Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"I have returned from my quick trip to Austin for a few days at the South by Southwest conference. Last time I was there, Silicon Valley Bank fell apart, which made for a rather entertaining weekend to spend as a fly on the wall around the various tech executives who make their pilgrimages to the conference. By that point in 2023, the shine had already mostly worn off on the crypto excitement compared to the crypto extravaganzas that characterized SXSW during crypto’s peak hype years.</p><p>This time, although crypto prices are back up, crypto excitement didn’t seem to be. <br>(...)<br>There was a great panel about “Openness Under Pressure”, which touched on similar points as my recent newsletter about open access amid widespread AI scraping. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber took the mainstage for a keynote with the inimitable tech journalist (and Bluesky board member) Mike Masnick. She wore an oversized black t-shirt printed with black text that read mundus sine Caesaribus (“a world without Caesars”). It was immediately recognizable to those who had seen Mark Zuckerberg’s custom black-on-black aut Zuck aut nihil (“Zuck or nothing”) shirt at a Meta event last year, an egomaniacal play on aut Caesar aut nihilb and a nod to the emperor after whom Zuckerberg has long styled himself.</p><p>Her message was clear: we need a world resilient to the outsized power of Zuckerbergian billionaire emperors. And we need platforms that are, as she and Masnick put it, “billionaire-proof”. I couldn’t agree more.</p><p>Sadly, for now we remain in a very much not billionaire-proof world, so I will now update you on how that’s all been going."</p><p><a href="https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-79/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="">citationneeded.news/issue-79/</span><span class="invisible"></span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SocialMedia" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SocialMedia</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SocialNetworks" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SocialNetworks</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Fediverse" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Fediverse</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/SXSW" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>SXSW</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Crypto" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Crypto</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Cryptocurrencies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Cryptocurrencies</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BigTech" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>BigTech</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/BlueSky" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>BlueSky</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Web3" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Web3</span></a></p>