"Over the course of five years, we tried dozens of revenue models […] We’d run as a subscription service! Take a share of revenue […] bundle a magazine with textbook publishers! Sell T-shirts and other branded merch!

[…]

At the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising."

https://web.archive.org/web/20140830021729/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/advertising-is-the-internets-original-sin/376041

#FirstBannerAd #ads #history #technology #internet #TheWeb #InternetHistory

The Internet is the great template of failure for our entire society, synecdoche, the part stands for the whole, Conway’s law.

Capitalism has no place for revolutionary ideas, it was only once global communication was intimately tied into commerce, propaganda, and surveillance that it had “value” and could become the cornerstone of the new economy. If we had been a decent civilization, the government would have seen the power of what was brewing in the halls of academia and the military (they did) and acted to enshrine that power for the public good, probably as part of the library system or the post office initially (they didn’t).

Imagine that world for a moment: where instead of fighting an all fronts battle for the ability to exist, The Internet Archive was the model for how the Internet was run. Where wikipedia didn’t have to beg you for $3 every few months and wage a never ending shadow war to keep nazis from rewriting history, and was instead a well-maintained part of society, voted on and up-kept for the public good.

Alas, advertising was the only way to stay relevant in our world and the government is riddled through with fascist termite damage, shaking in the ever strengthening winds.

I.M.O. they really screwed up by making sending emails effectively free. If there had been a charge of only, say, 2 cents per, then spam wouldn’t be like it is now – so bad that email becomes almost unusable.