For some reason, blaming sex workers for "starting" the rent seeking behavior of corporations doesn't pass the smell test for me. After all porn magazines have had subscriptions since before the internet.
I had a sales guy at my employer tell me excitedly that he and a client were inventing a new thing for us to support on their website, selling a book before it was even finished, one chapter at a time! He was crestfallen when I told him that Charles Dickens had done it in the 1830s, and that I learned Ruby on Rails from a book published that way by Pragmatic Programmers around 2005.
I don’t think that’s what the article was saying. She was a pioneer in digital media and controlled her work without needing publishers or promoters who typically exploit women in that industry
It's also just wrong that it was innovative. The Wall Street Journal website set up a paywall in the same year, and many other smaller sites probably did as well.
As you say, the idea of subscribing for content goes back hundreds of years.
Back in the 90s there was a zeitgeist where people in different pockets of the world came up with similar ideas and similar solutions to certain problems. Technology hit a certain threshold that allowed for specific innovation to occur.
It reminds me of that movie "The Billion Dollar Code" [1] where some guys claim that Google stole their Google Maps idea. Whereas in reality, it's more likely that due to certain technological advances, different people came up with the same/similar idea of how to store and display maps.
People were going online in the ‘90s (and using obnoxiously large phones)
Umm, the guy in that picture isn’t “going online”, he’s making drunken purchases at 2:00 a. m. via QVC’s 800 phone number. You see a keyboard attached to that “monitor”?
This is fascinating for the ways that it's wrong, like, subscription services are as old as newspapers, and early internet news sites including Wall Street Journal had paywalls at the same time or earlier.
Also this:
> Video teleconferencing, with the proto-Zoom platform CU-SeeMe
Apparently Skype has completely disappeared from the cultural memory. Video conferencing was invented in 2020, everybody.
I'm referring to the fact that johnny-come-lately Zoom is the reference point for all video conferencing products. CU-SeeMee isn't "proto-Skype" it's a "proto-Zoom".
