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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

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gumby

Sounds dystopian to me

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You're already living it. This is just about openly accepting it.

Non serviam.

True but it's just not as cool as all the dystopian films made us think it would be

In many ways it's far worse. Kinda like the RM mind parasites.

An internet that is drastically less tied to surveillance capitalism, and where participants directly exchange value with each other instead of through privacy intrusions? Sounds perfect to me.

We do exchange value. Real value. I would not read webpages if I did not get value. Webpages would not be offered if those making them did not get value. Even when there was no commercialism on the Internet at all. Or why people do a lot of things without any money involved. Basing everything on "money" is a scourge. Not to mention the height of inefficiency. Our brains have to deal with something very different instead of the thing itself. Which also lead to a general inability to think about actual things - just "spend more money" to solve something, why even think about the actual things? Money-magic thinking.

> Webpages would not be offered if those making them did not get value.

If you’re not paying, you’re the product. Ads are a bigger scourge than “basing everything on money” which is just value made fungible.

This isn't strictly true. It's only true if the entity creating the website needs to extract a monetary profit. Plenty of people make websites (and other products) and happily share them in a community. The benefit they draw is in the act of creating and sharing.

Yep. Real communities exist, and when they do we enjoy contributing time and energy to support the group. For better and worse, the opensource ecosystem depends on this community spirit. So does HN and the tech blogging sphere. I don’t take the time to write a blog post for money. I do it because I want to be part of the conversation happening amongst my peers.

Adding explicit commerce to every conversation devalues and corrodes our social bonds.

People do things for free when it benefits them. Relying on people to do things for free as a way to organize society is doomed to failure. The moment you have to do something, whether you want to or not, is when it becomes work. And people don’t want to be required to do things they don’t want to do for free. It has never worked in the history of humanity.

P2P networks and decentralized services have historically suffered because they relied on generous volunteers who donate their time and money (via resource allocation) to benefit the network. Blockchain / crypto is a mechanism to introduce financial elements into p2p networks. The experiment is ongoing, but there has been more advancement in p2p tech in the last 5 years than previous 20.

Money is an abstraction of value. So I don't see how you praise "real value"(whatever that is) on the one hand and disparage monetary valuation as a scourge. Assessing something's value to you on a personal level is functionally no different than attaching a figure to something's worth whether that be in dollars, gold, time, or some other quantity or unit.

> Money is an abstraction of value

Which is greatly overvalued because it gives you the illusion and convenience to use numbers. Which "frees" you from actually thinking about the problem. Everything is a finance problem (and when you understand finance and management you understand everything).

See, I don't understand you either. It makes no sense to me how soooo many intelligent people could fall for something so silly and not see how deep inside a hole they are standing.

Like all models, it's a really great tool for the right job. Humans tend to forget about terms and conditions, when finding something worked well they ignore the fine print.

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