> As far as the rent extraction apparatus, it is enumerated almost entirely by a population that simply did not exist online back in the imagined halcyon days o

> As far as the rent extraction apparatus, it is enumerated almost entirely by a population that simply did not exist online back in the imagined halcyon days of "the independent internet". The masses didn't come online to tap through homespun webrings, they don't care about that stuff, these shiny hyper-optimized manipulation machines are what keep the masses online in the first place. I agree, but I think people arguing over that would have expected to maintain the same ratio as the internet population grew. Frankly utopian IMO but one should dream, no?