First there was the post by Thomas Baekda – Facebook is Dying – Social is Not. Thomas predicts that the Facebook will collapse under the weight of it’s own overcomplexity. And just a day latter the Internet is abuzz about the Wired article by Ryan Singel – Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative. Ryan proposes the creation of an “open source” Facebook clones to respond to the painstakingly cataloged privacy breaches.
Not sure if Ryan Singel realizes that’s this is not just the Facebook, but this is how the entire Internet works. And going few decades earlier this was the deliberate mass use of computers to evaluate the popular tastes on the orders of the product marketeers and the henchmen behind the manipulative political rhetorics. And later people made the bargain with the devil during the evolution of the Internet. You give us your clicks and we’ll give you the free Internet and the free information. To support this “value proposition” we will channel the clicks through the highly centralized bottlenecks of servers where we’ll exchange the clicks for the ads. This is how Google works and almost every company on the Internet today.
So what Ryan Singel suggests with the “open source alternative” is that instead of Mark Zuckerberg presiding over the bottleneck oligarchy while the rest of the developers starve, there are multiple “open source” platforms with all the developers starving equally. This free culture is so ingrained and the expectation of the “free” is so corrosive that if tomorrow Mark Zuckerberg would propose a complete Facebook privacy in exchange for $1 a month subscription, the result is rather predictable. The problem is not with the Facebook but with the Frankenstein monster of the free Internet that destroyed the creative class and the value of the original work in the haze of the “creative commons” mashup. The only value proposition left is the centralized market where the information about your home, your family, your friends and your “likes” is sold to the advertisers or the political hacks.
The alternative is not another free for all platforms but the Internet-based on rewarding the creative efforts instead of linking or “liking” it, the internet based on the micropayments and subscriptions. The choice is stark; you can either pay for the products of the human imagination and creativity or give away your privacy and your freedom to the slavery service of the scalable, centralized oligarchy. In this light the “open source” is the problem not the solution.
In the Internet of the future Rob Dobi (his photo above) shouldn’t have to sell the t-shirts but will make a dignified living selling his beautiful photos.
Further reading:
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Great Point! Enjoyed your article — open source is not so open is it? Or is it?!
Open source is open but it closes the doors for people to make a honorable living from their ideas and imagination.