Rising Tide Rents and Robber Baron Rents

There's much focus on the rent seeking world, on the vast assembled powers. And a more just and better world would have better answers for meeting with these imbalances. But I think it also masks the counter-narrative that it's about us (humanity) and our empowerment & how we sustain choice & agency & create systems where we aren't as likely to be pushed under the yolk.

And it feels like software ought have a lot of opportunity here. That our user agency ought be building, that it ought blend into a creative agency. A more malleable system of systems where we still retain property rights & options, not all given away in the shrinkwrap terms of service & felony offense of business model to bypass their technological protection measures. We ought be making post-industrial and proto-humam open source software that tries to expose its guts & is a live interactive world of software, not dead programs.

Maybe innovation comes from outside IT. But gee it feels like so much of the world is so capital intensive, that most people won't get their own personal stake. Amplifying the person's/personal stakes: that feels like how we keep homo erectus making tools and making their world. The personal computer still feels key to this.

I like to link to this old Google page, still online from when their search engine ads were all clearly labeled and in a separate column to the right of results with an offsetting background color. They correctly criticized the loss of trust that comes with selling search results, but the potential revenue from doing so never went away and they gradually succumbed.

(For the pedantic: yes, while they technically still label the ads and don't call it selling search results, can a double-digit percentage of users tell them apart from results? Especially with Google now selling so many results and having so many cross-promotions that the unpaid results are well below the fold.)