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In our reality, Ted Nelson served as a muse rather than the Internet’s architect. Legend has it that he conceived of Xanadu as an antidote (or amplifier) for his attention deficit disorder. He dreamed of a word processor that allowed users to surf through and freely explore associations, related material, and alternate contexts of any given piece o

Charles Broskoski • Counter Currents: Are.na on Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

John Perry Barlow eff.org

Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignore

Neal Stephenson • Snow Crash: A Novel

Mathias Grønnebæk,

Laura Shin • The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze

Warzel: Oh, that’s really interesting. I like the idea that Discord is kind of like the TV Guide and each platform is a different channel and people just switch back and forth depending on what’s on. Au: I think this is what Mark Zuckerberg and other would-be Metaverse builders right now are missing. It’s not the platform that matters as much as th... See more

The Atlantic • Lessons From 19 Years in the Metaverse

Take decentralized networks, which promised to shift power from tech giants back to users. The vision was beautiful: creators and contributors would finally capture the value they generate. But many crypto networks revealed how quickly noble intentions can unravel. What started as a grassroots movement to build community-owned wireless networks dev... See more

The Last Human Choice

What Netflix and Spotify both did was dress up this obviously better consumer experience with an interface and a proposition that was (1) legal and (2) worth paying for in big chunks. And we all did.

Sacha Meyers • Bitcoin Is Venice: Essays on the Past and Future of Capitalism

The problem, in other words, isn't intermediation – it's power . The thing that distinguishes a useful intermediary from an enshittified bully is power . Intermediaries gain power when our governments stop enforcing competition law. This lets intermediaries buy each other up and corner markets. Once they've formed cozy cartels, they can capture the... See more

Cory Doctorow • Pluralistic: Middlemen Without Enshittification; The Bezzle Excerpt

“Rife’s key realization was that there’s no difference between modern culture and Sumerian. We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite—the people who go into the Metaverse, basically—who understand that information is power, and w