Image by Jutta M. Jenning, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.
Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:
1. As a followup to last week's news article about the identity of Bitcoin's founder, it seems that it may have been a hoax after all. Not surprising, really. Andrea Castillo, writing for Reason, argues that we should entirely halt the hunt to identify the cryptocurrency's creator, because "The entire purpose of the Bitcoin project is to facilitate a way for humans to access financial channels regardless of personal circumstances. That its leader would be pseudonymous and impersonal is therefore appropriate, even necessary". I really enjoyed reading Castillo's take on it, and have to agree—why does the mainstream media feel the need to know who the founder of Bitcoin is (or was) in the first place!?
2. There is yet another followup from last week's Weekend Thoughts, when I published a link to #GOPDildos, an art project that takes photos featuring them Republicans holding guns and replaces the weapons with dildos. The project's creator wrote an article that discusses the motivation behind it and the artist's personal opinion on the issue of gun control. It's definitely worth reading for anyone interested in politics, Republicans, guns, and/or dildos.
3. I enjoyed this 2015 edition of the Voight-Kampff Empathy Test, from science fiction author Philip K Dick's seminal novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which was made into the hit film Blade Runner. The 2015 version includes a satirical political spin, mentioning the movements #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter in a fairly humorous (depending on your take, I suppose) way.
4. An article written by a well-known YouTuber made the rounds this week, pointing out the economic difficulties that online content creators face. Many people who have tens (or even hundreds!) of thousands of followers have trouble affording to pay for their basic bills like rent or groceries. It is essentially necessary for them to publish company-sponsored videos/posts or ask their followers to sponsor them with a service like Patreon. The catch-22 for many creators is that they are seen as too big to ask for money from their followers but too small for advertisers to consider working with. It's an interesting article, and it brings up something that I wanted to mention about Think Wilder—as of now, I haven't made a single penny off of this website. So far, all of this content that I have created has been not only free for my followers, but it has actually costed me money (in hosting and domain name registration fees). I consider this project to be a labor of love, so for the time being I don't mind paying to share my work. In the future, I may consider instituting a sponsorship program for readers to chip in or running sponsored posts from time to time, but I haven't made a decision on that yet. However, I'm lucky in that I have a steady day job and don't rely on an inconsistent income source, so my situation is simply different from the ones that are described in the article. At any rate, give the article a read, and if you have any input on whether or not I should attempt to make money off of this website, feel free to contact me using one of the social share icons below!
That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.