WTF kind of question is that?
The Internet by definition includes everyone on the planet. Generating the energy to power it affects each and every person, animal, insect, mollusc, plant and fungus. We've already been down this path haven't we? Affecting many for the benefit of the few?
Dig up old solar energy that the Earth managed to lock up deep down, in the form of fossilised carbon, profit from it, Earth suffers and loses a resource from it. Repeat with next resource.
Claim that some area of land "belongs" to you - after you've lived on it for a whole (5.714285714285714e-9)% (that's a mere 0.0000000005714285714th of one percent, give or take) of the Earth's existence to date, use that claim to enslave your fellow beings, and force them to dig fossilised energy up for you, sell it back to them - profit! What a cracking good scheme!
At each step the planet's state of health becomes worse. And worse. And now some people are tapping off some of the energy to supposedly power (read "profit", it's always about profit, not fair living) a thing called WEB3. Once again, those activities are generating heat and destroying the planet's health. Best part is how crypto was planned to make people rich, but a) crypto costs a lot of energy to generate and b) Sam Fried. . .
There's a solution
Luckily there's a way to remediate the effects of the Web3 and the demands made by it and crypto on the resources of the planet - taken while people still live in abject poverty mind you, with not a concern or care for them - and it's really really easy:
For every "NFT" you create and sell, for every bit of "digital currency" you "mine," - give the fiat currency equivalent of ten times that amount to a fund for climate remediation. For every picture of a stupid monkey you sell or buy - pay for the remediation of ten monkeys' habitats. Every time you buy a Lamborghini, buy the equivalent of ten times as much money's worth of clean EVs, and donate them to the climate remediation fund so that they can distribute them among people who actually need a car for transport and not for w*nk factor.
In other words - stop freeloading on the planet's resources - OUR resources - and start paying for the total bullshit you're shovelling.
There. Problem solved.
Imagine you replace the words "climate remediation fund" with the words "your government acting as a climate remediation organisation." I can't imagine any world government opposing the legislation then.
There. That problem solved too. YW.
Because until we stop acting as though what's owned by the entire world's population could ever be the individual wealth of a small number of individuals, there won't be any stopping the behemoth.
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| Here. Have a monkey. Have a Lambo. Have a brain FFS. |
There. By rights I should have had to pay about AUD$3.14519million for that effort above - if I was using it to extract monies or other forms of wealth from people. (In practice, only a very few people ever click on the advertising links that pay me 0.00027c per click, and only a lovely wonderful few ever donate, hint, hint...)
What De Beers did with their self-manufactured diamond boom, the tobacco industry did with tobacco and the fossil fuel cartel did with fuel, energy and plastic, or what the automotive industry do with their planned obsolescence; and all that happened in the "dot com" days - a new crop of eager faces, hungry souls, and wide open financial vaults now want to do that with Web3.
The plan is to keep consuming energy hand over fist over petaflop, burn energy at one end, convert it into stupid monkeys and lambos, and never once look back at the devastation it'll cause. That cryptohobbit creature going to court and hopefully into an oubliette soon after, that's one reason to have hope that this effort refocuses and starts caring more for stewardship than croupiership.
Meanwhile, those wannabe "monkey kings"
Yeah, nah, I don't mince words, won't. Because this.
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| Do. Not. Want |
Let me be clear - I want to live well and comfortably. I also want everyone else to live well and comfortably too. But to me that doesn't mean I want all these trappings of (it eventually always comes down to "wealth" which is an accoutrement of) power. There. I said it. I don't want power. Over anybody or anything. And I don't want anyone exercising power over me.
When I say it like that, I can see how it's a thing everyone goes through. As a baby, even the family cat has a power of life or death over you, then as you get older the locus of power changes to parents and older siblings - and then at some point you realise you're an adult and all the childhood powers that ruled you, are no longer exterting a hold. And so what do so many people do? They go out and try to exert their power over others. . . Sheesh. Really grow up.
The other thing I have to say is that some children just never do grow up. I can point to Mr Trump as an example, and Mr Morrison as a Prime example. But we ALLOWED THEM HAVE POWER OVER US. Yikes!
Come on! We've EVOLVED!
And yet somehow, none of us want to realise that the first and main thing on the planet that we should be exercising control and power over is ourselves. We can't seem to work out how to do it though, can't seem to make it happen. . .
"Oh, the advertisers - those clever sneaky advertisers - they made me want this year's 'Whack-O-Matic 4litre All Wheel Drive Superliner 2022' - and I've only had it six months and they've already come out with the 'Whack-Plus-Double-Wham-O-Matic 4.2litre All Wheel Drive Ultraliner 2023'... "
Really? I'm a person that can look you in the eye and honestly say that I've never bought a new car, instead I've been milking a bit more lifespan out of second, third, and even fourth - hand cars before they go to be scrapped. When, as I did, you live and work 300km from the next nearest place larger than a mining camp, and 400 - 2500km (depending on how serious it is) from the nearest suitable medical facility, you need some transport. Bonus points if it's reliable and doesn't kill you. I've also never owned a house, never invested in stocks and shares, or held a credit card.
What I really really want is that I'd been able to learn - for my entire childhood not just the first two years - from teachers who were not doing it for the money but because they really genuinely cared about imparting knowledge and learning skills. I was lucky enough to have something very close to this idyll for my first two school years, and then ended up dumped into the education factory.
And as that kid, I wished that I could do the things that I was genuinely interested in doing when I graduated, but instead discovered that power (other people's, unfortunately) dictated that I needed to do a lot of things I didn't want to do and wasn't suited to, in order to survive. And you know what? I learned the shit out of those jobs, until I knew them well enough to have supervised them. And then generally one of two things happened -
one, I knew how they should have been done and wondered why the supervisor(s) didn't do them and
two, I'd get tired of doing things the hard way just because some asshole "had the power" to dictate it be done that way, and then either get into arguments and asked to leave, or just leave.
But you see, I've come to the conclusion that the whole human race is now at that point, where some stupid ass-hat has "the power" to do right but instead they keep doing wrong. And the people that work for money doing those things wrong are realising that instead of being overpowered by the wealth and assumed power, we can start pushing back to have things balance out.
And every time I get that feeling, I see things like Web3 showing me that exploitation and greed still rule...
A WEB3 App That Shall Remain Anonymous
. . . invited me to make a newsletter using their software. I could use "tokens" to - I don't know, because the next sentence contained the acronym "NFT" and - . . . I got a healthy dose of socialist nausea and tuned out, and then - . . . then - . . . I thought I'd just check it out anyway. I already use a newsletter/RSS aggregator to let people know about my posts, not because I make money from it but because - (go see the paragraph under the monkey picture up above is why) - I like to communicate the things I fever-dream up, the news I come across, and also the stuff I do; and I hope that other people who are like-minded will work on making those concepts more widely-known and popular.
So I went to see what it offered me besides the chance to crypto-scam the hell out of my readers and found:
You can "token-gate" your newsletters. (I mentally substituted "paywall" for their phrase fragment. You probably should, too.)
The first thing I noticed was that I can't use the clumsy awkward and quite frankly immature and stupid editor they provide. It has so many things that I dislike, that I could start another entire post just about that.
But you can "token-gate" your newsletters.
I can't put URL links in as easily as with 80% of the other online WYSIWYG editors out there. URLs are the lifeblood of blogs and newsletters, pointing readers to one's own content, to supplementary content, to newly-discovered content. That makes it a pretty lame newsletter.
But. . . You can "token-gate" your newsletters.
Images are so basic I can't even add a caption or control the final relative size of an image.
But. You can "token-gate." You know, your newsletters.
Where are my typography options? Fonts?
Token-gate...
Argh! It's effing useless!
Tokens...
The whole effort seemed to hang from tokens and so forth and (as I said) substituting the phrase token-gating for the phrase pay-walling. The newsletter itself seems to be secondary to flogging your tokengated content just like a multi-owner monkey picture, using the world's energy grid to track that in a blockchain somewhere, and pretend it's money, without ever actually putting money into it in the first place.
Content, the look and flow of content, ease of use - all seemed to be VERY secondary to the newsletter site, "tokens" was where it was at and all the rest was stuff that the mug marks do to make tokens go round.
I'm probably an old fart wet-blanket but I really prefer content to crypto, and I wish currency of any kind was abolished worldwide and we all realise that there's plenty to go around and make everyone wealthy as long as "wealthy" doesn't mean "owning ALL the things and FY everyone else" to you. Once you can do whatever work takes your fancy without having to worry about pay scales and profits and bank statements, you realise that you don't really need 27 McMansions and a dozen Lambos to be well-off and happy.
The problem as I see it is that everyone from low-income blue-collar workers to millionaires considers themselves to be "middle class," and middle-class people seem to consider themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires who'll be better off any minute now as long as they can steal someone else's lunch to get by. (By the way, I recommend that video, it's quite good.) And that sort of brings us to:
A Quick Thingie To "Influencers"
- Segue. A quick segue to Influencers. What should Influencers do? Okay maybe that IS evident from the name. But the ones I read/view/listen to, they inspire me, educate me, show me and teach me, on topics as far ranging as cosmology to cookery.
One thing they patently needn't do is sell propaganda for the big corporations that are chewing the world up and spitting it out in ruins. And what is that thing all Influencers need to do if they want to keep being Influencers?
Sponsorships and product placement.
Quick Distinction:
I have a Youtube channel, also Odysee, Twitch. I have blogs and websites. But I'm decidedly not an Influencer. I have influence with a small readership, but not Influence of the capital-I kind. Those capital-I Influencers, they have a topic (or in the case of one or two Titans, a dozen topics) of interest to them and they specialise on those. They create a very specific body of content, opinion, and material related to their chosen topic(s).
And in order to do that effectively, they currently need money, hence the commercialisation of Influence. They have a team, they get up and create, document, and produce Content. The capital-C kind of Content is focused. Few Influencers have the resources (intellectual, mental, financial) to do more.
But imagine if everyone had a Universal Basic Income (UBI) and could go do Influencer-ey things without needing to stress about money? We'd see a lot more Simon Whistlers, that's what'd happen.
Give us time - as a species we're still a way behind that state where we can all be wide-ranging polymaths. But the children that are following Influencers right now, the ones from 0 to 12 years old. THEY will have a wider range of comprehension. They'll have more interests, more balls in the air than we can juggle.
So there's the reason I can't adopt the capital I mantle - I mentioned that I had a good education in the first two years, and one thing it equipped me to do was to follow what I wanted to learn and learn it. So I don't so much have a focal topic. I have a dozen. I have several dozen. I keep accumulating more.
And I'd like to reach a lot of people, but if I dumped everything through one firehose, people might get a bit nonplussed at the wide range of topics. I could do one blog and tag everything, I suppose. But I'm shyte at tagging, my head won't and doesn't and refuses to try and tag. So I try to - TRY TO - and sometimes succeed, in keeping several blogs with distinctly separate but occasionally overlapping, Topics.
So I have around a dozen blogs, about 6 of which I write in regularly. And that means that, unlike an Influencer, I can't pump out 6 posts a week on "my chosen topic" because in a week I have maybe three of my topics in mind, am doing housework and chores because I don't have a Production crew to off-lay work onto and a Domestic crew to clean up everything for me.
Besides, I also have a few other interests that I don't blog so much about. I don't have a blog titled "My Wife Is The Most Wonderful Person In My Life" but I try and spend time with her because we know we're the Universe's gift to one another. We both waited half a century to find one another, so everything else is secondary. You won't find a blog called "Geez We Have The Best Cats" but I invest time in interacting with them because they're one of the more delightful things in our life. "Living With Our Ills" isn't a thing you'll find among my blog topics either.
So I sent someone a link to one of my recipes once, and they were surprised that the recipe blog goes back to 2007 or somewhere as far as that, but only had a few hundred recipes. They expressed surprise at that. Why weren't there close to 800, one a week? I explained to them that I've had five blogs including that one for a long time, and some even pre-dated it, so I'd have had to write around 5,000 posts if I was to be fair-handed between them all.
I probably actually have fewer than 2,000 if I count blogs I've archived or that were lost when hard drives or hosting providers went bust.
I also had a day job (sometimes two) and never really got that vanity where if I was "Writing dammit, get someone else to cook!" and so I should be exempt from cooking or whatever other chores needed doing. So sometimes a blog went months without a new entry. Oh and I also wrote paid articles for a few online magazine-format sites back then, the pay was minimal but the fun I had made it worthwhile.
So. If you want to get a feel for my stuff, take a look at Ted's News Stand. I've put a feed of my top blogs there, in a continuous list. As I write an article on any of the blogs in that list, it gets added to the top of the queue. So you can see many of my topics, follow them back to the relevant blog, and one day if people express a need, I'll create a newsletter feed for each of them. At the moment, I have just one newsletter that comes out once a week and includes all the newest posts from the News Stand list.
I also message on Mastodon: @prawntech3d@mastodon.online if you want to talk about anything. and you can go to my Ko-Fi page and buy me a virtual coffee or make that a monthly coffee and become just like a Patreon patron but without all the BS. I also accept Paypal.
But sorry, no bitcoin, NFT, or monkeys . . . I will also accept work on scripts or blog posts for other people, as long as you don't mind my bitterness... Hehehe not with you my readers of course - but with the unfairness of life, always.
