I think universal paywalls would be much better. Consider how video games typically work: You pay for the game, then you can play it as much as you like. Video games sometimes try to sell you things (e.g. political ideologies, products) but there is vastly less of that then e.g. youtube or facebook, what with all the ads, propaganda, promoted content, etc. Imagine if instead all video games were free, but to make money the video game companies accepted bribes to fill their games with product placement and propaganda. I would not prefer that world, even though it would be less regressive in that poor people could play just as many games as rich people.
And that’s not even including the benefits of privacy / not-Big-Data. In a different world than ours, Big Data would be used mostly for scientific research that benefits everyone. Not in our world. In our world it’s mostly used to control populations, for surveillance and propaganda, and to sell stuff to people. (I agree that the “sell stuff to people” thing is partially good, but it’s partially bad too, and it certainly isn’t good enough to outweigh the surveillance and propaganda effects IMO).
If the internet used a universal paywalls model, it would be a lot easier for people to be private, I think. I’m not sure.
I think universal paywalls would be much better. Consider how video games typically work: You pay for the game, then you can play it as much as you like. Video games sometimes try to sell you things (e.g. political ideologies, products) but there is vastly less of that then e.g. youtube or facebook, what with all the ads, propaganda, promoted content, etc. Imagine if instead all video games were free, but to make money the video game companies accepted bribes to fill their games with product placement and propaganda. I would not prefer that world, even though it would be less regressive in that poor people could play just as many games as rich people.
And that’s not even including the benefits of privacy / not-Big-Data. In a different world than ours, Big Data would be used mostly for scientific research that benefits everyone. Not in our world. In our world it’s mostly used to control populations, for surveillance and propaganda, and to sell stuff to people. (I agree that the “sell stuff to people” thing is partially good, but it’s partially bad too, and it certainly isn’t good enough to outweigh the surveillance and propaganda effects IMO).
If the internet used a universal paywalls model, it would be a lot easier for people to be private, I think. I’m not sure.