The Graeber interview is intense. Related to work, this was particularly interesting:
Graeber: And of course the pandemic has highlighted the reverse side of this: the more immediately your work helps other people the less you are likely to be paid.
Q: Health and care workers, factory and utility workers, shopkeepers… got celebrated during the pandemic. How come?
Graeber: Because the essence of their work is to do no harm. Just consider the emergency and care workers who are out there risking their lives so that the health system does not collapse. In theory, a labour movement is the strongest when their work is essential and brings a lot of bargaining power to the workers. So if the health and care workers would decide to strike for better conditions and better pay this would be the best possible moment. But in reality this does not happen.
However, I don’t agree with his characterization of open source work. Indeed, much open source work is started on nights and weekends but it matures in institutions and with corporate contributions. I would get into details, but I don’t want to derail the conversation. The point still stands. There is a lot of uncompensated labor being done on the internet.
I would like to invite your perspective on this issue in the context of open source and the issue of “making a living”. Have you experienced examples of that?
Personally? Certainly. I found it impossible to get local information about COVID-19 cases, so I build a service myself: 
The Corona Virus in Turin, Italy. It’s nothing brilliant, but there are others in my community that also want this service. The gap between the dynamic document I made and the people out there that I know want to read it is frustrating.
If I can provide the service to the right people (the more difficult part) then I can seek compensation that I can invest back into the work.
How would you like to solve this?
There are concrete lessons to learn from both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. I still dream of a network where one person signals a good or service available in a virtual space they can control (i.e. not controlled by a 3rd party, like Facebook). The contemporary web is absurd because better models are so easy to imagine.
- Decentralized: If I like a band, I should be able to go to their webpage and compensate an artist directly for their work.
- Centralized: If I like a band, I can support them on a platform that they own with other bands (a cooperative like Ampled). The people that make the content should own the platform.
How can we find an appropriate value system for value-creating work?
It’s important to look at the models of the past while acknowledging what makes the internet unique. Marx couldn’t have imagined a space where ephemeral goods could be distributed at zero marginal cost all over the plant in a fraction of a second.