Alex Wittenberg

To call something artificial is usually to suggest its inferiority to some ostensibly natural alternative. For example, the boast “No artificial sweeteners!” come to mind. And when applied to people, the word suggests a lack of authenticity or sincerity. But if we recall the word’s semantic relation to artifice or art, then we might come to see art... See more

A new business type here is the paid community: a direct subscription to join in. Today, most paid communities live on the outskirts of existing social platforms. But as they become normalized, paid communities are becoming a viable business model for smaller-scale social networks aiming to be both profitable and socially sustainable. 

“They weren’t taken by humans, and they weren’t taken for humans. They are by AI, for AI. They thus lack any sense of human composition or human audience. They are creations of utterly bloodless industrial logic. Google’s CAPTCHA images demand you to look at the world the way an AI does.”

“On the same boat on which I arrived in 1926,” Illich explained,the first loudspeaker was landed on the island. Few people there had ever heard of such a thing. Up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change. Henceforth the access to the microphone would determine whose voice sha... See more

Not surprisingly, Rosa rightly notes that “technologies and processes associated with digitalization have fundamentally transformed our lives by making nearly the entire world, as it is represented in our consciousness, accessible and controllable in historically unprecedented ways.” Digital technology has especially abetted the parameterization of... See more

Right now in the creator space, the closest thing to this model is in the upfront advances that more and more big platforms are paying creators to join and produce content. Substack, Clubhouse, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, and others all pay cash advances to creators in the hopes that they then generate even more revenue for the platform. So far, i... See more

One concern with the development of these types of machine learning technologies is the issue of bias — ensuring the programs work equitably for all patients, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, nationality and other demographic criteria.

Tokenized subscription could create an angel audience of other creators, investing in something very early and very risky with the dream of a potential upside but also just for the fun of it. We see this already with so much of what’s happening with Web3. There are pure speculators but that alone would be nowhere near enough to spin the wheel as fa... See more

While they have much in common with more traditional organizations, tokenized communities promote fundamentally different economic models than the mainstream organizations that preceded them.