A World Where Platforms Rule and Content Creators Work For Free

We live in a market where the owners of the platform profit from the valuable content that everyone else creates for free. What if platforms like Facebook or Instagram rewarded users for the content that they shared?

The women on Instagram with the so-called “famous-butt” helped Instagram make thousands of dollars by driving traffic to her profile page. Every news outlet on the web covered the story but do you see Instagram cutting here a check?

Jaron Lanier discusses this topic briefly in this video clip. Jaron is the author of “You Are Not A Gadget”, a book that discusses topics about digital culture.

Each time a major platform is developed, it has the potential to change a small part of our lives. With Facebook, users are encouraged to add their employment information, educational information, current city of residence, and location that they are from. These are the details that define the “first-impression” of every relationship. Never in the real world would you meet someone and experience this first-impression. With Facebook we have no option but to accept this policy. Sure you can choose to exclude this information, but your first impression will be defined by the fact that you chose to do so. We are “locked-in” as Jaron calls it.

This “lock-in” is the same concept that regulates who earns money on the web. The platform always makes the real money. Everyone else can either produce the content for free, or try to make their own platform and charge others. What a system huh?