A Four Paragraph Update

Monochrome artwork of person tied to wheel, saying "This is torture!", as black-robed figures turn it. Two robed men look on, one saying "I am composing a proclamation that says it is not."
"The Torture Memo" by tomblanton1957, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Because I'm a long-former, and what some people consider blog length is my idea of a quick memo.


It's been almost a third of a year since I got Ghost installed here, and posted my 95 theses on leaving SS (SubStack). During most of that time I was travelling for whānau reasons. I kept posting a lot in the fediverse (mainly using my Mastodon account), because it's easy to do on the run. But I only feel like blogging if I have time and space to unpack my laptop, find a comfy spot, and work uninterrupted for a few hours.

A lot of my energy has been dammed up with finishing a closing up shop post for the Bridge Seat Cooperative, and running it past a couple of people before posting it. So it's a great relief to get that put to bed.

Next I'm going to repost some musings I wrote for the Bridge Seat blog, which I want to be able to share without linking to SS. My rough plan is to schedule them in advance, at least a couple of weeks apart, then start putting together some new stuff to post in between to keep things fresh.

For now though, I'm going to post a copy of a piece that was originally published by The Daily Blog in November 2015, exploring the differences between the crowdsourcing of genuine digital commons (Wikipedia, couchsurfing platforms, etc), and the outsourcing platforms (Uber, AirBnB, etc) being sold at the time as the "sharing economy". I recently noticed that the piece vanished from the web, sometime after the last copy taken by the Wayback Machine in October 2020. So now that I'm hosting my own blog, it seems like a good time to get it back on the web.