The internet business model: renting services and paying with our privacy (Spam Mail #25)

Hi there,

All of this week’s 💩 Cool Shit feel idealistic - fun expressions of how knowledge can best be shared on the web.

In contrast, this week’s 💎 Word gems tackle the thorny issue of business models on the internet (plus a must-read on how the wealthy avoid paying tax).

💩 Cool Shit

Hot 100 TikTok Sounds - A weekly hottest 100 on TikTok.

Discriminator - An interactive documentary about facial recognition databases.

Learn Morse Code - A typing trainer for Morse code.

Aristide Benoist Portfolio - A portfolio site with a wonderful horizontal navigation.

Prejudice Free - Confront your prejudice with this interactive quiz to show how  socio-demographic factors might affect how people around us think.

Web Badges World - A library of badges from the Web 1.0 days.

Wayfinder - Finally, a wonderful, meditative game that connects the land with poetry.

💎 Word gems

The Internet of Landlords Makes Renters of Us All (The Reboot / Jathan Sadowski)

If podcast advertising has taught us anything, it’s that we need to cut out the ‘middle men’. Yet, in stark contrast every online transaction is being turned into a service.

The core business model of platform capitalism is best understood as an expansion of rentierism — owning property for the purpose of maintaining control over it and extracting rent from those who live and work on it. I call today’s techno-economic system — which drives investment in innovation, development of infrastructure, and accumulation of capital — the Internet of Landlords.

Building a More Honest Internet (Columbia Journalism Review / Ethan Zuckerman)

This serves as a nice follow-up to the article above. If we rent out spaces on the internet, the form of payment is our privacy. This piece challenges surveillance capitalism by exploring what a public service model of the web could look like.

Can we imagine a social network designed in a different way: to encourage the sharing of mutual understanding rather than misinformation? A social network that encourages you to interact with people with whom you might have a productive disagreement, or with people in your community whose lived experience is sharply different from your own? Imagine a social network designed to allow constituents in a city to discuss local bills and plans before voting on them, or to permit recent immigrants to connect with potential allies. Instead of optimizing for raw engagement, networks like these would measure success in terms of new connections, sustained discussions, or changed opinions. These networks would likely be more resilient in the face of disinformation, because the behaviors necessary for disinformation to spread—the uncritical sharing of low-quality information—aren’t rewarded on these networks the way they are on existing platforms.

The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax (ProPublica / Jesse Eisinger, Jeff Ernsthausen and Paul Kiel)

If you haven’t read this article yet, you must. The ProPublica team share the staggering  disparity in income tax between the wealthy and everyone else.

The results are stark. According to Forbes, those 25 people saw their worth rise a collective $401 billion from 2014 to 2018. They paid a total of $13.6 billion in federal income taxes in those five years, the IRS data shows. That’s a staggering sum, but it amounts to a true tax rate of only 3.4%.

It’s a completely different picture for middle-class Americans, for example, wage earners in their early 40s who have amassed a typical amount of wealth for people their age. From 2014 to 2018, such households saw their net worth expand by about $65,000 after taxes on average, mostly due to the rise in value of their homes. But because the vast bulk of their earnings were salaries, their tax bills were almost as much, nearly $62,000, over that five-year period.

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