The lesson from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit has in each case been identical: Platform ownership matters. If you invest your time into a platform w

The lesson from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit has in each case been identical: Platform ownership matters. If you invest your time into a platform which someone else owns, they can devalue your investment at any time, on whim. Or they could sell it to a billionaire ideologue who is angry at his daughter. I don't know what the future will look like, but I do know this: we will all be much more careful about how we spend our time, and what kind of control we have over the future of that investment. Finally, a quick note of historical precedent: This is not a new problem. Musicians, writers, and artists have been dealing with exploitative contracts for a literal century. What's new is that the 'creator economy' has democratized not just content creation, but also creator exploitation. We are all Ke$ha now, in a sense.