Comment by beckman466 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beckman466 | Hacker News Reader

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> How can we reverse the trend that a wonderful piece of tech such as RSS is obliterated without any regard to implications?

RSS being killed is a part of the commodification/privatization of knowledge. RSS simply gives users too much freedom.

"What if we thought of some of the most lucrative tech companies as essentially tax collectors, but privately-run (and thus not democratically accountable)? Economists call this rent-seeking, and what we’re seeing with a lot of tech companies is that their telos is little more than “rent-seeking as a service”. It’s basically baked in to their business model. Once you’ve fully developed the technology underpinning your service - be it coordinating food delivery, or processing payments, or displaying intrusive ads to people who just want to read a goddamn page on the Internet without being entreated to buy stuff - then your whole schtick then becomes collecting taxes on a whole ecosystem of economic activity."

https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-86

You're seeing this in the podcast space, where content is normally distributed via RSS. You have big players like Spotify buying up podcast productions and making them exclusive behind their app. Luckily, right now open RSS distribution is still the norm for the overwhelming majority of podcasts, but who knows how long that'll last.

That quote is absolutely right with the MO of a lot of tech companies these days. They don't actually innovate on tech itself---that's too risky and expensive. Instead, they innovate on business models to make themselves toll operators on everyday life.

>Luckily, right now open RSS distribution is still the norm for the overwhelming majority of podcasts, but who knows how long that'll last.

Presumably it will probably last so long as advertising pays the bills for those for whom podcasts are a directly commercial endeavor. At which point they'll go behind paywalls and/or die.

Paywalls and RSS aren’t mutually exclusive. Ars Technica offers full-text RSS feeds for subscribers. Substack sites have RSS for public posts but also some subscriber-only posts. Podcasts could work similarly; I’d be surprised there weren’t some already.

Fair enough. Although I suspect that a bunch of new subscription services is not what most people campaigning for RSS are looking for.

Patreon provides RSS feeds for creators, that's how paywalls are done for most podcasts these days.

"They don't actually innovate on tech itself---that's too risky and expensive. Instead, they innovate on business models "

So true. When you look at most of the unicorns most of their tech could have been done 10 or 20 years ago.

Considering their size the innovation output of giants like MS, Google or Apple is really low.

One of the great contradictions of the Californian Ideology:

On one hand, freedom is sacred, especially freedom of speech, information, etc.

On the other hand, private property is sacred, whether it is physical or intellectual.

Yet intellectual property laws directly impede the free flow of speech/information. So what'll it be, private property or freedom?

What makes this specific to California instead of the US as a whole?

they most militantly 'defend' their intellectual property system and have also monopolized many communications networks

See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology

yes and this: https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideo...

"There is an emerging global orthodoxy concerning the relation between society, technology and politics. We have called this orthodoxy `the Californian Ideology' in honour of the state where it originated. By naturalising and giving a technological proof to a libertarian political philosophy, and therefore foreclosing on alternative futures, the Californian Ideologues are able to assert that social and political debates about the future have now become meaningless.

The California Ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counter-culture libertarianism and is promulgated by magazines such as WIRED and MONDO 2000 and preached in the books of Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats and even the President of the USA himself. As usual, Europeans have not been slow to copy the latest fashion from America. While a recent EU report recommended adopting the Californian free enterprise model to build the 'infobahn', cutting-edge artists and academics have been championing the 'post-human' philosophy developed by the West Coast's Extropian cult. With no obvious opponents, the global dominance of the Californian ideology appears to be complete."

That's libertarianism, not specific to California. In principle everybody has a lot of freedom but in practice the powerful accumulate more and more power and freedom for themselves at the expense of others.

Using the state to enforce intellectual property is not really libertarian. By the way any libertarians defending the use of the state to maintain artificial monopolies and enforce regulations that advantages big organizations is a corporatist à la Federalist Society.

“Using the state to enforce intellectual property is not really libertarian.”

As far as I understand, in a libertarian world the state would not enforce property rights but you would have to go a court and sue. I think the result would be the same as we have now. The party who can afford more lawyers or lobbyists will most likely win.

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