I really like the thinking that Joel Dueck is spinning up around privacy and facilitating payments to make building stuff online economically viable without ads. He proposes some legal and architectural tools, but notes that:

Focusing on the nuts and bolts of the web itself, looking for technical solutions, is not going to be enough to counteract these broader trends. And as I’ve said before, simply appealing to people to change their personal habits of internet usage is insufficient and ineffective. What is needed is a principled re-adjustment of the entire playing field — a political solution to a political problem.

Elsewhere, he remarks that if the economics of blogging do collapse¹, he will “feel as though we lost something valuable — a truly democratic chance for people to sustain their lives through the pursuit of literacy and self-expression.” I thought about this same thing this morning, and I contemplated the worth of continuing to write and post here. The “community”, such as it was, of bloggers and readers, is much changed from when I started posting to my old home blog, way back in the pre-social media days. But here I am, all the same, tapping away. For those of us who were into this before services ate everything, it’s kind of a hard habit to break.