Why is Ev Williams refusing to engage with the Medium commoners?
I took a cue from Medium and put a Paypal donation widget on my posts. — Mike Essig
I agree with Mike Essig, attaching a PayPal widget is not enclosure of the commons, nor is seeking a donation, though I feel there are better ways of doing this.
I don’t really know what to say about this. I agree with much of what you say. I don’t see adding the Paypal widget as enclosing the commons, because it is not coercive. All I’m saying is: If you like this, consider supporting it.
As always a thoughtful response from Mike Essig.
If we are to ask for a donation, then a better way would be through faircoin, as that was what it was created for, to support cooperative ventures.
I have often seen the option to make a donation to support writing, but that is not the reason the person is writing.
- fNmzNYrLJHZhDzGM3AEGECZ51nkUKyph6g
- fXdguh69T52Zwrur98Ci66bqjZuwLBCHph
- fPkSPhRfcAvrND9GKgSffjM3DKTvNYWjGE
Faircoins has the advantage that is part of FairCoop, which if we believe in the collaborative commons we should all be supporting.
It may not have been the intention of Ev Williams, though he seems equivacal on this, it would certainly not have been the intention of Vulture Capitalists out to make a fast buck, the commoners, the readers and writers a means to an end, but intentional or not, what has been created is a de facto collaborative commons, where the commoners freely contributed, expecting no more reward than than thanks and praise from their fellow commoners.
That nature of information is to flow, to flow freely. It is only greed that stops this free flow of information, greed and artificial monopolies and Draconian intellectual property rights and copyright.
Richard Stallman understood this in the 1980s.
If anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution. Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs.
Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.
Around the same time as Richard Stallman published the The GNU Manifesto, Bill Gates was arguing the opposite, closed systems, paid for software.
If Medium chooses to pay a select group of writers and I was one of that select group, I declined the offer, who does the choosing? This is to create a layer of what David Graeber calls bullshit jobs.
The problem is that whilst Ev Williams continues his Sheriff of Nottingham impersonation and refuses to engage with the commoners, we can only guess what is he trying to achieve with enclosure of the commons.
A commons is the interaction between the resource and the commoners, in this case the Medium platform, the readers and writers.
A do not think anyone would object to a mechanism to ensure the long term future of Medium, one that rules out advertising, floating on the stock market, charging for access, satisfying the greed of Vulture Capitalists.
Thee are many ways of doing so, I have previously outlined several for example the platform placed in the public domain, free software as defined by The GNU Manifesto supported by a Creative Commons License, if people wish to contribute, equally shared between or distributed by the commoners.
Bandcamp is one obvious model to look at. No Vulture Capitalists, it supports musicians, if you pay to download, and you choose what to pay, a small cut goes to bandcamp to support the platform.
James Hoffmann has crowdfunded selected writing from his blog Jim Seven to be published as a signed limited edition hardback book to compliment The World Atlas of Coffee.
Pensar desde los comunes, the Spanish edition of Think Like a Commoner, was published in this manner, crowdfunded, then printed locally, with free e-book, translation from English to Spanish by Guerrilla Translation, a P2P translation collective and cooperative founded in Spain.
Collections can be collated and published as bound hard copies, Medium provides the tools to make this possible.
