Leverage Is Everything
We are freedom loving people. Nostr was created for the purpose of providing and protecting freedom. The people who are here, are here because they became aware of the freedom they had lost, and wanted it back. Nostr is free because it is small, but small things that provide something that the world needs have this pesky tendency to grow and become bigger. This is a good thing, but it also means that we need to be careful to not lose the freedom that we have.
## How did we lose our freedom the first time?
It was tempting to blame this all on ads and move on. But that would be a lie. The truth is that we lost our freedom because we gave it away. We gave it away because we were tricked into thinking that we were getting something in return. We believed that the services that we were using were free, but they weren't. We paid for them with our freedom. We paid for them with our privacy. We paid for them with our data. We paid for them with our attention. We paid for them with our time. We paid for them with our lives.
I believe that the average user has very little understanding of the true cost of the services that they use. This was not always the case. There was a time when people understood that if you wanted to use a service, you had to pay for it. You had to pay for it with money. As the Internet grew at a rapid clip, more and more capital was invested into new businesses that competed with the existing ones. Since they had huge amounts of capital, they could afford to offer their services for almost nothing. Eventually, the industry competed the prices to zero. This was the beginning of the end.
After a while, investors generally expect to see a return on their investment. This is a reasonable expectation. The problem is that the only way to get a return on investment when you are not charging for your service is to sell something else. The only thing that these companies had to sell was the data that they had collected from their users. This is when the data economy was born. This is when we lost our freedom.
We did not chose to compete these prices down to zero, but once the prices were there, we did expect them to not go back up. There are very few things as difficult as getting someone to pay for something they have been getting for free. It took a while before anyone noticed that their leverage was gone. Most people still don't know.
The companies building the products knew though. Generally, people are pretty decent at keeping track of where their paycheck comes from. The products changed accordingly, to gather and process more data, to have a better product to sell to the people who were paying the bills.
## How do we keep our freedom this time?
We need to obey the golden rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules". This is the only way to keep our freedom. We need to make sure that the people who are paying the bills are the same people who are using the product. This is the only way to make sure that the incentives are aligned. This is the only way to make sure that the product is built for the users. When we pay for a product with our funds, we become the boss. The people who are building the product have a real incentive to make sure that we are satisfied, because every time we are not, we can take our money elsewhere, which is money out of their pocket.
Saying that users should directly pay for a product is easy. Making it happen is hard. The reason that it is hard is because it is not a simple matter of just charging for the product. The product needs to be built in a way that makes it possible to charge for it. It also requires a mental shift from the users. I do not intend to understate the difficulty of the challenge. I do intend to state that it is a challenge that we must overcome.
Freedom is preserved when those who enjoy it have skin in the game. "Easy come, easy go," as the saying goes. Freedom is not free. It never has been. It never will be. It is a constant struggle. It is a constant battle. It is a constant fight. It is a constant war. Wars are messy and expensive. You do not win a meaningful victory by failing to fight, or by becoming the enemy. You win a meaningful victory by fighting the right fight, and by fighting it the right way.
The Nostr polis needs to have skin in the game. The people shitposting, creating inkblot art, creating lewds (hi Onyx), posting cat pictures, and engaging in heated political discourse over the socialistic direction of certain countries... they need to be the ones guiding the hand of development on Nostr. They are the ones that will bring users to the platform, keep it alive with conversation, and keep it interesting. They are the real value adds to the network. The most technologically perfect communications protocol has absolutely *zero* value if there is no one to use it.
## Freedom is not free
It's a meme at this point, but it's true. Freedom is not free. It is for the do'ers, payers, movers and shakers. It is for the people who are willing to put their money, time, and safety on the line. We do not have to be rich to take that power back. Those days are over. The Internet has democratized the ability to fund and direct things. We can do it a couple of dollars at a time, across thousands of people. The trick is that people have to actually do it. Collectively, as a group.
There is no wrong way to do this, except by not doing it. You can give any amount to anyone creating services and software for Nostr. Yes, it's a great thing to check into whoever you are donating to, make sure they have a good reputation, and see how well funded they already are, and make a choice based on that. It's also OK to just hand the money to a dev because you are a fan. But the most important thing is that you do it. If you don't do it, no one else will. If no one else does it, we will lose our freedom again. If we lose our freedom again, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
## The future is bright
This is not a criticism of anyone or anything. It is a call for thought, and a reminder of some of the factors that played into how things went down the first time. We are in a unique position to do something about it. We have the technology. We are gaining the people. We have the talent and people high in openness willing to consider new ways. We must find that new way, and rally around it. We must make sure that we do not lose our freedom again. We must make sure that we do not lose our leverage again. We must make sure that we do not lose our power again.
