TTL 39
Good Morfternight friends,
We all love to complain about ads on the internet, but before we imagine a world without ads, it helps to remember one thing: the internet is expensive to run.
Every search, every scroll, every upload relies on data centers that consume vast amounts of electricity, networks that carry information across the globe, and people whose job is to build, maintain, and moderate the system.
All of that has to be paid for.
The internet wasn’t designed to be a charity. It was designed as an open infrastructure. Anyone can use it, but someone has to pay for it.
And that’s where the real problem begins. The issue isn’t making money online – the issue is what happens when companies act as if their profits don’t carry any responsibility.
Cory Doctorow has a name for the outcome of such behavior: enshitternet.
Platforms lure users in by being generous. Then they pivot to please advertisers. Then they squeeze both, stripping value from everyone until the whole system breaks.
This cycle shows what happens when businesses forget they’re operating on a commons, and commons only survive when people who benefit also contribute back.
If your customers find you, pay you, and talk about you online, you’re building on shared infrastructure and you should take care of it.
Open source proves the point. WordPress is free and open. Agencies build businesses on it. But at that stage they face a choice: invest back into the ecosystem or take without giving. If too many choose the second option, the system erodes. Even worse, free riders gain an immediate advantage, which discourages others from contributing—accelerating the decline.
So the paradox is this: contributing rarely maximizes short-term profits. But it’s the only way to keep the ecosystem alive long enough for everyone to keep benefiting.
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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