Jon Naughton The guardian – The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has withered – Note that Dave Winer's blog is now 30 years old. Winer invented RSS which easily trusments blogs and guarantees that podcasts can be read on your choice of choice. Like Winer, when I started, I also thought that blogs were for everyone. This is not the case.
“I was born to blog. —Dave Winer
Naughton also notes how Big Tech did not fully push blogs on the margins by creating “closed gardens”.
Like many of us, (Dave Winer) has realized that what was known as blogosphere could be a modern achievement of the idea of Jürgen Habermas of “the public sphere” because it was open to everyone, everything was questionable and social rank did not determine who was authorized to speak. But what he – and we underestimated was the speed and exhaustiveness that technological companies such as Google and Facebook would have this public sphere lock up with their own closed gardens in which “freedom of expression” could be algorithmically organized while the speakers were intensively monitored and their data extracted for advertising purposes.
Blogs are one of the few civic spaces for democratic discourse. I noted in The perpetual beta series (2016) that the annoying truth is that our existing institutions do not have the answers. They were all designed for a different era. Our markets, designed to capitalize on gaps and weaknesses, are already focused on the creation of digital platform monopolies, so that the rest of us become nothing more than users and space tenants. These capitalists are not different from the 19th century thieves barons.
For example, at this digital time, many of us have nothing. When we die, everything we rented – our music, our accommodation, our software – no longer belongs to us. Even our identities, such as e-mail addresses and user names, disappear. We become consumers, but not owners. Is the servitude under digital contract our collective dystopian future?
It is necessary to question existing hierarchies to create outcome From the future where there will be a shared power and authority based on mutual trust. The dominant organizational model must move on the continuum, far from the hierarchy, to the networks. Returning to simple and old hierarchies withdraws us from our obligation as citizens to build a better network organizational model for society.
Let us keep the blogosphere very alive and prosperous.
