I think much of the social corrosiveness of the web and news media as it stands is due to the adoption of advertising as the primary means of funding content cr

I think much of the social corrosiveness of the web and news media as it stands is due to the adoption of advertising as the primary means of funding content creation, the resulting expectation that most content should be free, and the failure to produce effective micropayment systems so that paid content has become synonymous with paywalls (high cost barriers around large bodies of content). I would love to see a world in which it is possible to directly pay for content in a very fine grained and frictionless manner, and in which doing so is the norm. I hadn't considered that the success of large language models might break the current system in a way that can only be fixed by moving it in the direction I'd like to see (but maybe not the micropayments). What an exciting thought :-D I must read Anathem, maybe it'll change my mind. Neal Stephenson's always great anyway.