Re: Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool

But the perfect storm of Covid + internet + infrastructure for paid communities is throwing us back to older ways of organizing society.

This idealistic dream brings to mind Marc Andreessen’s recent confession that the “original sin” of the internet was not building a payments layer into the browser. The paid communities you investigate are an attempt to remedy that sin and ground cyberspace in the material/economic systems that support our livelihoods.

The universities of the 12th century had very little in common with the top-down corporate models of today’s higher education. These universities were more like student unions.