association-list

Atten­tion con­ser­va­tion notice: ~900 words of divi­sive, under-​​researched hobby-​​horse riding.

So I read this piece by Fred­die de Boer the other day, and then Rob Horning’s post on Steve Jobs. Some­thing in both both­ered me.

Both of them are basi­cally get­ting at con­sumerism and cap­i­tal­ism from slightly dif­fer­ent left-​​wing view­points (I am assum­ing that you’ve read both, at this point). I par­tially agree with both of them. Nei­ther of them gets all the way to the root of their argu­ments, so maybe I am get­ting their posi­tion subtly wrong.

But I think the thing that they’re get­ting wrong, both of them, per­haps this entire line of cri­tique, is that the inter­net that we have cannot pos­si­bly be any other way, as a straight­for­ward con­se­quence of where all of the money (or near as makes no dif­fer­ence) on the inter­net comes from, which is adver­tise­ment. What I mean by this is that almost every­thing inter­est­ing that’s hap­pen­ing lately on the com­mer­cial web is in the SaaS sphere (I include social net­work­ing in this, although the ser­vice is a tad neb­u­lous and always chang­ing) and almost all of it that inter­acts with con­sumers is funded by adver­tis­ing rather than pay­ment for the prod­uct. Even in app stores, there are ads, although due to the cog­ni­tive magic/​trickery of encap­su­la­tion into ‘apps’, people seem will­ing to put in a little money up front, although never very much.

Horn­ing seems to address this every so often, but he never seems to take it all the way. The under­ly­ing logic of the social deskilling that he sees stem­ming from Face­book has no root in the logic of what people actu­ally need from some­thing like a social net­work­ing plat­form. In a world where the money comes from some­where else, Face­book or an entity like it would look and act noth­ing like it does. As it stands, social deskilling is just a epiphe­nom­e­non of Face­book need­ing infor­ma­tion about what you’re doing there, so they can keep you there longer, look­ing at their pages and the ads dis­played on them. One could argue that it isn’t so much a social deskilling as a gam­i­fi­ca­tion of online social inter­ac­tion, with the dual goal of get­ting more infor­ma­tion about the user to sell to adver­tis­ers, and to keep them look­ing at adver­tise­ments for longer peri­ods of time.

My cri­tique of de Boer is a little dif­fer­ent, because I think that he gets closer, in his clos­ing para­graph. I guess I would say that he reads to much in; he assumes that more people are more deeply engaged with the worth­less­ness of the cur­rent online world than really are (as does Horn­ing). I’ll gladly join him in his cru­sade to end a world where every­one is a fetishis­tic consumer/​critic, but I think that the number of people who actu­ally aspire to that sort of thing, who con­struct their selves online, are many fewer than he imag­ines. Here too, of course, we see the logic of the advertising-​​funded inter­net, as innu­mer­able out­lets attempt to pull in as many ‘eyes’ as pos­si­ble with their floods of strate­gized and seo-​​optimized ‘con­tent’. Each strug­gling to estab­lish them­selves as a brand, to gain loyal fol­low­ers (ad-​​viewers all), rather than follow the logic of their var­i­ous mis­sions. Trying to be divi­sive, sticky, intru­sive, to keep us look­ing longer than we would have otherwise.

This is all pretty dreary, I guess. I think that both of these guys are inter­est­ing thinkers, and de Boer doesn’t spend a lot of time talk­ing about the inter­net, so it’s under­stand­able if his insights are a little hazy there. And it isn’t if I come equipped with all of the answers. I mean, I have some pro­pos­als, but isn’t as if the US gov­ern­ment is going to go around reg­u­lat­ing adver­tis­ers and taxing mar­ket­ing bud­gets and nation­al­iz­ing Com­cast. Nor is anyone going to write a com­puter virus that installs adblock­ing on people’s browsers. Although that’s both awe­some and doable.

I just mean to high­light the irre­sistible logic of all of the money on the web cur­rently coming from ads and its con­se­quences. We’re essen­tially stuck at this stage until we can figure out how to make money doing some­thing else. Google is the high­light here. They’ve brought together thou­sands of smart people who make daring and great prod­ucts of gen­uine util­ity, and it’s all just a side­line to their real busi­ness, which is spying on you for people who want to sell you shoes.

Their cri­tiques are obvi­ously heart­felt (at least de Boer’s. I feel that I am never sure where Horn­ing is coming from, emo­tion­ally or con­tex­tu­ally), but com­plain­ing that ‘the inter­net’ is vapid or ener­vat­ing or atom­iz­ing or what have you isn’t the point. To some extent, it falls victim to the same kind of end-​​of-​​history/​there-​​is-​​no-​​alternative think­ing both of them inveigh against in other aspects of their polit­i­cal dis­courses. This is not a sur­pris­ing thing; the inter­net is not apart from the world. But the inter­net is a place where it’s espe­cially prob­lem­atic, where we’re will­ing to build an entire world on a pile of shit because the shit-​​sellers have told us there is noth­ing else to build on. There is end­less analy­sis to be done on the effects of this, but to me it isn’t impor­tant. None of these prob­lems is solv­able inside the cur­rent frame­work, and few of them would exist out­side of it. Anat­o­miz­ing the symp­toms while ignor­ing the dis­ease isn’t going to get you anywhere.