We need to set aside our petty differences and fight the true enemy: bloated IDEs.

Yeah, as always, the devil is in the details. For now I think that we need a simple and clear articulation of the main idea. In the exceedingly unlikely event that it ever gets traction, I look forward to hammering out the many nuances.

It’s not a solution, but as a mitigation, I’m trying to push the idea of an internet right of way into the public consciousness. Here’s the thesis statement from my write-up:

I propose that if a company wants to grow by allowing open access to its services to the public, then that access should create a legal right of way. Any features that were open to users cannot then be closed off so long as the company remains operational. We need an Internet Rights of Way Act, which enforces digital footpaths. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to create little paths into their sites, only to delete them, forcing guests to pay if they wish to maintain access to the networks that they built, the posts that they wrote, or whatever else it is that they were doing there.

As I explain in the link, rights of way already exist for the physical world, so it’s easily explained to even the less technically inclined, and give us a useful legal framework for how they should work.

On farming specifically, are you American? American farming is extremely inefficient and unproductive. “Family farming” is not usually an economically sustainable farming model. Throughout history, collective farming with a larger labor pool is much, much more common, and family farms only show up under very specific conditions – when land is very cheap. American land use programs were purposefully designed to displace indigenous people first and farm second. The government made the land cheap (or free) to entice farmers to move into it. As a result, we’ve inherited a family farm system that no longer makes sense, and we’re struggling to figure out what to do.

Sarah Taber writes about this a lot: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/america-loves-the-idea-of-family-farms-thats-unfortunate.html

On your general point, on how much is true, I’ve read a lot of criticism of this video, and I think most of it comes down to interpretation. What is free time? A lot of people criticize the video for not acknowledging that peasants had to work outside of the time they were working for other people, but so do we. Our lives are very different from theirs, and it’s just really hard to compare.

For example, when I say I spend a lot of my free time renovating an old house I’m fixing up, that sentence makes perfect sense, but I’m implying a very specific idea of “free time” that’s actually a little weird, when you think about it. Right now, I’m spending my free time writing this, but to a many a peasant, I assume writing was probably serious work done by serious people with specific training, not something they would consider a leisure activity.