Good Morning Everyone,
The chorus of authoritarian sociopaths has been increasing over the last couple of weeks in a bizarre attempt to pressure Spotify to cancel Joe Rogan.
You know we’re living in a strange time when some cohort of people (read: authoritarian lunatics) think some guy should not be able to express himself and have open conversations on the internet that they do not like, and instead of them simply “changing channels”, said individual should be deleted, de-platformed and silenced altogether. Least of all some old hippie like Neil Young who is famous for writing a song about “rocking in the free world”. Absolutely mental.
Joe Rogan released a 9min video in response to the criticism apologizing if he’d “pissed anyone off” and telling a pretty funny and ironic story about working as a security guard when he was 19 at a Neil Young concert. Well worth a listen.
The underlying dynamic here is that Joe Rogan’s podcast distribution is exclusively via Spotify’s platform now, and Spotify is a traditional centralized US tech company.
The inherent vulnerabilities of centralization are on full display here, and while Spotify seem to have stood their ground reasonably well so far, in my opinion it’s only a matter of time until they lose the fight and are forced to conform whether by political pressure or new laws and regulations.
This serves as a perfect advertisement for Podcasting 2.0. A decentralized and permissionless distribution mechanism with censorship resistant payments enabled by the lightning network.
The primary difference here is that these centralized platforms are typically advertising machines and advertising, if personalized, entails surveillance. The ability to pay for content you value, in a value-4-value model, via a censorship resistant protocol seems like an obvious way forward.
Even though we have not yet seen this kind of pressure on other dominant content platforms like substack, it’s likely that at some point the inevitable happens, whereby platforms like ghost.io and others stand to benefit.
It’s still very early and there will continue to be a ton of development in this area, but there is no doubt the need exists and likely continues to become more and more pertinent over time. Apps like Sphinx and Breez are doing a great job of enabling this kind of interaction, and we’re likely to see an explosion of innovation in this space.
The future of content, speech, payments and online human interaction is fully decentralized, Peer-to-peer and censorship resistant.
I hope you have a great day, and keep on rocking in the free world.
I will chat to everyone tomorrow.
AK
“Freedom is not given, it is taken.” - Subhas Chandra Bose
