating unregulated versions of the taxi and hotel industries.
It wasn’t that there was no money in the sharing economy. It was that the BIG money — the 1,000x returns—was in creating unregulated versions of the taxi and hotel industries.
The parts of the social web that we tend to think of as *good* — Wikipedia, for instance — are also the parts that are hard to heavily monetize.
You add big money, you start the clock running for ruining things.
You add big money, you start the clock running for ruining things.
(As an aside, this is the root of why I am so critical of crypto and “web 3.” A financialized version of the web where everything is a speculative hustle is a version that can never be good.)
Part of what has made twitter way-less-bad than Facebook and YouTube is that Twitter has never been good at making money.
Elon insists that he doesn’t care if his $43B investment turns a profit.
I hope that’s true, but I’m doubtful. He says a lot of stuff just for the camera.
Elon insists that he doesn’t care if his $43B investment turns a profit.
I hope that’s true, but I’m doubtful. He says a lot of stuff just for the camera.
If and when the money gets big, Twitter will get worse.
That’s been one of the main throughlines of the past 30 years of the web.
That’s been one of the main throughlines of the past 30 years of the web.
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