Following Jaron Lanier’s advice, I’ve taken a summer sabbatical from social media. His advice comes from his latest book, Who Owns The Future? I’m pleased to report that, as promised in his book, the curtailing of my social media habits has not resulted in any nasty consequences. I haven’t gone into a shakey-handed withdrawal. I haven’t resorted to substance abuse to compensate for a sudden hole in my social existence. And I haven’t found myself feeling suddenly lonely or isolated for my silence (although, by way of disclaimer, I’m a classic introvert so I’m naturally inclined to enjoy my own company anyways).
Lanier’s advice is intended to demonstrate two facts: 1) we don’t need social media so any feelings of dependency we might have in relation to them are illusory; and 2) to the extent that owners of social media web sites exploit our usage, we have the power answer that exploitation (it’s called self-control). Lanier’s thesis is simple: online enterprise is designed to make money from the (typically) free contributions of ordinary users like you and me and the valuation of such enterprise is inflated by the amount to which such contributions go uncompensated. He proposes a scheme of micropayments so that every time a user’s online activity enhances a given social media site’s value, that user receives a credit. He rests his proposal on the demands of basic fairness and economic common sense.
Okay, I get the fairness argument. As a writer/blogger, I’ve experienced the crashing indignation of making free (or payment in links to my blog which turns out to be the same thing as free) contributions to sites that monetize their online presence with advertising revenue then get swallowed up by larger media enterprises for huge gobs of capital. The first time I felt this personally was when Eric Olsen sold Blogcritics to Technorati for an undisclosed sum. More recently (and more egregiously) was Arianna Huffington’s sale of the online news outlet, The Huffington Post, to AOL for a cool $315 million. Granted, when a risk works out, the risk-takers should be rewarded for their risk, but still, when virtually all the value of a company’s business comes from free content …
(The fairness argument exposes an ironic relationship between the anti-piracy wailing and gnashing of teeth that comes from big-media outlets and their online news subsidiaries which have universally transformed the letter-to-the-editor into a major cottage industry with hundreds of comments appended to op-ed pieces on the manufactured controversy du jour. Ain’t it typical? But not unexpected. Part of their business model involves getting whatever they can get from you without having to pay a dime for it, but suing you for your left testicle when the situation is reversed.)
As for the economic common sense argument, to be honest, I don’t have a background in economics and so can’t address it with any critical savvy. Unfortunately, neither does Lanier, and that’s a fundamental problem with his book. He’s best writing about those things where he lives and moves and has his being i.e. at the nexus of technology and culture, which is why his first book, You Are Not A Gadget, was so very very good. By contrast, Who Owns The Future? is choppy and aphoristic. He throws out bald statements (which may well be true) but seems to lack the patience to support them with the linear logical progression of ideas that economic types are likely to demand.
Building on an idea he introduced in Gadget, Lanier argues that a big problem is “lock-in” which quickly developed from early design decisions in the construction of the world wide web. For example, there is absolutely no reason why hyperlinks need to be unidirectional. It was technically feasible to create a markup tag for hyperlinks that went both ways i.e. linked one web page to another page, but also linked from the target page back to the source so that the “linkee” would automatically know that someone had linked to their page. Instead, the unidirectional link (arbitrarily) created a demand for search engines to crawl and index the entire WWW and provide linkage info through services like Google’s analytics.
I would argue that the problem runs deeper than a simple case of technological lock-in. Lanier makes it clear that he’s what might best be described as a “soft” capitalist. In fact, he goes to great lengths (as only an American writer would feel compelled to do) to explain (almost apologetically) that he’s not really engaged in some kind of utopian lefty or (god forbid) socialist thought experiment. Instead, he just wants to give the online manifestation of democratic capitalism a nudge in the right (er, proper) direction. But for the majority of online users whose “real” lives play out beyond the dictates of American-style democratic capitalism, matters may be more complicated than Lanier lets on. (In fact, one suspects that Future is written with the tacit assumption that the reach of the world wide web and the boundaries of the U.S. of A. are coterminous.) If there is any lock-in, it isn’t technological; it’s ideological. It is the lock-in of Lanier’s “soft” capitalism as an appropriate model for all transactions. In fact, the global dissemination of that model via the WWW is probably the last great colonizing push of the modern era. Lanier didn’t invent this lock-in situation, of course, but he sets himself up as a moderate apologist for it; it just needs some tweaking.
The question I would pose to Lanier, a question whose answer remains vague by the end of Future, is: how do we implement this system of compensation? Do we legislate it? If so, how do we legislate it across borders? In other words, if a future U.S. law compels Facebook to pay domestic users who direct their friends to an advertiser’s web site, how do Somalian Facebook users share in this source of income? Or do we encourage a system of voluntary subscription where social media companies pay users at the expense of their shareholders because, aw shit, it’s the right thing to do?
In the meantime, I’ll wait for hell to freeze over.
Actually, in the meantime, I’ll put an end to my sabbatical and resume what I’ve been doing for years now—posting content online for free. Giving it away. Naively supposing there are other people out there who may stumble upon it and not be put off by the fact that they don’t have to pay for it. My motives for this fall emphatically outside the purview of Future’s assumptions. I do not seek fame and fortune. I do not seek adulation or approbation. While I have several reasons for doing what I do, the one which seems to apply in this context is resistance. I offer a simple gesture of resistance to the overweening assumption that, as with the rest of the world, the things one encounters online are reducible to resources just sitting there waiting to be converted into cash.