It is a matter of scale. In the video, I bring this up to Noam towards the end. He actually disagrees, that audience is a form of capital. He says it is influe

It is a matter of scale. In the video, I bring this up to Noam towards the end. He actually disagrees, that audience is a form of capital. He says it is influence, but not capital. Even though one can do the same operations with it as with any capital, including exchanging it for other forms of capital etc. You are just USED to celebrity culture, and following what Jonny Depp or Will Smith does can even overshadow a war in Ukraine or humanitarian crisis in Yemen. Four Libyan ambassadors matter more than millions of Libyans. On Wikipedia or in NGinX there are no celebrities, except maybe the founders. And it is far far more useful and popular than their closed-source capitalist alternatives: Britannica/Encarta and Internet Information Server. They power more machines and serve more people in more ways. And you bet that there are a lot of operating system maintainers that put software like nginx and php through their paces before giving their members access. If you don’t like a centralized organization vetting things, then have various distros, like Linux. The point is that the author shouldn’t also be the one vetting each new version and what changed. Security researchers should be. Your argument for “free speech absolutism” would fail in science and any endeavor that actually matters to people. For humor, entertainment and idle discussion, maybe we can have celebrities. But yes — my video would normally not matter if not for Noam Chomsky’s amassed reputation and audience. The content in my video would be far better published as part of a collaborative discussion rather than an off-the-cuff one. But a chat between two non-celebrities would be fine for society… people could watch it for entertainment, or whatever. It wouldn’t move markets or convince people of crazy theories about 9/11 or QANON pedophiles. There is a limit to how much power should be concentrated in one place.