I often think about Swartz, and I wonder if he did what he did because he saw where we were heading and knew that they were never going to let him near a computer to fight it. I hope that he’s at peace.

OpenSI doesn’t really roll of the tongue does it? What will they do? update to OSI? because that’s already a bunch of things…

They want the internet to be as cable, radio, and books before it. It just took longer because of the complexity of the systems. They can’t stand that people for about 20 years had the means to educate themselves and they’ve been fighting to censor it since at least 2012. The problem is that now the tech bros are on board. Before they still had enough idealist types internally to keep them pushing back.

It was only a matter of time. having been raised in the free and open internet it really breaks my heart.

‘Flockroaches’

It’s not fully accurate to lay the blame at the feet of Netflix. At the time, they just saw the writing on the wall and did what they had to do to survive. Their catalog was massive because, early on, no one thought streaming would work. They had a massive collection of shows and movies that didn’t pull enough of an audience to air on TV for ad revenue. Netflix was able to get a TON of long-term deals that they used to grow, but when those contracts were coming due, the rights holders pulled out and started trying to make their own services. At that point, Netflix basically had to become a studio and pivot to original content, or else they wouldn’t have content at all.

The long and the short of it is that because Netflix was first, it got to set the stage for the golden age of streaming, but because it worked, it was inevitable that streaming would become cable.

It’s not Netflix’s fault. It’s just the course of the entertainment business. They suck now, but back then, I couldn’t think of a single bad thing to say about them… well, maybe that they got rid of the 5-star rating system. That system was definitely used to get metrics for their early programming.