I enjoyed this. I find it somewhat telling though that while the title is about "the internet", the actual discussion about what's changed focuses a lot on money. You can argue that the internet changed how money is made, but I think it's a mistake to conflate technology with our societal response to and management of it. As gun-control advocates love to point out, firearms have been around for centuries but that doesn't mean people everywhere are shooting each other constantly. We have things like laws to contain the effects of technology. I think a major component of the culutral changes described in the article is a lack of political will to ensure, by force if necessary, that the economic gains of technology are spread widely.

Another caveat to the title is that the article seems mostly to be talking about the "web 2.0" or post-social-media internet. I'd say that earlier stages of the internet, particularly what some people now see as the "golden age" from the late 1990s to around 2010, actually involved a remarkable flowering of culture. Blogs proliferated, traditional media started making websites with substantial content, and there were valuable achievements in new media like Flash games. The article says:

> The internet has made it easy to evaluate all content — including criticism — against three key metrics: views, likes, and shares.

And that's true, but it's not "the internet" that did that, it's the specific subset of the internet that we allowed to run amok. Blaming that on the internet is like looking at a street full of obnoxious advertising signs and saying that paint ruined this town; maybe that's a factor, but another one is a lack of signage laws.

The part of the internet that has destroyed and continues to destroy culture is the part that's built on pandering and profiteering, which, not coincidentally, is the same part of other industries that has destroyed beautiful and promising things in the past.

That said, the article makes a lot of good points. This one in particular:

> What happened to journalism in the 21st century is, in many ways, the story of the conflict between two utopian values: Information wants to be free and Writers should be paid.

There's no denying that technology played in role in the creation of this dilemma. It's not just about journalism, of course. It has to do with the fact that computers enable the essentially resource-free copying of information, and that's affected many industries (perhaps most notably the artistic ones like movies and music that the article discusses in other contexts). But just because technology brings us new problems doesn't mean we can't address those problems by updating our expectations and standards of behavior.