Re: Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12
On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 10:21 PM, wrote: > Do they know that you really can't "control" anyone on Facebook and that > the *primary* "sales" activity that happens is NEGATIVE (i.e. people > telling each other what *not* to buy) -- you betcha. Yes; and the big four Internet corporations (Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook) play the same negative game on a larger scale within the media and creative industries: shrinking them while securing the diminished business for themselves. Compared to the creative industries of the 1960s-1990s - advertising agencies, TV networks and major record labels for example -, businesses like Google's AdWords, YouTube or Apple's iTunes run on a minimal internal workforce, give almost no jobs to external creative industry workers, and have relatively small total cashflows and profits. In the last decade, the classical creative industries have already shrunk about 50% if I believe what insiders have told me about employment and project budgets in their respective work fields such as design, architecture and advertising. If we project the media consumption habits of today's teenagers and young adults onto the future, then it's not far-fetched to expect that one day, YouTube (or its future equivalent) will have replaced network TV, Google Ads (or maybe Facebook ads if the company plays it smart) will have a near-monopoly on publishing media advertising and iTunes will have replaced the recording industry, even those monopolies amount to much less than they would have had in the 1960s or 1980s. 'Content' production may largely become outsourced into crowdfunded self-organization, potentially turning the old activist dream of self-organized media into a precarious nightmare. Creative industries may shrink to a fraction of today's size because of economic streamlining effects. Just compare the labor required to design a magazine ad or make a tv commercial to that of making a Google ad, or the design work required for a paper book versus the largely automated XML document engineering of an e-book, or, on the consumer's side, the obsolescence of having hundreds of newspapers that mostly print the same news. (Which is why the Internet has killed news as a salable commodity.) This development could be rationalized as genuine industrialization and cutting overhead of an industry that never truly worked like one. If the big Internet four (which might consist of partly different companies in the future) seize the biggest piece of that shrunk cake, it will still be profitable enough for them, and it will make sense for them to focus on 'negative activity' within the creative industries, in the same way the car industry destroyed railway and public transport systems in 20th century America. So the economic question for Facebook is not what new business it can make, but which established creative industries it can kill off in order to live on a profitable-enough fraction of what they used to make. Florian # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12
On 05/08/2012 05:52 PM, Morlock Elloi wrote: The curiously absent question is why there should be "social media" in the first place, and 'media' in general. Lascaux. - Rob. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12
Thanks for that Dmytri. I find the way Jake Appelbaum frames these issues very accessible and clarifying for my own thinking, and what you wrote here continued to do that for me. Jaromil, can you add to what you're writing here? I feel that I could learn a lot from you, but am missing enough context and maybe history that I'm having trouble understanding what you're saying. I too am far more inclined away from macro-, grand, sociological analyses, towards the micro, personal, ethnographic, and would be most happy for you to send me away with reading to sharpen me up ;) Nick # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12
Dmytri: > Eliminating privilege is a political struggle, not a technical one. Ahah -- therein lies the conundrum. Are you sure that you can defend this, apparently controversial, "priority" scheme? Where does one's "politics" come from? In particular, what might *cause* an "anti-privilege" sort of politics (not to be confused with either the politics of "fairness" or "anti-corruption")? Are you claiming that this sort of politics could be the result of some "natural law" or has some other "inate" origins? Probably not. Or, does it arise from our "material" circumstances? And, since I presume we are talking here about human psychology, what do we know about the relationship between that psychology and the material environment in which we live? Then, how is this psychological environment shaped by the technologies we use and their relationship to various sorts of "scarcity" (which are themselves produced by technologies)? So, which has priority? Technology? Economics? Culture? Politics? Seems you might have over-simplified things and drawn distinctions that are too sharp -- perhaps the result of grinding an axe? As has already been pointed out, much of our lives already has little to do with "profit." As McLuhan declared a very long time ago, we already live in an age of "software communism." Since I'm an ex-Wall Street banker, I happen to know some of the people who funded Facebook. Do they want profits? Sure, but do they also know that what they are doing is skating on very thin ice? Absolutely. Do they intend to "hold" the stock -- not any longer than legally necessary! Do they know that you really can't "control" anyone on Facebook and that the *primary* "sales" activity that happens is NEGATIVE (i.e. people telling each other what *not* to buy) -- you betcha. Does anyone on Madison Avenue *really* believe that you can "target" people and get more money out of them than they did with television ads? No -- the smart ones have learned over the past 15 years that it really doesn't work that way. They are just hoping to minimize how much LESS they get out of them! People aren't fools and since antiquity human cultures have valorized VIRTUE over VICE. Greed is a vice. Endless accumulation isn't a virtue -- temperance is, along with prudence. How do you know that Bernard de Mandeville's "Fable of the Bees" wasn't a "limited time offer" that has now EXPIRED? Capitalism was invented for a "purpose" by more-or-less by the same people who gave us the 18th century (first) Industrial Revolution. While corporations and usury had been around for a while, that purpose was (roughly speaking) "industrialization." Today the Chinese call their system "state-capitalism," which given that they are still industrializing makes a lot of sense. Industrialization raises living standards, increases population density, improves health, lengthens life expectancy and generally "helps" EVERYONE -- right? Just look at Angus Madisson's charts and graphs. So, does "capitalism" still have a broad social *purpose* once a significant level of industrialization has already been achieved? Might the same "anti-privilege" politics that you champion be a result of having already achieved "post-industrial" status -- personally and culturally? For what it's worth, the *original* Internet (okay, ARPANET) was quite "centralized" and, in fact, had "surveillance" (albeit of a very small group of researchers who had grown reluctant to travel to "brain-storm") as (one of) its primary goals. By the time I brought AOL public in 1992, its entire profits were the result of HOT CHAT, which was superceded by AOL becoming the primary site for accessing PORN sites, since they had the largest server-farm and, therefore, the most room to cache "pictures." So, there's "surveillance" (like the don't pass go, directly to jail type -- for instance) and the "I've got all your clicks but don't know what to do with them" type -- which is exactly where Google and Facebook are today and will likely be 10 years from now. Be careful not to believe what the "capitalists" tell you . . . they often aren't telling the truth! Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY P.S. The first person I heard use the term "venture communist" was John Perry Barlow, speaking at a Forbes conference. As a guy who has come with a few catchy phrases, you might want to trademark the term! # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Inclusive Social Media for Civic Engagement Evaluation Report, May 16 Webinar, New Knight Grant and Locals Online Community
Greetings, I wanted to let you know we've published our 60 page evaluation report on inclusive online community engagement in lower income, highly diverse, high immigrant neighborhoods. The Inclusive Social Media pilot project was funded by the Ford Foundation. Read the executive summary and full report here: http://blog.e-democracy.org/posts/1420 RSVP for an online event/teleconference on May 16 for a Q and A discussion here: http://inclusivesocialmedia.eventbrite.com Also, we've just launched a "take it to scale" project in St. Paul with major funding from the Knight Foundation! Our goal is to _inclusively_ engage 10,000 residents ~daily across a network of online neighbors forums. By inclusion we mean forums that reflect the local racial and ethnic diversity in each of the 16 neighborhood forums we host led by local volunteers. Reaching lower income residents is important as well. St. Paul is 44% people of color. It is all about creating _bridges_ among diverse neighbors. http://beneighbors.org - Public outreach http://e-democracy.org/inclusion - Dry project info, grant details http://e-democracy.org/se - Example Minneapolis forum with about 1,000 members or 20%+ of households Part of the three year grant also includes lesson sharing. We are planning future webinars and exploring e-training options for 2013. While we will host neighbors forums based on volunteer capacity in communities beyond the 17 we currently serve (US, UK, and NZ currently), we see sharing lessons for independent adaptation as key to our mission. Our "free" option for peer to peer knowledge sharing that is open now is the Locals Online community of practice. I encourage you to join us if you either host a local online group, blog, social net, etc. or if you'd like to start one and have access to 300+ of your peers. http://e-democracy.org/locals We also host the global Digital Inclusion Network online community which is related: http://e-democracy.org/di We look forward to your input and questions on the report. ** Please reply to: cl...@e-democracy.org Sincerely, Steven Clift Founder and Executive Director, E-Democracy.org # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12
The curiously absent question is why there should be "social media" in the first place, and 'media' in general. Not why there is - it's like free cocain - but why it should exist. This is a political question. The justification (ethical, moral, political, philosophical) for the existence of low cost/free communications between arbitrarily distant people needs to be questioned. If you think that it's obvious, think again, and try not to factor in the allure of spreading your own pathetic output to billions with a keystroke. Perhaps communication should be expensive. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12
Hey Jaromil, nice to see the more friendly tone. If you read any arrogance in my writing it is certainly unintentional, as I freely admit that I am thoroughly dilettantish theorist and claim no credentials or authority whatever, likewise for any perceived "attacks," I make none. Pointing out issues and limitations is not an attack, but simply analysis. I also make no claims that my ideas are novel, new, cool, important or even interesting. What I'm mostly interested in is if the arguments I'm making are correct or incorrect. If you, or anybody else, can explain how and why what I say is incorrect, I'm much obliged. If you have found an error, please help me and explain it. However, I have read your email several times, and I'm still not able to understand your criticism, beyond a vague sense of displeasure and the now toned-down personal comments. And since we're quoting Pink Floyd; I've got a bike, you can ride it if you like, it's got a basket, a bell, and rings and things to make it look good. I'd give it to you if I could, but I borrowed it. Best, On 08.05.2012 11:10, Jaromil wrote: In the meantime, we have many clever and dedicated people contributing to inventing alternative platforms, and these platforms can be very important and worthwhile for the minority that will ever use them, but we do not have the social will nor capacity to bring these platforms to the masses, and given the dominance of capital in our society, it's not clear where such capacity will come from. Thanks for the roundup. It doesn't progress much from a story on mass-media that we have told ourselves already 20 or more years ago in Italy, if not before. Anyway. <...> -- Dmytri Kleiner Venture Communist # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Why I say the things I say
Long live Thorstein Veblen! The shining light of radical sociology on the Left. On 05/08/2012 01:54 AM, Keith Hart wrote: I think the main difference between Brian and me is that he wants to engage personally with the politics of our moment in history and this comes across sometimes as being myopic (which he is not), whereas I want to get a sense of the global picture and that makes me rather detached about the politics. I do think we are entering a period of war and revolution that could be as long as the neoliberal phase... Thanks for the vote of confidence, Keith, you are generous in your assessment. For the record, Mr. Myopic, aka "the Keyboard Revolutionary," is doing an extensive collaborative project on global political economy over the last hundred years or so. It's called "Three Crises: 30s-70s-Today." The first phase of it is archived, not on the campus of any university, but on the website of a little radical free cultural center: http://messhall.org/?page_id=771 The idea of this and similar efforts is to eventually be able mount an autonomous challenge to intellectual complacency, from a position outside the Ivory Towerblocks of contemporary universities. We're not there yet -- it would take a whole network of similar efforts -- but the movement is growing. Note among others the archive of written texts and the bibliography and readings. Some food for thought and maybe even material for agitation. Because of exactly the imperative for political engagement that Keith talks about, this first iteration of Three Crises is focused on the United States -- whose place as the hegemonic power of the 20th century makes that focus partially necessary anyway. However I do want to enlarge the focus of this work for its second iteration with Occupy Berlin from June 17-23 (yes, under the wings of the infamous Biennial). This will be a very intensive series of lectures and discussions on which Armin Medosch will collaborate. One of the things I find so interesting is that right now our Euro-American "depression" corresponds with the BRICS' expansion. Just as, in the day, the American stagflation of the 70's corresponded with the rise of Europe and Japan to the status of equals or at least near economic peers of the USA. It is quite dfficult to enlarge the focus of political-economic analysis to global dimensions, and even more difficult to maintain a political engagement while doing so. But this is the challenge of our tumultuous times. I am still interested in responses to the friend/enemy problem that I was raising at the start of this particular thread. Nicholas Knouf gave a very thoughtful answer that I'll respond after thinking about it for a few days. best, Brian # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12
dear Dmytri, On Tue, 08 May 2012, Dmytri Kleiner wrote: > > In the meantime, we have many clever and dedicated people > contributing to inventing alternative platforms, and these platforms > can be very important and worthwhile for the minority that will ever > use them, but we do not have the social will nor capacity to bring > these platforms to the masses, and given the dominance of capital in > our society, it's not clear where such capacity will come from. Thanks for the roundup. It doesn't progress much from a story on mass-media that we have told ourselves already 20 or more years ago in Italy, if not before. Anyway. Apologies for my rather personal attack in my other mail, I see you have at least refrained from attacking the attempts of others to individuate the very "capacity" (shouldn't it be called constituency?) you talk about here. I do not believe a macroeconomical analysis is at all bad, you can go on with it if you really like to continue that narrative, I see there is plenty of people that feel comfortable in the reiterate tracing of such graphs, but please do not exclude other narratives, as you was doing, what made me furious. And especially, do not build your interpretation of reality solely on your own visions, which seems to be very abstract to me, quite not in touch with the working class you are aiming at. So, I know is very hard for you, but please, don't be arrogant. Probably the very political concept we have in common is that of class consciousness (or maybe call it just consciousness?), but with a certain burlesque narrative you are just contributing to destroy it. Well, now I see you are back to a decade ago, allright. I guess the public liked that. You are in Europe, right? Careful with that axe, Eugene. ciao -- jaromil, dyne.org developer, http://jaromil.dyne.org GPG: B2D9 9376 BFB2 60B7 601F 5B62 F6D3 FBD9 C2B6 8E39 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Recent Books I'm In and Why They're Good
Recent Books I'm In and Why They're Good Ok, this is a bad way to begin reviews/announcements of some recent books that discuss my work (in the midst of others of course); I'm not sure how to do this modestly, or whether modesty would even be an issue. For me these books have been important because much of what I've done, I thought lost; my career is one of constant falterings, restarts, occasional moments when it seems as if things are going to turn out well - then more falterings, and so forth. I begin constantly; it's only a matter of time before I collapse. The truth is I also like these books for all sorts of reasons, so here goes. The most recent is also the most expensive, Garry Neill Kennedy's The Last Art College: Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1968-1978, MIT Press, 2012, around $70. I taught there several times during this period, as a visiting artist or visiting faculty. The school was amazing; it had a world-wide reputation with people like Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, and Joseph Beuys coming up. There's a lot on Dan Graham and Ian Murray, who was a student and catalyst at the time. The book's over 450 pages long, large format, and includes a lot of work and statements by the people who came through. NSCAD was a kind of paradise; students and faculty were given tremendous latitude in their projects, and everyone was treated as as valuable, and an artist. Simone Forti, Gerhard Richter, and Michael Snow made books for the NSCAD Press. A lot of the energy and genius of the place emanated from David Askevold, who headed the Projects class. Krzysztof Wodiczko and Emmett Williams and Charlemagne Palestine were there. Dorit Cypris and Sharon Kulik were students, Martha Wilson and Kasper Koenig were there. I'm not sure of Martha's affiliation. The school had a conceptual bent, but this was translated into thinking about and through performance, painting, sculpture, and life. These were formative years for me; in particular, I owe a lot to David and Ian. I wouldn't get the book for me, however (god, what hubris); the totality of the volume really shows what's possible in art education, and why art schools - which seem to be on the decline (as is art education in the US at least, another matter) - are really important in the world. Along with this, Peggy Gale edited Artist Talk, 1969-1977, NSCAD Press, 2004 - transcriptions of talks given at the school. Artists include Acconci, Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, James Lee Byars, Dan Graham, Lawrence Wiener, Patterson Ewen, Daniel Buren, and so forth - all males, it should be noted (which is one of its faults - Laurie for example also gave a talk). I'm in this as well with 43 pages of strangeness. Even more recently than Kennedy's book, Jason Weiss just edited Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-DISK, The Most Outrageous Record Label in America, Wesleyan University Press, 2012. Again, I'm part of the "oral." This book documents the company, which for all intents and purposes introduced the free jazz of Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and Guiseppi Logan; Michael Snow is in this as well. Ayler died years ago; the people interviewed include Sunny Murray, Amiri Baraka, Gato Barbieri, William Parker, Burton Greene, Logan, Roswell Rudd, Marion Brown, Milford Graves, Ishmael Reed, John Tchicai, Gunter Hampel, and Sonny Simmons, among others. There's a large section on Bernard Stollman, who founded the company. If you're interested in free jazz, new music, experimental music, alternative-anything, this book, I think, is a must read, along with Valerie Wilmer's As Serious As Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz. And the music (forget me here) is unbelievable; both books serve as reasonably good guides. Chris Funkhouser has published two books on electronic writing; the latest is New Directions in Digital Poetry, Continuum, 2012. There's a section on me, for which I'm grateful. This is the best book I've seen on the subject - it follows up on Funkhouser's Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959-1995, Alabama, 2007. I'm in this as well. What Chris has done, in both, is present the works of a great number of people, along with commentary/theory; the writers/poets/artists include David Daniels, Jim Andrews, Philippe Bootz, mIEKAL aND, Laurie Anderson, Brian Kim Stefans, Stephanie Strickland, John Cayley, Mez (Mary Anne Breeze), Talan Memmott, Caitlin Fisher, Sandy Baldwin, Deena Larsen, and many others. New Directions is divided into case studies, Prehistoric focuses on history, but both volumes overlap past and present. I love Funkhouser's writing, which is clear, energetic, amazingly lucid, and really useful for anyone trying to follow the roots and current landscape of an incredibly messy area of contemporary - what? literature, programming, poetry, thought, culture, interactive work, new media? The books are exciting with numerous examples. The intensity of Maria Damon's art and writing is phenomenal; her Postliterary America,
Re: Why I say the things I say
Good point, Michael! Come back, Thorstein Veblen, all is forgiven. I am really just making a plea for the introduction of world history into this discussion. The fastest-growing economy in the world between 1890 and 1913 was Russia with an annual growth rate of about 10%, similar to China's today. We all know what happened next after the imperialist powers started fighting each other and the revolution was not in Germany. The British thought the world economy was in a Great Depression 1873-1896, but it turned out that returns on middle class savings (consols) were being squeezed by American and German capital, while the world economy boomed (Siberia, South Africa, Brazil). We are not just witnesses to the self-serving ideologies of the super-rich. (Thomas Jefferson presciently called commercial monopolists a psuedo-aristocracy and wanted to include inhibitions to their growth in the constitution, but the Federalists got round that one. Whether he knew that or not, Veblen made the same point a century later and now it is our turn.) There are massive changes taking place under our noses and, as far as nettime is concerned, you would think nothing much is going on outside the US. I think the main difference between Brian and me is that he wants to engage personally with the politics of our moment in history and this comes across sometimes as being myopic (which he is not), whereas I want to get a sense of the global picture and that makes me rather detached about the politics. I do think we are entering a period of war and revolution that could be as long as the neoliberal phase and that is why I gobble up what Brian has to say. I did produce this reflection on revolution and the human economy not long ago: http://thememorybank.co.uk/2012/02/07/the-human-economy-in-a-revolutionary-moment-political-aspects-of-the-economic-crisis/ Keith # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12
Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12 I gave a talk with Jacob Applebaum at last week's Re:publica conference in Berlin. It seems it had fallen to us to break a little bad news. Here it is. - We are not progressing from a primitive era of centralized social media to an emerging era of decentralized social media, the reverse is happening. - Surveillance and control of users is not some sort of unintended consequence of social media platforms, it is the reason they exist. - Privacy is not simply a consumer choice, it is a matter of power and privilege. Earlier at Re:publica, Eben Moglen, the brilliant and tireless legal council of the Free Software Foundation and founder of the FreedomBox Foundation, gave a characteristically excellent speech. However, in his enthusiasm, he makes makes a claim that seems very wrong. Moglen, claims that Facebook's days as a dominant platform are numbered, because we will soon have decentralized social platforms, based on projects such as FreedomBox, users will operate their own federated platforms and form collective social platforms based on their own hardware, retain control of their own data, etc. I can understand and share Moglen's enthusiasm for such a vision, however this is not the observable history of our communications platforms, not the obvious direction they seem to be headed, and there is no clear reason to believe this will change. The trajectory that Moglen is using has centralized social media as the starting point and distributed social media as the place we are moving toward. But in actual fact, distributed social media is where we started, and centralized platforms are where we have arrived. The Internet is a distributed social media platform. The classic internet platforms that existed before the commercialization of the web provided all the features of modern social media monopolies. Platforms like Usenet, Email, IRC and Finger allowed us to do everything we do now with Facebook and friends. We could post status updates, share pictures, send messages, etc. Yet, these platforms have been more or less abandoned. So the question we need to address is not so much how we can invent a distributed social platform, but how and why we started from a fully distributed social platform and replaced it with centralized social media monopolies. The answer is quite simple. The early internet was not significantly capitalist funded, the change in application topology came along with commercialization, and it is a consequence of the business models required by capitalist investors to capture profit. The business model of social media platforms is surveillance and behavioral control. The internet's original protocols and architecture made surveillance and behavioral control more difficult. Once capital became the dominant source of financing it directed investment toward centralized platforms, which are better at providing such surveillance and control, the original platforms were starved of financing. The centralized platforms grew and the decentralized platforms submerged beneath the rising tides of the capitalist web. This is nothing new. This was the same business model that capital devised for media in general, such as network television. The customer of network television is not the viewer, rather the viewer is the product, the "audience commodity." The real customer is the advertisers and lobby groups that want to control this audience. Network Television didn't provide the surveillance part, so advertisers needed to employ market research and ratings firms such as Neielson for that bit. This was a major advantage of social media, richer data from better surveillance allowed for more effective behavioral control than ever before possible, using tracking, targeting, machine learning, behavioral retargeting, among many techniques made possible by the deep pool of data companies like Facebook and Google have available. This is not a choice that capitalist made, this is the only way that profit-driven organizations can provide a public good like a communication platform. Capitalist investors must capture profit or lose their capital. If their platforms can not capture profit, they vanish. So, if capitalism will not fund free, federated social platforms, what will? For Moglen's optimistic trajectory to pan out, this implies that funds can come from the public sector, or from volunteers/donators etc? But if these sectors where capable of turning the tide on social media monopolies, wouldn't they have already done so? After all, the internet started out as a decentralized platform, so it's not like they had to play catch-up, they had a significant head start. Yet, you could fill many a curio case with technologies dreamed up and abandoned because they where unable to be sustained without financing. http://www.dmytri.info/privacy-moglen-ioerror-rp12/ Give the continuous march of neolib
