Even closer to home, in the club community, you see how certain good ideas can warp over time in this new climate. DJing, for example, has a storied and noble history. In the best cases, taking something like Berghain as an example, club culture can be self-regulated, sustainable, and sovereign. In most cases, however, the permission systems of DJing in this new climate (where nobody buys music) are also tantamount to exploitation—where basically anyone with the right contacts can collect money performing the work of others for free, all under the cover of a narrative of electronic music as some kind of collective celebration.

If you think about it, DJing, unbeknownst to the people who innovated the practice back when people were buying records, is almost a perfect compliment to the platform logic of Web 2.0, in which all the value trickles to the curators, or gatekeepers, of content. What is more Web 2.0 than getting paid to promote yourself curating the unpaid work of other people?