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> But as Amazon got bigger and bigger and the externalities more apparent, it felt less like we were helping each other and more like we were help Bezos buy yet another yacht or media empire.

The Internet-circulating quote comes to mind: Planet Earth is pretty much a vacation resort for around 500 rich people, and the remaining 8 billion of us are just their staff. The Relative Few have got the system set up perfectly so that whatever we do, we're probably serving/enriching them. AI doesn't really change this, but it does further it.

> The Internet-circulating quote comes to mind: Planet Earth is pretty much a vacation resort for around 500 rich people, and the remaining 8 billion of us are just their staff. The Relative Few have got the system set up perfectly so that whatever we do, we're probably serving/enriching them. AI doesn't really change this, but it does further it.

I don't necessarily disagree with the analysis on how Planet Earth is currently setup to be, but something that I've been thinking about lately, is that to the extent we can consume the public image of some of the Relative Few, they seem oddly unhappy.

I think you're right.

Anyone who finds themselves with $100m in their bank account and thinks, "No, I need more," is a person with a hole inside them that can never be filled.

If raw resources (tree cutting) and manufacturing (book binding) is saturated, a fully-realized economy has just one step left: financialization.

You have to start finding ways to keep people hooked on books and make it a part of their regular lifestyle. One book can't be enough, and after a while you have to convince them to replace the books they already bought. New editions, Author's Footnotes, limited run release, all of the stops have to be pulled out to get consumers to show up en-masse. Because that's what they are - consumers, not readers - wallets to be squeezed until they're bled of all the trust they had in media.

I think about the publications I liked reading as a kid, like Joystiq and Polygon. Some of the best games journalism the industry produced, but inevitably doomed to fail as their competitors monetized further. The rest of traditional media has followed the same path, converging on some mercurial social network marketing tactic as the placeholder for big-picture brand strategy.

There were a couple of threads on HN this week. "Do you have any unusual hobbies" and "How do you relax". I enjoyed them and was thinking of contributing. Then it occurred to me that my comments would be gold for targeting advertising at me. That is the distrust that has been bred by the data harvesters.

Exactly. That thread about hobbies was just a trap designed to squeeze as much info from as many people as possible.

I can totally see that, for sure. I was much more likely to write a review long ago, now I don't even bother. (For buying stuff online, at least.) Maybe I lost my innocence about this stuff a long time ago, and so it's not so much LLMs that broke it for me, but maybe... I dunno, the downfall of Web 2.0 and the death of RSS? I do think that the old internet, for some definition of "old," felt different. For sure. I'll have to chew on this. I certainly felt some shock on the IP questions when all of this came up. I'm from the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion, and now that largely makes me feel kinda old.

Also I'm not a fan of billionaires, obviously, but I think that given I've worked on open source and tools for so long, I kinda had to accept that stuff I make was going to be used towards ends I didn't approve of. Something about that is in here too, I think.

(Also, I didn't say this in the first comment, but I'm gonna be thinking about the industrial revolution thing a lot, I think you're on to something there. Scale meaningfully changes things.)

> the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion

That was always a luxury of its peculiar historical moment, though, wasn't it? Barlow didn't have to care who paid for the infrastructure, but he was just bloviating.

No, it's as true now as it was then. The intellectual property team didn't win on the merits or by law enforcement; it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick.

> it was the convenience of streaming anything at will for a monthly fee that did the trick

That's not the whole story, though. There have been many community-driven projects to bring convenient access to copyrighted works to the masses in a convenient way. You may recall the meteoric success of Popcorn Time. Law enforcement shut them down. Without the hand of the state beating down any popular alternative to legal distribution it absolutely would be the dominant mode of media consumption.

I feel the future includes the sentiments you describe. It was a little before my time professionally, but I grew up reading that kind of thinking.

I do think that the open web stuff, decentralized, or at least more decentralized than currently, is the path forward. I've been reading about the AT protocol and it recently becoming an official working group with the IETF.

I feel a second order effect of making decentralized social networking easier, is making individuals more empowered to separate from what they don't believe in. The third order effect is then building separate infrastructure entirely.

As sad as that can be - in my personal opinion it runs the risk of ending the "world wide" part of the web - it appears to be the only way society can avoid enriching the few beyond reason.

> I'm from the "information wants to be free" sort of persuasion, and now that largely makes me feel kinda old.

Me too, 100%. But that was during a moment in time when that information was more likely to be enabling a person who otherwise didn't have as many resources than enabling a billionaire to make their torment nexus 0.1% more powerful.

> I kinda had to accept that stuff I make was going to be used towards ends I didn't approve of. Something about that is in here too, I think.

Yeah, I've mostly made peace with that too.

The way I think about it is that when I make some digital thing and share it with the world, I'm (hopefully!) adding value to a bunch of people. I'm happiest if the distribution of that value lifts up people on the bottom end more than people on the top. I think inequality is one of the biggest problems in the world today and I aspire to have the web and the stuff I make chip away at it.

If my stuff ends up helping the rich and poor equally and doesn't really effect inequality one way or the other, I guess it's fine.

But in a world with AI, I worry that anything I put out there increases inequality and that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Maybe that's just the way things are now and I have to accept it.

> But in a world with AI, I worry that anything I put out there increases inequality and that gives me the heebie-jeebies. Maybe that's just the way things are now and I have to accept it.

This observation doesn't really clash with "information wants to be free." You just have to include LLMs in the category or "information," like Free Software types already do for all software. You don't need to abandon your principles, you should shift your demands. A handful of companies can't be allowed to benefit from free information and then put what they make behind a wall.

> Free Software types already do for all software

Free Software types also create software...they didn't just argue for a better license and try to regulate Sun/others to re-license their software; they wrote free (libre) versions of proprietary software and released it for free (cost), which is what counteracted the "[putting] what they make behind a wall". If you're saying "[some] LLMs should be free", I agree.

I don’t disagree with you, but this has been going on for a while… Google monetized the the by indexing it and monetized what you wanted to find. Facebook monetized the eyeballs from the pictures and posts you added. Now LLMs will monetize all web content. To play devil’s advocate - LLMs do give something back. Those with ideas and no coding experience can now build entire businesses for little to zero cost. This seems different

> A handful of companies can't be allowed to benefit from free information and then put what they make behind a wall.

What is there to prevent them?

Nothing today; but in a democracy, we have the power to make it possible, if people vote the right way.

It does feel like the collaborative, free open nature of the web has gone and the optimism that brought… it feels like no one would build Foursquare today. But then I wonder if I’m just old an jaded and to the younger generation creating content, for them the web is open and expressive- just in a different way

I still use swarm every day, and get teased for it all the time.

"So Steve, you're a millennial. What does it mean to 'be the mayor' of something?"

I can relate to this so much! IMHO Foursquare genuinely did gve the better recommendations for food and drink and I still think this recommendation problem is far from solved.

> It used to feel like I was tending a public garden filled with other people who might enjoy it. It still kind of feels like that, but there are a handful of giant combine machines grinding their way around the garden harvesting stuff and making billionaires richer at the same time.

An underrated upside to being harvested is that your voice has now effectively voted in the formation of the machine's constitution. In a broader ecological sense, you've still tended to a public garden, but in this case your work is part of the nutrient base for a different thing.

Broader still: after the machines squeeze all of our inputs into an opaque crystal, that crystal's very purpose is to leak it all back out in measured doses. Yes, "some billionaire" will own the lion's share of that process, but time so far is telling that efforts can be made to distill strong, open, public versions of the same.

> time so far is telling that efforts can be made to distill strong, open, public versions of the same.

I do really hope that part of the longer-term answer for AI is LLMs being run locally.

I like the garden analogy.

Writing online used to bring you readers. Now it trains model, which answers the same questions without sending anyone to your site.

AI harvesting your garden doesn't destroy the garden though. It's like calling piracy theft; in the digital realm those types of analogies quickly break down.

I also personally still feel like posting reviews on Amazon is a public good. I like helping people. That my efforts also help Amazon as a company is incidental.

Certainly if there were a convenient way to cross post my reviews to a more open platform that would be great. The more people I can help the better. It does annoy me to see companies trying to block scraping as if they own my posts and they aren't part of a commons.