| The solution is non profits or open protocols. Internet Archive. Let’s Encrypt. Signal. Peertube. Jitsi. AT Proto. (not an exhaustive list) Competition is not the way out, but building public goods through corporate entity structures that are protected from the usual capitalist forms of acquisition (B Corps are not required to maximize value, non profits can be made almost impossible to acquire through incorporation and governance choices). In other words, don’t build another car company, build a mass transit system, build the library, build the park. A great recent example was Mitchell pushing Ghostty into a non profit before using it as a component for a venture startup (Superlogical). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49100329 > We will build on libghostty exactly as it was designed to be used: as a public building block for terminal applications. Superlogical will consume the same MIT-licensed components available to everyone else, and we will continue to upstream shared terminal work so every libghostty consumer can benefit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48738228 (Our collective defense against people building moats to capture economic gains through the control of data or capabilities is to make it impossible to build the moat, and it’s never been cheaper to do so with LLMs, “computah make it so”) |
This is a decent brain storming along those lines for social media in particular, but it could also apply more broadly, like you say:
https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/