Just because you’ve thrown a few crumbs of business or exposure at these people doesn’t mean they’ve become any richer than their equivalents would have been in the pre-Internet days.
The fact that the technological requirements for small new businesses and cottage content industries have changed shouldn’t be confused with an improvement in the opportunity landscape as a whole.
If anything, these “businesses” - especially the content creators - are more like digital feudalisms, as (mostly) low-status low-value workers try to scratch out an existence on territory owned by a single entity they have no democratic influence on.
The reality is that wealth concentration among the hyper-rich is accelerating as they capture an ever-increasing share of global productivity.
If the Internet were likely to fix this, we’d have seen some evidence of this happening by now.
But there is exactly zero evidence for this, and even less reason to believe that it can happen, given where we are today.
The only thing that might change this is total disintermediation - open, distributed, publicly owned, non-corporate hardware and software infrastructure, including search, security, content distribution, storage, and applications.
You only have to think about that for a few moments to see how far we are from that kind of Internet, and just how locked down, siloed, chokepointed, gated, and obsessively monetised the Internet we have today is.
