TTL 38
Good Morfternight friends,
I have a question for you today: should the internet be free?
In late 2024, Wikipedia launched its fundraising campaign under the banner “The internet we were promised.” The message struck a chord: many imagined that promise meant no paywalls, no subscriptions, no ads—a space where knowledge was simply free of charge.
But that promise was never real: as I already said, the internet is a complex infrastructure that needs money to survive.
The point of the campaign wasn’t money—it was values. In English there’s a useful distinction: free as in beer vs. free as in freedom.
→ Free as in beer means price. You get a beer handed to you for nothing.
→ Free as in freedom means rights. Not whether the beer is free, but whether you’re allowed to brew it yourself, share it with friends, or choose how it’s made.
That’s the freedom we should be fighting for.
Because the real danger isn’t that online content costs money. It’s that our ability to publish, connect, and preserve knowledge is being eroded by platforms that close themselves off, by content that vanishes without trace, and by systems that value profit over permanence.
That’s it for today, see you next week.
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I also publish on paolo.blog and monochrome.blog.
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