I also want to know this.
Do we have an alternative for listeners to leave big social/big stream? How can we incentivize and facilitate them? Say, I travel around, chat with people, say how I’m not too big on surveillance/ad based cultural economy. “Okay,” they say, “what should I use instead?”
“You shouldn’t use”, perhaps I ought to say, “you should participate!”
My point of reference is a perhaps imaginary past where everyone in the village played an instrument. But they have not even that point of reference.
For them music is like one big ad for feeling emotions instead of for buying things. As far as means of communications go, I’ve tried suggesting different things that I’ve been big on at the time – alternative social media and chat apps mainly, since I spent the longest time thinking everybody just downloads their music as files. Spotify snuck up on me completely.
And so, my recommendations don’t stick – it’s not like they’re particularly slick. Developers of alternatives, as radically justice driven as they may be, burn out, or drop the ball. I think we’re seeing another phase of that with the present enshittification of Firefox – one of the more well-established alternatives to people’s general information workflow, even if always a sort of “loyal opposition”, dropped some pretenses just recently.
So, these days, people hardly even try alternatives. App fatigue is real. The recommendation that sticks most is, well, torrents. Because free shit.
What can I offer the average consumer that works with, not against their current “passive consumer” mentality, and only gradually empowers them, same as they were gradually frog-boiled by toxic corporate culture in the first place?
What’s a cultural technology that presently doesn’t have critical mass, but can obtain it with the help of a funding body? Will anyone give a grant that enables us to pay, say 10EUR to 1000 people to join the Fediverse and stick around for a while, same as cryptoscammers do “airdrops” to incentivize completely random people into joining their faux-networks? Press X to doubt, ZIRP is over…