PEOPLES PLATFORM EB

Astra Taylor

• Publisher: Fourth Estate
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780007565146
• eBook ISBN: 9780007525607
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Computer Science General
• Index: Computer Science

From a cutting-edge cultural commentator, a bold and brilliant challenge to cherished notions of the internet as the great leveler of our age.

The internet has been hailed as an unprecedented democratising force, a place where everyone can participate.

• So why are minorities and marginalized groups under-represented on user-generated websites, with less than 15% of Wikipedia written by women?
• Why does keyword-jammed and star-studded churnalism proliferate, at the expense of in-depth, investigative journalism?
• And how have a handful of giant corporations like Facebook, Google and Apple seized control of our creativity, galvanizing individuals to produce content for free?

'The People's Platform' argues that for all our 'sharing', the internet reflects real-world inequalities as much as it reduces them. Attention accrues to those who already have it. Cultural products are increasingly valued more as opportunities for data collection for distributors – content creators receive little for their efforts. News filters mean people mistake what interests them for what is really important. And we pay for our 'free' access to content by offering up our personal details to advertisers.

The online world does offer a unique opportunity for greater freedom, but a democratic community that supports the diverse and lasting will not spring up from technology alone. If we want the internet to be a people's platform, we will have to make it so.

1

A PEASANT’S KINGDOM

I moved to New York City in 1999 just in time to see the dot-com dream come crashing down. I saw high-profile start-ups empty out their spacious lofts, the once ebullient spaces vacant and echoing; there were pink-slip parties where content providers, designers, and managers gathered for one last night of revelry. Although I barely felt the aftershocks that rippled through the economy when the bubble burst, plenty of others were left thoroughly shaken. In San Francisco the boom’s rising rents pushed out the poor and working class, as well as those who had chosen voluntary poverty by devoting themselves to social service or creative experimentation. Almost overnight, the tech companies disappeared, the office space and luxury condos vacated, jilting the city and its inhabitants despite the irreversible accommodations that had been made on behalf of the start-ups. Some estimate that 450,000 jobs were lost in the Bay Area alone.¹

As the economist Doug Henwood has pointed out, a kind of amnesia blots out the dot-com era, blurring it like a bad hangover. It seems so long ago: before tragedy struck lower Manhattan, before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq started, before George W. Bush and then Barack Obama took office, before the economy collapsed a second time. When the rare backward glance is cast, the period is usually dismissed as an anomaly, an embarrassing by-product of irrational exuberance and excess, an aberrational event that gets chalked up to collective folly (the crazy business schemes, the utopian bombast, the stock market fever), but “never as something emerging from the innards of American economic machinery,” to use Henwood’s phrase.²

At the time of the boom, however, the prevailing myth was that the machinery had been forever changed. “Technological innovation,” Alan Greenspan marveled, had instigated a new phase of productivity and growth that was “not just a cyclical phenomenon or a statistical aberration, but … a more deep-seated, still developing, shift in our economic landscape.” Everyone would be getting richer, forever. (Income polarization was actually increasing at the time, the already affluent becoming ever more so while wages for most U.S. workers stagnated at levels below 1970s standards.)³ The wonders of computing meant skyrocketing productivity, plentiful jobs, and the end of recessions. The combination of the Internet and IPOs (initial public offerings) had flattened hierarchies, computer programming jobs were reconceived as hip, and information was officially more important than matter (bits, boosters liked to say, had triumphed over atoms). A new economy was upon us.

Despite the hype, the new economy was never that novel. With some exceptions, the Internet companies that fueled the late nineties fervor were mostly about taking material from the off-line world and simply posting it online or buying and selling rather ordinary goods, like pet food or diapers, and prompting Internet users to behave like conventional customers. Due to changes in law and growing public enthusiasm for high-risk investing, the amount of money available to venture capital funds ballooned from $12 billion in 1996 to $106 billion in 2000, leading many doomed ideas to be propped up by speculative backing. Massive sums were committed to enterprises that replicated efforts: multiple sites specialized in selling toys or beauty supplies or home improvement products, and most of them flopped. Barring notable anomalies like Amazon and eBay, online shopping failed to meet inflated expectations. The Web was declared a wasteland and investments dried up, but not before many venture capitalists and executives profited handsomely, soaking up underwriting fees from IPOs or exercising their options before stocks went under.⁴ Although the new economy evaporated, the experience set the stage for a second bubble and cemented a relationship between technology and the market that shapes our digital lives to this day.

As business and technology writer Sarah Lacy explains in her breathless account of Silicon Valley’s recent rebirth, Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good, a few discerning entrepreneurs extracted a lesson from the bust that they applied to new endeavors with aplomb after the turn of the millennium: the heart of the Internet experience was not e-commerce but e-mail, that is to say, connecting and communicating with other people as opposed to consuming goods that could easily be bought at a store down the street. Out of that insight rose the new wave of social media companies that would be christened Web 2.0.

The story Lacy tells is a familiar one to those who paid attention back in the day: ambition and acquisitions, entrepreneurs and IPOs. “Winning Is Everything” is the title of one chapter; “Fuck the Sweater-Vests” another. You’d think it was the nineties all over again, except that this time around the protagonists aspired to market valuations in the billions, not millions. Lacy admires the entrepreneurs all the more for their hubris; they are phoenixes, visionaries who emerged unscathed from the inferno, who walked on burning coals to get ahead. After the bust, the dot-coms and venture capitalists were “easy targets,” blamed for being “silly, greedy, wasteful, irrelevant,” Lacy writes. The “jokes and quips” from the “cynics” cut deep, making it that much harder for wannabe Web barons “to build themselves back up again.” But build themselves back up a handful of them did, heading to the one place insulated against the downturn, Silicon Valley. “The Valley was still awash in cash and smart people,” says Lacy. “Everyone was just scared to use them.”

Web 2.0 was the logical consequence of the Internet going mainstream, weaving itself into everyday life and presenting new opportunities as millions of people rushed online. The “human need to connect” is “a far more powerful use of the Web than for something like buying a book online,” Lacy writes, recounting the evolution of companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and the now beleaguered Digg. “That’s why these sites are frequently described as addictive … everyone is addicted to validations and human connections.”

Instead of the old start-up model, which tried to sell us things, the new one trades on our sociability—our likes and desires, our observations and curiosities, our relationships and networks—which is mined, analyzed, and monetized. To put it another way, Web 2.0 is not about users buying products; rather, users are the product. We are what companies like Google and Facebook sell to advertisers. Of course, social media have made a new kind of engagement possible: they have also generated a handful of enormous companies that profit off the creations and interactions of others. What is social networking if not the commercialization of the once unprofitable art of conversation? That, in a nutshell, is Web 2.0: content is no longer king, as the digital sages like to say; connections are.

Though no longer the popular buzzword it once was, “Web 2.0” remains relevant, its key tenets incorporated not just by social networking sites, but in just by all cultural production and distribution, from journalism to film and music. As traditional institutions go under—consider the independent book, record, and video stores that have gone out of business—they are being replaced by a small number of online giants—Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, and so on—that are better positioned to survey and track users. These behemoths “harness collective intelligence,” as the process has been described, to sell people goods and services directly or indirectly. “The key to media in the twenty-first century may be who has the most knowledge of audience behavior, not who produces the most popular content,” Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, explained.

Understanding what sites people visit, what content they view, what products they buy and even their geographic coordinates will allow advertisers to better target individual consumers. And more of that knowledge will reside with technology companies than with content producers. Google, for instance, will know much more about each user than will the proprietor of any one news site. It can track users’ online behavior through its Droid software on mobile phones, its Google Chrome Web browser, its search engine and its new tablet software. The ability to target users is why Apple wants to control the audience data that goes through the iPad. And the company that may come to know the most about you is Facebook, with which users freely share what they like, where they go and who their friends are.⁵

For those who desire to create art and culture—or “content,” to use that horrible, flattening word—the shift is significant. More and more of the money circulating online is being soaked up by technology companies, with only a trickle making its way to creators or the institutions that directly support them. In 2010 publishers of articles and videos received around twenty cents of each dollar advertisers spent on their sites, down from almost a whole dollar in 2003.⁶ Cultural products are increasingly valuable only insofar as they serve as a kind of “signal generator” from which data can be mined. The real profits flow not to the people who fill the platforms where audiences congregate and communicate—the content creators—but to those who own them.

The original dot-com bubble’s promise was first and foremost about money. Champions of the new economy conceded that the digital tide would inevitably lift some boats higher than others, but they commonly assumed that everyone would get a boost from the virtual effervescence. A lucky minority would work at a company that was acquired or went public and spend the rest of their days relaxing on the beach, but the prevailing image had each individual getting in on the action, even if it was just by trading stocks online.

After the bubble popped, the dream of a collective Internet-enabled payday faded. The new crop of Internet titans never bothered to issue such empty promises to the masses. The secret of Web 2.0 economics, as Lacy emphasizes, is getting people to create content without demanding compensation, whether by contributing code, testing services, or sharing everything from personal photos to restaurant reviews. “A great Web 2.0 site needs a mob of people who use it, love it, and live by it—and convince their friends and family to do the same,” Lacy writes. “Mobs will devote more time to a site they love than to their jobs. They’ll frequently build the site for the founders for free.” These sites exist only because of unpaid labor, the millions of minions toiling to fill the coffers of a fortunate few.

Spelling this out, Lacy is not accusatory but admiring—awestruck, even. When she writes that “social networking, media, and user-generated content sites tap into—and exploit—core human emotions,” it’s with fealty appropriate to a fiefdom. As such, her book inadvertently provides a perfect exposé of the hypocrisy lurking behind so much social media rhetoric. The story she tells, after all, is about nothing so much as fortune seeking, yet the question of compensating those who contribute to popular Web sites, when it arises, is quickly brushed aside. The “mobs” receive something “far greater than money,” Lacy writes, offering up the now-standard rationalization for the inequity: entertainment, self-expression, and validation.⁷ This time around, no one’s claiming the market will be democratized—instead, the promise is that culture will be. We will “create” and “connect” and the entrepreneurs will keep the cash.

This arrangement has been called “digital sharecropping.”⁸ Instead of the production or distribution of culture being concentrated in the hands of the few, it is the economic value of culture that is hoarded. A small group, positioned to capture the value of the network, benefits disproportionately from a collective effort. The owners of social networking sites may be forbidden from selling songs, photos, or reviews posted by individual users, for example, but the companies themselves, including user content, might be turned over for a hefty sum: hundreds of millions for Bebo and Myspace and Goodreads, one billion or more for Instagram and Tumblr. The mammoth archive of videos displayed on YouTube and bought by Google was less a priceless treasure to be preserved than a vehicle for ads. These platforms succeed because of an almost unfathomable economy of scale; each search brings revenue from targeted advertising and fodder for the data miners: each mouse click is a trickle in the flood.

Over the last few years, there has been an intermittent but spirited debate about the ethics of this economic relationship. When Flickr was sold to Yahoo!, popular bloggers asked whether the site should compensate those who provided the most viewed photographs; when the Huffington Post was acquired by AOL for $315 million, many of the thousands of people who had been blogging for free were aghast, and some even started a boycott; when Facebook announced its upcoming IPO, journalists speculated about what the company, ethically, owed its users, the source of its enormous valuation.⁹ The same holds for a multitude of sites: Twitter wouldn’t be worth billions if people didn’t tweet, Yelp would be useless without freely provided reviews, Snapchat nothing without chatters. The people who spend their time sharing videos with friends, rating products, or writing assessments of their recent excursion to the coffee shop—are they the users or the used?

The Internet, it has been noted, is a strange amalgamation of playground and factory, a place where amusement and labor overlap in confusing ways. We may enjoy using social media, while also experiencing them as obligatory; more and more jobs require employees to cultivate an online presence, and social networking sites are often the first place an employer turns when considering a potential hire. Some academics call this phenomenon “playbor,” an awkward coinage that tries to get at the strange way “sexual desire, boredom, friendship” become “fodder for speculative profit” online, to quote media scholar Trebor Scholz.¹⁰ Others use the term “social factory” to describe the Web 2.0, envisioning it as a machine that subsumes our leisure, transforming lazy clicks into cash. “Participation is the oil of the digital economy,” as Scholz is fond of saying. The more we comment and share, the more we rate and like, the more economic value is accumulated by those who control the platforms on which our interactions take place.¹¹

Taking this argument one step further, a frustrated minority have complained that we are living in a world of “digital feudalism,” where sites like Facebook and Tumblr offer up land for content providers to work while platform owners expropriate value with impunity and, if you read the fine print, stake unprecedented claim over users’ creations.¹² “By turn, we are the heroic commoners feeding revolutions in the Middle East and, at the same time, ‘modern serfs’ working on Mark Zuckerberg’s and other digital plantations,” Marina Gorbis of the Institute for the Future has written. “We, the armies of digital peasants, scramble for subsistence in digital manor economies, lucky to receive scraps of ad dollars here and there, but mostly getting by, sometimes happily, on social rewards—fun, social connections, online reputations. But when the commons are sold or traded on Wall Street, the vast disparities between us, the peasants, and them, the lords, become more obvious and more objectionable.”¹³

Computer scientist turned techno-skeptic Jaron Lanier has staked out the most extreme position in relation to those he calls the “lords of the computing clouds,” arguing that the only way to counteract this feudal structure is to institute a system of nano-payments, a market mechanism by which individuals are rewarded for every bit of private information gleaned by the network (an interesting thought experiment, Lanier’s proposed solution may well lead to worse outcomes than the situation we have now, due to the twisted incentives it entails).

New-media cheerleaders take a different view.¹⁴ Consider the poet laureate of digital capitalism, Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired magazine and longtime technology commentator. It is not feudalism and exploitation that critics see, he argued in a widely circulated essay, but the emergence of a new cooperative ethos, a resurgence of collectivism—though not the kind your grandfather worried about. “The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised version of socialism,” Kelly raves, pointing to sites like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Yelp.

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless me...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. A Peasant’s Kingdom
• 2. For Love or Money
• 3. What We Want
• 4. Unequal Uptake
• 5. The Double Anchor
• 6. Drawing a Line
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Also by Astra Taylor
• Copyright
• About the Publisher