The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
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 meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.
Kelly reassures his readers that the people who run this emerging economy are not left-wing in any traditional sense. They are “more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos,” he explains. “Thus, digital socialism can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates,” transcending the conflict between “free-market individualism and centralized authority.” Behold, then, the majesty of digital communitarianism: it’s socialism without the state, without the working class, and, best of all, without having to share the wealth.
The sensational language is easy to mock, but this basic outlook is widespread among new-media enthusiasts. Attend any technology conference or read any book about social media or Web 2.0, whether by academics or business gurus, and the same conflation of communal spirit and capitalist spunk will be impressed upon you. The historian Fred Turner traces this phenomenon back to 1968, when a small band of California outsiders founded the Whole Earth Catalog and then, in 1985, the online community the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, the WELL, the prototype of online communities, and then Wired.
This group performed the remarkable feat of transforming computers from enablers of stodgy government administration to countercultural cutting edge, from implements of technocratic experts to machines that empower everyday people. They “reconfigured the status of information and information technologies,” Turner explains, by contending that these new tools would tear down bureaucracy, enhance individual consciousness, and help build a new collaborative society.15 These prophets of the networked age—led by the WELL’s Stewart Brand and including Kelly and many other still-influential figures—moved effortlessly from the hacker fringe to the upper echelon of the Global Business Network, all while retaining their radical patina.
Thus, in 1984 Macintosh could run an ad picturing Karl Marx with the tagline, “It was about time a capitalist started a revolution”—and so it continues today. The online sphere inspires incessant talk of gift economies and public-spiritedness and democracy, but commercialism and privatization and inequality lurk beneath the surface.
This contradiction is captured in a single word: “open,” a concept capacious enough to contain both the communal and capitalistic impulses central to Web 2.0 while being thankfully free of any socialist connotations. New-media thinkers have claimed openness as the appropriate utopian ideal for our time, and the concept has caught on. The term is now applied to everything from education to culture to politics and government. Broadly speaking, in tech circles, open systems—like the Internet itself—are always good, while closed systems—like the classic broadcast model—are bad. Open is Google and Wi-Fi, decentralization and entrepreneurialism, the United States and Wikipedia. Closed equals Hollywood and cable television, central planning and entrenched industry, China and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. However imprecisely the terms are applied, the dichotomy of open versus closed (sometimes presented as freedom versus control) provides the conceptual framework that increasingly underpins much of the current thinking about technology, media, and culture.
The fetish for openness can be traced back to the foundational myths of the Internet as a wild, uncontrollable realm. In 1996 John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead lyricist and cattle ranger turned techno-utopian firebrand, released an influential manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” from Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum, the annual meeting of the world’s business elite. (“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone … You have no sovereignty where we gather.”) Almost twenty years later, these sentiments were echoed by Google’s Eric Schmidt and the State Department’s Jared Cohen, who partnered to write The New Digital Age: “The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history,” they insist. It is “the world’s largest ungoverned space,” one “not truly bound by terrestrial laws.”
While openness has many virtues, it is also undeniably ambiguous. Is open a means or an end? What is open and to whom? Mark Zuckerberg said he designed Facebook because he wanted to make the world more “open and connected,” but his company does everything it can to keep users within its confines and exclusively retains the data they emit. Yet this vagueness is hardly a surprise given the history of the term, which was originally imported from software production: the designation “open source” was invented to rebrand free software as business friendly, foregrounding efficiency and economic benefits (open as in open markets) over ethical concerns (the freedom of free software).16 In keeping with this transformation, openness is often invoked in a way that evades discussions of ownership and equity, highlighting individual agency over commercial might and ignoring underlying power imbalances.
In the 2012 “open issue” of Google’s online magazine Think Quarterly, phrases like “open access to information” and “open for business” appear side by side, purposely blurring participation and profit seeking. One article on the way “smart brands” are adapting to the digital world insists that as a consequence of the open Web, “consumers have more power than ever,” while also outlining the ways “the web gives marketers a 24/7 focus group of the world,” unleashing a flood of “indispensable” data that inform “strategic planning and project development.” Both groups are supposedly “empowered” by new technology, but the first gets to comment on products while the latter boosts their bottom line.
By insisting that openness is the key to success, whether you are a multinational corporation or a lone individual, today’s digital gurus gloss over the difference between humans and businesses, ignoring the latter’s structural advantages: true, “open” markets in some ways serve consumers’ buying interests, but the more open people’s lives are, the more easily they can be tracked and exploited by private interests.17 But as the technology writer Rob Horning has observed, “The connections between people are not uniformly reciprocal.” Some are positioned to make profitable use of what they glean from the network; others are more likely to be taken advantage of, giving up valuable information and reaping few benefits. “Networks,” Horning writes, “allow for co-optation as much as cooperation.”18
Under the rubric of open versus closed, the paramount concern is access and whether people can utilize a resource or platform without seeking permission first. This is how Google and Wikipedia wind up in the same camp, even though one is a multibillion-dollar advertising-funded business and the other is supported by a nonprofit foundation. Both are considered “open” because they are accessible, even though they operate in very different ways. Given that we share noncommercial projects on commercial platforms all the time online, the distinction between commercial and noncommercial has been muddled; meanwhile “private” and “public” no longer refer to types of ownership but ways of being, a setting on a social media stream. This suits new-media partisans, who insist that the “old debates” between market and the state, capital and government, are officially behind us. “If communism vs. capitalism was the struggle of the twentieth century,” law professor and open culture activist Lawrence Lessig writes, “then control vs. freedom will be the debate of the twenty-first century.”19
No doubt, there is much to be said for open systems, as many have shown elsewhere.20 The heart of the Internet is arguably the end-to-end principle (the idea that the network should be kept as flexible, unrestricted, and open to a variety of potential uses as possible). From this principle to the freely shared technical protocols and code that Tim Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web, we have open standards to thank for the astonishing growth of the online public sphere and the fact that anyone can participate without seeking permission first.21
Open standards, in general, foster a kind of productive chaos, encouraging innovation and invention, experimentation and engagement. But openness alone does not provide the blueprint for a more equitable social order, in part because the “freedom” promoted by the tech community almost always turns out to be of the Darwinian variety. Openness in this context is ultimately about promoting competition, not with protecting equality in any traditional sense; it has little to say about entrenched systems of economic privilege, labor rights, fairness, or income redistribution. Despite enthusiastic commentators and their hosannas to democratization, inequality is not exclusive to closed systems. Networks reflect and exacerbate imbalances of power as much as they improve them.
The tendency of open systems to amplify inequality—and new-media thinkers’ glib disregard for this fundamental characteristic—was on vivid display during a talk at a 2012 installment of the TEDGlobal conference convened under the heading “Radical Openness.” Don Tapscott, self-proclaimed “thought leader” and author of influential books including Growing Up Digital and Wikinomics, titled his presentation “Four Principles for the Open World”: collaboration, transparency, sharing, and empowerment.
Tapscott told the story of his neighbor Rob McEwen, a banker turned gold mine owner, the former chairman and CEO of Goldcorp Inc. When staff geologists couldn’t determine where the mineral deposits at one of his mines were located, McEwen turned to the Web, uploading data about the company’s property and offering a cash reward to anyone who helped them hit pay dirt. “He gets submissions from all around the world,” Tapscott explained. “They use techniques that he’s never heard of, and for his half a million dollars in prize money, Rob McEwen finds 3.4 billion dollars worth of gold. The market value of his company goes from 90 million to 10 billion dollars, and I can tell you, because he’s my neighbor, he’s a happy camper.”
This is Tapscott’s idea of openness in action: a banker-turned-CEO goes from rich to richer (of course, there was no mention of the workers in the mine and the wages they were paid for their effort, nor an acknowledgment of Goldcorp’s record of human rights violations).22 For Tapscott, McEwen’s payoff is a sign of a bold new era, an “age of promise fulfilled and of peril unrequited,” to use his grandiloquent phrase. “And imagine, just consider this idea, if you would,” he concluded. “What if we could connect ourselves in this world through a vast network of air and glass? Could we go beyond just sharing information and knowledge? Could we start to share our intelligence?” The possibility of sharing any of the windfall generated as a consequence of this collective wisdom went unmentioned.
A similar willful obliviousness to the problems of open systems undercuts the claims of new-media thinkers that openness has buried the “old debates.” While Lawrence Lessig convincingly makes the case that bloated intellectual property laws—the controlling nature of copyright—often stifle creative innovation from below, his enthusiasm for the free circulation of information blinds him to the increasing commodification of our expressive lives and the economic disparity built into the system he passionately upholds.
“You can tell a great deal about the character of a person by asking him to pick the great companies of an era,” Lessig declares in Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, and whether they root for the “successful dinosaurs” or the “hungry upstarts.” Technology, he continued, has “radically shifted” the balance of power in favor of the latter. Proof? “The dropouts of the late 1990s (mainly from Stanford) beat the dropouts of the middle 1970s (from Harvard). Google and Yahoo! were nothing when Microsoft was said to dominate.” This, it seems, is what it means to have moved beyond the dichotomy of market and state into the realm of openness—that we must cheerlead the newly powerful from the sidelines for no better reason than that they are new.