Cute cat theory of Web 2.0

This is a really fascinating talk that was given at the recent ETech conference. One of the slides really caught my attention, and I think I agree with it. The text: “Hypothesis: Sufficiently useable read/write platforms will attract porn. If there’s no porn, the tool doesn’t work. If there are no activists, the tool doesn’t work well.”

His larger point, is that

Blocking banal content on the internet is a self-defeating proposition. It teaches people how to become dissidents - they learn to find and use anonymous proxies, which happens to be a key first step in learning how to blog anonymously. Every time you force a government to block a web 2.0 site - cutting off people’s access to cute cats - you spend political capital. Our job as online advocates is to raise that cost of censorship as high as possible.