If I’m reading an article on espn.com for free, there has to be some value exchange. I either need to pay to read the article or I need to be willing to be included in future advertising to people who have read that article. We haven’t come up with a better model to support free content on the Internet than advertising.

I would be willing to pay 5p to read that article if there was an automatic and easy mechanism to deliver that transaction to espn.com.  I want their journalists to get paid and I want the content to keep existing. But I’m also not such a dedicated fan of that site that I’m ready to subscribe monthly. The last thing we need is an Internet full of subscription paywalls.

So in the meantime, if the fact that I read an article on espn.com about rugby scores puts me in an audience of people who like rugby and this complicated web of advertising is going to show me rugby ads and ESPN is going to make money from that and that is going to keep the articles free … sure, whatever they gotta do I guess. I’m not sharing anything personal or private with espn.com so if they want to pass that along to 1600 other places so I can keep reading for free… whatevs.  It’s not the model I would’ve chosen but I don’t have a better plan to keep ESPN in business. 

From RTO mandates to Slack monitoring to spy cameras to seemingly-random layoffs, and now this… after the pandemic people realized their boss would rather they die than miss work, and there has been an uptick in union activity and more resistance from employees since… and here comes the AI industry to the rescue, to put the power back in corporate hands and squeeze employees. 

Stupid bastards. I hope Apple and WhatsApp and Signal all just turn off service in the EU. Let the users eat these assholes alive when their apps stop working.

Terms of service for paid accounts say that the content isn’t scanned for any reason. So I guess the other way to avoid feeding the machine is to pay to operate the machine while it feeds on others…