De-platforming and Techno-Feudalism

Tris & Robin talk about what it means to be an online creator in an age of Techno-Feudalism, and what to do about it. 📖 CHAPTERS 00:00 Tris’s New Mentoring Tiers17:01 De-Platforming and Diversifying Income33:19 Deplatforming and Diversification34:22 The Power Dynamics of Platforms49:53 Techno-Feudalism Explained58:50 The Future of Tech and Society The Matrix We’re still working on the power/money/etc matrix we talked about in the show, and will replace this text asap. follow discussion here: https://github.com/NamtaoProductions/decapsulate.com/issues/30 🔗 LINKS Ours https://robinwinslow.ukhttps://noboilerplate.orghttps://lostterminal.comhttps://modemprometheus.comhttps://phosphenecatalogue.com External Techno-Feudalism Book 🧑 CREDITS Decapsulate is a NAMTAO Production (namtao.com) It is hosted by: Tristram Oaten (https://mastodon.social/@0atman)Robin Winslow (https://union.place/@nottrobin) This work is BrainMade (https://brainmade.org) Transcript Tris: [00:00:00] We are about a month after I’ve launched the scholarship and diversity tears on my patron. Robin: I, yeah, we introduced the scholarship and diversity topic very briefly, I think in the last episode. It’s quite interesting. I think it’s, talk about the particulars of what you chose Tris: for the last couple of years. What has allowed me to move from having a day job as a programmer to a internet creator, job, whatever it’s called, writer is what I tell my mom. But I don’t think that’s descriptive enough. Robin: An internet Tris: writer. Do you write the internet? Yes, I write the internet. Well, I did before, and I suppose I still do now. Um, but I’m using English this time rather than, uh, code. What allowed me to bridge that gap? Money was coming in from YouTube ads, which is wonderful, and lots of people joined my Patreon, which I’m incredibly grateful for. And the money was life changing, but not enough to pay all of my rent, so I had to keep the day job. What did allow me to bridge that gap and get away from the day job was. Setting up a mentoring tier where a few people had asked me if I would do lessons if I do one-on-one tuition, that sort of thing. And I eventually said yes, because as a freelancer you should always say yes when people offer you to pay your money. And it worked out really well. I got 10 or 15 people signed up and that was enough for me to cover my bills. I don’t quite make as much as when I was working a day job, nine to five, uh, programming. But it’s more than compensated for like how nice the work. It’s, yeah. I’m my own, my own boss. You know, Robin: that was a question I had in my mind actually was whether at this point you are. Making as much money as you were making or not, but yes, no, I completely agree. That like, quality of life Tris: Oh my God. Yeah. Robin: Very much improved. Yeah. It’s the Tris: backward spending supply curve of labor whereby when you offer people more hours, they take them, but after your boss increases your salary to a certain point, you actually choose fewer hours. ’cause your basic needs are being met. And actually you’d rather buy your life back through doing less work, but more well paid work. Robin: Have we talked about this before? You, you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t necessarily. Sorry. If you’ll allow me a, a tiny segue, because I found this quite interesting. Um, there’s a podcast called The Happiness Lab, which I don’t know whether I fully subscribe to, but sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I, I put it on because I think it helps sort of set my, my mood for the day. Aw. Um, and the latest episode I was listening to is about this economist who I’ve forgotten the name of, but I can put in the notes who won a Nobel Prize, uh, a while ago, maybe in the eighties or nineties or something. ’cause of all the work he’d done critiquing the, the standard model of economics. Um, and one of the big ways is this thing that he called, I think he calls it the winner’s paradox or something. And the way he characterizes it is the, is this example where you go into a bar and you say, I’ve got this jar of coins. Um, whoever bids the most for this jar of coins can have them. And if there’s, you know, any number, any significant number of people in that bar, the top bid for that jar will definitely be worth more than the actual number of coins at the jar. Um, and so they will have, they will have lost out, um, Tris: right. Robin: And I feel a little bit like this is relevant in this thing about the job because you always want to be paid more and therefore you always want to work harder. And you, and sort of human nature doesn’t really lead us to necessarily realizing that that’s not really worth it. From a personal perspective, if you see what I mean? Tris: Yes, uh, absolutely. Robin: Because we feel like a winner. Tris: Yes, of course. I feel a little, like, I must mention at this point that like my circumstances of where I...