Mikael Pawlo

I posted 10 AI videos yesterday, reposted someone else’s TikTok, and schedule-posted 4 jokes that went viral in 2016. Why am I not famous yet? App is broken.

Nothing more dangerous to kids than GNU/Linux. You could easily end up in the computer-developer camp.

The hyper-polarized are useful idiots for foreign adversaries, and I'm sorry that me being moderate pro-skilled-immigration has highlighted that.

A minor aristocracy of “creators” on X is currently in revolt over Nikita Bier’s latest tweak: if your account is based in Nigeria, you don’t get paid for churning out hostile takes on U.S. politics or the hottest take on The Donald Instead, you’re nudged, gently, algorithmically, inexorably, toward producing local content in your own language. Cue The Outrage. The monetized mind, once fed, now howls when the trough is moved. WHERE IS MY MONEY? But here is my unfashionable position: no one should be paid at all. Again. NO ONE SHOULD BE PAID AT ALL. Not because creators lack value, au contraire!, but because attaching money directly to expression on a public square is the original sin of modern platforms. It corrupts incentives at the root. It replaces curiosity with optimization, thought with throughput, and wit with volume. The timeline becomes less John Stuart Mill’s marketplace of ideas and more a low-grade derivatives exchange of outrage, where the underlying asset is attention and the traders are paid per emotional spike. Once you introduce payment, you are no longer hosting speech. you are commissioning it. And commissioned speech, as Friedrich Nietzsche might have observed with a raised eyebrow (and then again, maybe not?), tends to become a will-to-engagement. just open a random newspaper It doesn’t ask “is this true?” but “does this perform?” The result is a feed shaped less by reality than by incentives. what Michel Foucault if anyone still remembers him would call a regime of production, not of truth. This also explains the second-order effect: the platform must suppress those who produce “too much.” Because once content is tied to payouts, frequency becomes a financial strategy. The system, predictably, gets gamed. So the algorithm turns punitive. You are encouraged to speak, but not too often, not too profitably, not too successfully. A strange kind of rationed freedom emerges: speech as both encouraged labor and regulated output. Compare this to the early Internet. Slashdot, Kuro5hin, The WELL. Or Usenet dot news for that matter. ...these were not perfect utopias, but they were closer to something recognizably human. People wrote because they cared, because they wanted to argue, to learn, to perform intellectually in front of their peers. Status existed, *FOR SURE*, but it was reputational, not transactional. You earned respect, not micropayments. I was once on of the top 10 contributors on Slashdot, a crown I did *not* wear lightly. I earned zilch. Nothing. And that distinction matters. As Hannah Arendt once argued (yes, always Arendt), the public realm depends on action and speech that are ends in themselve.s.. not merely means to survival or profit. I might misquote her here slightly, but somehting like that. The moment speech becomes labor-for-hire, it exits the public realm and enters the economic one. It is no longer civic: it is contractual. So perhaps Bier’s move is not the scandal people think it is. It is instead a half-measure toward a deeper truth: global discourse subsidized by engagement payouts was always going to collapse into noise. yes, noise. Not signal. If anything, privileging local language and local context is a small step back toward relevance, toward grounding. Even though multi-language and multi-jurisdictional accounts (like yours truly) will be punished. But the real fix is simpler, and far more radical: Remove the money. No payouts. No engagement farming. No financialization of expression. Leave people with something far rarer in 2026 than we care to admit: a place where they can speak freely without being paid to do so. that is what Elon Musk gave us. A platform not as a gig economy. but as a "republic of letters". And if that sounds austere, even naïve, consider the alternative: a world where every sentence is priced, every opinion optimized, and every voice subtly bent toward what sells. So - pardonnez my French - fucking uninteresting. In such a world, the loudest voices are not the wisest. But the most incentivized. au revoir