Once again, Mr. Denning seems to expertly construct (for some) a completely false narrative to sell what he’s selling… I guess.

The “Influencers” who attract enough attention are making boatloads of money on a whole host of platforms that are ad supported. And, yes, the platforms hugely profit from the ads and your info, too, to sell more ads. And this is pretty much a fair deal. If you don’t want to be tracked and profited from, it’s still fairly easy to get what is offered without being tracked. Yes, yes, you do have be somewhat intelligent and concerned. And it's pretty easy.

But the real problem with the model is not so much being tracked and profited from, which can largely be evaded easily. No, the problem is social media itself and how it lets people affect other people in ways that are inherent to web-based largely social interactions. In other words, social media is the problem, not the platform ownership or technology or the business model.

And, for this, you can see the case now being pursued against Facebook. Thankfully, our western liberal democratic societies have a legal and political system that (however imperfectly) provides the means to curb or regulate bad things.

Now, I have a somewhat special relationship with the world of ads making money for all these various and sundry platforms: I worked for DoubleClick in Web 1.0 time period. You know, the company that effectively invented web advertising, tracking, and collecting information to sell more ads and collect more info. We invented it and did it freely and widely and started making huge amounts of money from it. And then, when we purchased a catalog company that had names and addresses of all of the USA’s magazine subscribers, 20 US state attorneys general sued and all hell broke loose to force us into a number of boxes to keep from knowing all we knew and improperly using the information.

Ahh, the old days. Google had no idea how it would make money back then, like so many other search engines and platforms. After the DotCom crash brought DCLK to its knees, it was sold for a virtual song to a private equity company. And then Google bought DCLK. And the rest is history.

Now that is all very quaint. Now we have a whole new sector (crypto, DDLT, NFT, etc.) that wants to do what every evil or greedy player wants: REMOVE THE ATTORNEYS' GENERAL or any civil governance's ABILITY TO DO ANYTHING. No law, no protection, no rules or enforcement capability if something goes evil. And this is played as a key advantage and benefit in today’s world.

So, you can wholesale ignore much of what Mr. Denning presents as fact or narrative of “the way things are so terrible”. Because what is being proposed in the so-called “decentralized” space makes the peccadillos of Ad tracking and revenue models of these platforms now look like saints.

Watch out for worse.