Don’t Follow the Money!
Why I’m in love with Evan Williams….
In Sunday’s New York Times is a feature story all about this very place where I’m now writing — Medium — and its creator, the visionary Evan Williams:
“The Internet is broken,” he says, and I think most thoughtful people would agree when Twitter (of which Williams is co-founder) has become a hateful perch for trolls like Don John Trump and Facebook an enabling platform for fake news.
But is Medium the way to fix the Internet? That’s the question.
As long as money is the only way to keep score, to determine whether something succeeds or fails, then certainly Medium has not yet shown itself to be the answer.
But is money the only measure? Must everything be reduced to the literal bottomline? That’s the kind of thinking that might destroy the earth, in the form of man-made global warming. Surely there must be some kind of “business model” that transcends short-term profitability?
Isn’t it pretty to think so?
That’s what liberal thinking is all about, isn’t it? A belief in the future, that history is linear and progressive — that we humans are not condemned to endlessly repeat the past (per Steve Bannon), driving ourselves to drink:
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