mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06⚡ Interested in bootstrapping, podcasting, calm companies, business ethics, better life 🎙️ Co-founder of Transistor.fm (podcast hosting)
Kevin Kelly on the new economy:
“When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.
Well, what can’t be copied?
There are a number of qualities that can’t be copied. Consider “trust.” You can’t purchase trust.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/kevinkelly/p/better-than-free?r=5c3qv&utm_medium=ios
Peak design
When more people can build software, what happens to the value of software?
In economics, when you increase the supply of something, its market value goes down (and so does the price).
Up until now, software was valuable because it was hard to make. You needed a team of engineers, money, and time.
I'll be live on the New Media Show today with podcast hall-of-famer, @robgreenlee@podcastindex.social.
We'll definitely be chatting about video podcasting, HLS, AI, and the future of RSS.
👀 Interesting rebuttal to Jonathan Haidt's "Anxious Generation"
> "As a society we have almost a knee-jerk reaction to believe that the solution to any problem experienced by kids is to deprive them of yet one more freedom"
Time to improve my scores.
When more people can build software, what happens to the value of software?
(Software that would have taken years to build now takes days)
Whoever said the “pen is mightier than the sword” has never been in a sword fight with a pen.
I've been reflecting on something @dave@podcastindex.social said:
"Technology will always do it's worst thing."
In the early 90s, the internet was so small and quaint.
All this technology, in everyone's hands, has just produced so much stuff. It's had so many effects, in every direction.
Wrote about it here:
https://justinjackson.ca/tech-done-to-us
Just wrote a new post for Podcast Standards Project members:
"We need to play the game on the field: understand what genuinely motivates podcasters and listeners and respond with features they care about.
But, we're also trying to change the game."
https://podstandards.org/2026/02/13/playing-the-game-on-the-field/
I've started posting some of my candid observations about the podcast ecosystem here:
The idea that podcasts were always meant to be "audio only" is just not true.
Here's Steve Jobs demoing video podcasts in iTunes/iPod back in 2005:
"It’s insanely hard to make a full-time income as a creator."
Interesting thoughts from Ali Abdaal:
"If you just vlog your life like Emma Chamberlain, you'll have no competitive advantage (unless you’re extremely charismatic; even then it’s tricky)."
Curious about what folks here on Mastodon think.
This is cool. Asked Claude to generate some color options for this UI element, and it generated a bunch of sample palettes + UI mockups.
@dave@podcastindex.social who was that philosopher you quoted on the Podcasting 2.0 show? You said something like "technology will always do it's worst thing."
I've been quoting that endlessly since I heard you say it; now I need the source!
“Aim for Protopia. A protopian future is one that is only a little tiny bit better than today.” – Kevin Kelly
https://open.substack.com/pub/kevinkelly/p/protopia?r=5c3qv&utm_medium=ios
Writing code is no longer a hard or rare skill, and that changes things.
Great post by @mrnugget@mastodon.social:
"I want to shake them and go: man, don’t you see? All of it was built on the assumption that code is expensive! And most of it doesn’t make sense anymore when code is cheap. Yes, the need to do proper engineering won’t go away. But many things will, because a single constant in a very fundamental equation has been changed."
https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/joy-and-curiosity-78
Whenever I can, I ask "normal people" (friends at the coffee shop, Uber drivers, people I meet at meetups) how they consume podcasts. This is the general trend:
