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Comment on Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet (2021)

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The irony of complaining about the fragmentation of information and free things being given when a freemium modal block prevents you from reading the screed.

There's a difference between reading something for free and being free to read something.

A paywall is annoying but solvable with a wallet. Being behind the great firewall isn't.

It's not really that different, because there is no law that says the article must be made available to me as long as I pay a reasonable fee. The paywalling company is free to discriminate both the readers and the writers at it's whim.

Yes, because you don't have the right to force others to work for you at whatever you consider a 'fair price' and thank fuck for that.

Discrimination and slavery are othogonal. You can have a rule that says if you want to sell flour in a store, you have to apply the same standards to all comers. You can't be mysteriously out of flour just for the black family, or it costs 100x more just for the gay couple, etc. This does not make you a flour-selling slave because you don't have to be in the flour-selling buisiness at all.

Trying to make that somehow related merely exposes something unflattering about anyone who tries it.

I don't know how that could be applied to publishing/broadcasting platforms, but it doesn't matter because the point was only to say that there is no such rule, which means a wallet does not solve the paywall problem, and being free to read something and reading something for free are in fact not entirely unrelated, depending on the particulars of why you can't read something for free.

If there was say, some kind of unmoderated publicly run service where everyone had to pay a certain fee to access it, maybe even in the form of taxes, and everyone had access to it by law, that would be free to read and not read for free, but we don't have that. All we have are things where someone gets to decide what you are free to read.

and having sex with a 5 year and is no different from having sex with a 25 year old.

Oh wait ... yeah, it's different and the mechanics being roughly similar doesn't remove those differences.

yes, I said exactly that

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