The past week demonstrates, again, that we should have stopped at laptop/blogging/rss. The phone/social media/algo has fucking killed society’s self-control.
Around 2005 I was thinking that if we were to stay on RSS without an ad-based business model ala Google, things would be online, but local.
RSS gives you all the content so you can’t monetize. If you can’t monetize, you can’t scale. Which would probably have been good at taming people’s thirst for grandeur.
The other good thing would have been local media being empowered by technology instead of becoming zombies for the ad money.
An active, local online scene using open protocols to make things better? Still dreaming of that, can’t deny.