I think it also points to compensation for creators, so that they can dedicate their time to creating their works, mattering. I think him being on Patreon, and knowing he can count on income as long as he keeps creating this kind of content, contributes to the quality of what is produced.
I believe when someone no longer needs to concern themselves with financial consequences for taking time out of their day to create content for the public, and knows that there is reciprocity in the relationship between themselves and the rest of the world for whom they produce content, they can dedicate themselves more completely to their craft.
>>I’ve been dreaming lately of a tor-like network that’s based loosely on the idea of tailnets. Rather than blockchain bullshit, you’d have a direct ring of trust with friends, and then you could set up access policies to forward packets for people you don’t trust, but who know someone you do trust.
The network will coalesce around using a handful of hub nodes for the packet forwarding, and a malicious party need only to coopt that central cluster of nodes to unmask all web users.
The "blockchain bullshit" enables trusted decentralized interaction at scale.
Communal support (e.g. telling your friends about your work situation, and receiving advice from those who are informed) and legal mechanisms like lawsuits already ensures workers are by and large receiving the best the market can offer them.
The effect that unions have on ensuring employment contracts are not being broken by exploitive employers pales in comparison to the effect they have in restricting the labor market by giving unions what effectively amounts to government-enforced monopolies over various work units, which lets unions exploit companies.
There are numerous alternatives to granting unions enormous extra-contractual powers over employers that are available to society to prevent employer violations of labor contracts.
The changes that unions make will not neutralize the negative impact they have on an industry's efficiency/competitivess.
The outlier is if unions succeed in changing immigration policy to restrict the inflow of foreign labor. That can have unexpected effects that boost the country's economic growth rate or at least help its wage growth rate.
Depending on the situation, immigration restrictions can also harm the country's economy/wages.
Support for unions is based on a basic misunderstanding of economics.
It is not mandates from the state that lead to wages and work conditions improving. It's rising demand from employers, as their revenue increases, and they compete with other employers for a limited pool of workers.
Unions obstruct the flexibility and freedom of the market, and thereby hamper economic efficiency and competitiveness. Firms will, all things being equal, see less revenue growth in a unionized labor market, than a non-unionized one.
>>Some could say that the pre-Facebook blogging era was better, but I don't think those times ever had a chance of growing to encompass regular people.
Agree entirely.
>>the truth is that the only Android that could become a market standard is the Google Android, and Linux has no chance in hell as long as Microsoft and Apple have money to better tailor (and market) their OSes to end users (regular people and corporations).
Well Google Android has a much less entrenched position than Windows did, and it's precisely because it is open source. One can run non-Google Androids that are fully compatible with other Android apps, and Google would never be able to charge for its version for that reason.
>>Open source, by its nature, avoids attracting money, and money is exactly how you win mindshare.
While that's often the case, there are times where its nonproprietary nature facilitates its adoption. The fact that no one group owns an open source project can be an attractive feature, especially when disparate parties are looking for a common protocol or platform to collaborate through.
Cryptocurrency is both open source and attracts money. That's why I think blockchains might succeed against traditional web companies.
All-in-all I think our chances of being to solve the market monopoly problem with technology is good given the space of possible solutions. Of course this is just an opinion and I can't prove that it will work.
You can make the monopoly less relevant or irrelevant by superseding its market. Maybe saying that's a case of "breaking the monopoly" is a stretch, but the point is it's a valid solution to the problems of a monopoly, which emanate from the market and financial power its controller wields.
These technologies broke up arguably worse monopolies, over information (Google democraticizing access to information) and media (Facebook and other social media companies breaking the hold that mass media had over people's opinions by giving them an avenue to directly communicate).
I think people forget how bad the mass media situation was. We had a handful of companies disseminate one way broadcasting to the entire population. The audience were passive viewers whose choices in programming were extremely limited, and who had very little ability to participate in the creation and curation of the media content.
So I don't think it's clear that the market, left to its own devices, doesn't evolve toward the direction of greater personal autonomy and empowerment, and it's certainly not clear that it doesn't have the potential to.
>>Monopoly is a natural end-goal of a company, and it's the usual job of governments to prevent companies from achieving that goal.
Bottom up switch over to open source is a viable market solution to market monopolies. If Android or Linux become the market standard in OSs for example, that is not a proprietary monopoly that gives one group control over the OS.
Android breaking Windows' monopoly on operating systems. It did so largely by eclipsing the desktop computer by facilitating the creation of a new mode of personal computing.
One could argue that TCP/IP and web standards like HTTP and HTML similarly made the desktop and its associated software (operating system, productivity suites, etc) less relevant, by increasing the ability of desktop users to access computing resources served by machines running different operating systems (e.g. a Linux server).
I would rather solutions to large concentrations of tech power not come from above, in the way of government further expanding its control over the private sphere, but from below, via technological innovation in the form of distributed technologies like blockchains.
I believe when someone no longer needs to concern themselves with financial consequences for taking time out of their day to create content for the public, and knows that there is reciprocity in the relationship between themselves and the rest of the world for whom they produce content, they can dedicate themselves more completely to their craft.