The peak of my enthusiasm for Computers was 2010, specifically, the release of "Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators".

I don't think there is any mustache-twirling villain at the center of this shift, but I do believe that the organism of Capital looked at the surplus that Shirky described, and (correctly!) identified it as a positive externality.

If you've got enough energy to write a wikipedia article, you've got enough energy to answer one more work email.

The thing about externalities is that we usually discuss them from a regulatory perspective. Negative externalities bad, positive externalities good. In principle, government wants to punish companies for negative externalities and reward them for positive ones.

But from the perspective of private enterprise (including "independent creators") that's backwards. Negative externalities are great! That's society putting money on your pocket.

Positive externalities are leaving money on the table.

Furthermore, by the time you're talking about an externality, *the regulatory apparatus has already failed*. If you do something good and get rewarded for it to an appropriate degree, you don't have a positive externality! You just have a good product and/or service that you are exchanging for currency. Yay, commerce. Similarly for negative externalities. Once you have a negative externality, that means the regulator has *failed* to punish a harmful behavior.

Now, the body-horror portion of the thread: the capitalism is inside you too. When we express a progressive sentiment like "{artists | open source maintainers | carers} should be fairly compensated!" we are *also* recognizing a positive externality and demanding its correction. Not to say that's hypocrisy, saying that people doing valuable labor should get resources is not the same as asking for increased returns on passive investment. But it's still asking for private capture of public benefit.

The problem, of course, is the power dynamic. Existing corporations, people's employers, have the ability to manage people as resources and monitor behavior at a broader scale. Some of this is pushing people's schedules and wages, some of it is just insidious insights like "yes, great, make free blogs, we'll just run ads on them. free videos, cool, but would you like to join our Partner Program?"

All workers can do is ask "pay people fairly!" and withhold labor.

And of course one can also smash that like button and remember to subscribe: <https://www.patreon.com/creatorglyph>.

This *is* a cynical CTA, but it's also a serious point. I am trying to generally be a 2010s-style positive externality, and just get people to kick in enough that it can support the travel expenses for software conferences I want to speak at so that it is not a net *drain* on my savings to write open source code, blog posts, and talks. Maybe cover health insurance. And it is a very tough sell

@glyph maybe need to add "Al Gore gets elected and we get M4A instead of the war in Iraq" to my list of "alternative histories for a more open web"

@luis_in_brief just making the roblox oof sound as I take a critical amount of psychic damage

@glyph soooo much wasted potential good (missed positive externalities, to echo your thread) for society because programmers needed health care