Actually, no. He's a really nice guy who's genuinely excited about the possibilites that exist for the future of online comics, both short-form and long-form. He's done his research, and he know his stuff about micropayments and what it's going to take to get them to be a reality. I think what the argument boils down to is one of perspective; Scott is an optimist, and I am not.
Scott believes that advances in technology and the hard work of small start-up companies are likely to bring us new paradigms in the near future that will make micropayments feasible and jump the hurdles that are before us. He also feels that people will be excited to use this new system and will gladly accept the limitations inherent in such a system if it means that we get fresh, comicky goodness for a few pennies a month.
I believe that the same thing will eventually happen, but my timeline is significantly longer. I wish I could share his optimism, but I can't -- I've seen too much evidence that those hurdles are a lot higher than we'd like them to be. I'm not going to go into the details here, because Scott, I'm sure, will do an excellent job of summarizing his argument in future ICST columns, and it's really just an argument of when something like this will happen, and how long it'll be before it's accepted by the public. No one can say for sure. Only time will tell.
In the meantime, I'm going to try to find other ways to keep us afloat, and whore myself to squeeze every dollar out of you readers. The current solutions we have in place aren't going to be enough to even sustain our payments for bandwidth, much less support me full-time (which is every cartoonist's dream) -- you'll see more on that subject when I post (soon) on the sorry state of donations.
I just can't stop thinking that there's got to be a way that we can make this work today.