Everyone Who Was Supposed to Protect You From This Failed Miserably
Donald Trump will now be the president again. A colossal failure by every Republican, Democratic, legal, corporate, and media institution got us here.
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This fucking paywall is part of what failed me. Money grubbing capitalist horse shit.
Journalism costs money. Unless we enjoy being fed propaganda by billionaires who can afford to dump money into news organisations we should get used to paying for journalism.
You say that, but I remember the internet before all this shit. Print media once used to actually produce a product, which it sold in an actual physical store and through subscription services. Meanwhile, some outlets had internet editions, but the vast majority of what was posted online was being posted by people. You'd see a lot of excerpts, a lot of people's takes on things that were informed by articles they'd read, and a lot of websites and forums dedicated to particular subjects.
Then print media moved in and started begging us for their views, paying for them with ad revenue. They wanted our eyeballs. Then social media blew up and they got the visibility they wanted while contributing to the birth of the current terrible environment that is the internet today. Eventually, once they had the attention they'd sought from us, attention that we used to give each other, they started walling everything off.
Paywalls are part of enshittification. They're part of the degradation of the internet. And, surprise surprise, look where the degradation of the internet has led us.
This is absolutely part of what's failed us. It's the commodification of information. They literally started this subscription model clickbait bullshit.
I remember that time of the internet too, and agree that that was a better time for independent creators. But people on random blogs weren't breaking stories like the Panama papers, or the LAPD Rampart scandal, or anything that takes months or even years of investigation and interviews with sources. At the time, that was being paid for by the people buying newspapers, which people don't do any more.
And I disagree that paywalls are part of enshittification. For me, enshittification is when a news outlet tries to stay "free", covering their sites on ads and sponsored content, and puking out articles which are just lists of tweets, while having their articles written by unpaid interns or AI. See: the Independent, Evening Standard (both now owned by Evgeny Lebedev), and every single other paper that doesn't implement a paywall. I know lots of people who have been driven out of the journalism profession because you just can't make a living on it. Sure they can start a blog, but that won't put food on the table, and it won't allow them to spend huge amounts of time, and in many cases money, to actually get to the bottom of something that powerful people don't want you to know about.
Enshittification doesn't just mean charging for your services. It refers to when VC-backed startups use their vast funding to offer something for free, then make it worse and worse by trying to monetise it more and more. People deserve to be paid for their work. If you value their work, you should be paying them.
Sorry for the rant, I just really think that the reason journalism has taken such a massive nosedive in recent years is because hardly anybody is willing to pay for it. Similar to music: as a listener it sucked having to pay £12 for an album. But now on Spotify the artists are getting a pittance for something they've worked their whole lives to create.
"The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free."
Use the Bypass Paywall Clean plug-in if you're using Firefox.