I think we made a significant mistake when we moved to an Internet that is not paid for by the minute. It gave rise to all sorts of bad incentives for both producers and consumers. If every second spent online had a monetary cost, 90% of the problems of the internet would just vanish. Nobody would doomscroll, hardly anyone would spend their money trolling.
Somehow, time seems like it's free even though it actually is the only valuable thing we have.
To move to an Internet financed entirely by micropayments would be an amazing positive societal change, but I'm afraid we're past the point of no return. To fix this would require the infrastructure of the Internet to support this, but unfortunately the engineer types that actually decide on such things seem to see transfers of wealth as a total non-issue.
I think we made a significant mistake when we moved to an Internet that is not paid for by the minute. It gave rise to all sorts of bad incentives for both producers and consumers. If every second spent online had a monetary cost, 90% of the problems of the internet would just vanish. Nobody would doomscroll, hardly anyone would spend their money trolling.
Somehow, time seems like it's free even though it actually is the only valuable thing we have.
To move to an Internet financed entirely by micropayments would be an amazing positive societal change, but I'm afraid we're past the point of no return. To fix this would require the infrastructure of the Internet to support this, but unfortunately the engineer types that actually decide on such things seem to see transfers of wealth as a total non-issue.