I think the idea was coalesced in Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now: if there are no micropayments, there's no midd

I think the idea was coalesced in Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now: if there are no micropayments, there's no middle class. If there's no middle class, we're essentially doomed. So it feels logical that there has to be a marketplace for "ideas" and "thoughts", not just services. Creating a kind of global network of independent researchers as in E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops (1909): https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops