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The Darwinism of the tech food chain
By Dave Winer on Monday, April 09, 2012 at 4:08 PM.
A picture named inAndOut.jpgEarlier today I wrote about the Repub roadmap for change for the United States which the Dems have aptly described as Social Darwinism. Little did I know as I wrote this piece that Mark Zuckerberg was writing a check for $1 billion in the cause of Tech Darwinism. The survival of the fittest. The cool little startup, Instagram, becomes a footnote in the food chain, with a very nice reward attached. Good for them! $1 billion buys a lot of In-and-Out burgers. :-) permalink
But this further clarifies the role of users in the Darwinian ecosystem. We are at the bottom of the food chain. We are, as has been described here so many times, mere hamsters spinning the wheels. The more hamsters and the more spinning means more dollars for the beings higher-up the food chain. Unless.  permalink
Unless -- we choose not to participate. permalink
We're going to do more in the coming weeks and months to define what we mean by "choose not to participate." But just to begin, for vendors it means charging users a fair price for a service provided. And in return, a promise not to aggregate the users into a fine pink slime that can be reconstituted into billions of Facebook dollars. And for users, it means deciding that we're creating more than just little dots of pink slime on Zuck's social graph.  permalink
More to come! permalink
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