Month: March 2022

New Weezer. Yes, please.

I very much enjoyed this recent interview with Matt Mullenweg (founder of Automatic, developer of WordPress and the most recent owner of my beloved Tumblr).

This particular response from Matt was my favorite part of the conversation

I will add that one of the most amazing things about the technological revolution was allowing for economics of abundance, not scarcity. Things get more valuable the more copies there are. We were talking about the positive flywheel of open-source earlier. WordPress gets more valuable the more free copies there are. Now we’re getting more things to introduce scarcity and the value of scarcity into the web, perhaps even programmatically with stuff like NFTs. The difference between what’s come before — from tens of thousands of humanity’s advances — is this idea that, in the world of bits instead of atoms, you and I don’t have a zero-sum way of prospering. We can both benefit from the same thing. We can perfectly copy that software and that actually enables entirely new business models that are pretty exciting. Or maybe that it’s not a business at all, which is okay. Everything doesn’t have to be for profit.

My love affair with the internet, online communities and the web came from this ethos. And it still does today.