association-list

I’m sure that this has been noticed before, but I’ve never seen it directly laid out, so here goes:

There exists a tra­jec­tory for any good, ‘free’ web ser­vice, be it a social net­work, a search engine, a blog­ging plat­form, etc.. It looks some­thing like a par­a­bolic arc. The height of its apex and the speed with which it is reached are dif­fer­ent each time, but with enough data, you begin to see similarities.

In the early days, things suck. The site is ugly, it’s slow some­times, maybe they haven’t got their core mechan­ics nailed down, or for a social net­work, the fea­tures are good but there is no one there. As things pick up steam, the ven­ture vul­tures begin cir­cling, more people get hired, and things start to rapidly improved. Things look better, more of your friends are using it, there’s some actual infra­struc­ture money. There is a long, bright period at the top of the arc wherein every­thing is lovely on the user side. At the com­pany, though, they know already that grav­i­ta­tional rot has already set in. They’ve never charged you any­thing, because no one ever charges you for any­thing. They may not even be sure that the prod­uct is worth enough to ask you for money. But the des­per­ately need some. The high lifestyle of all their new coders and design­ers costs money, and the cap­i­tal men lurk­ing in the back­ground are get­ting all sweaty in antic­i­pa­tion of their expected liq­uid­ity event.

If you and they are lucky, some big com­pany will swoop in and pro­vide the release that every­one is look­ing for, buying you up and then run­ning you for years with benign neglect while they fold the bit of your tech that they wanted into their own prod­uct, or try to steal your user base or gen­er­ally just figure out some way to make actual money out of you. Often a ser­vice can live in this limbo for years, pro­vid­ing use value and plea­sure. The ending here tends to be swifter, when the new owner finally decides to shut the ser­vice down, or ‘re-​​brand’ (almost always a fatal wound).

When no fairy god­par­ent comes around, though, you enter the dread busi­ness of ‘mon­e­ti­za­tion’. For the most part, this comes in two fla­vors: charg­ing for pre­mium ser­vices or start­ing to sell ads. I have no prob­lems with using pre­mium ser­vices to sub­si­dize a free ver­sion. It’s a model that I like a lot, although I feel like people aren’t par­tic­u­larly trans­par­ent about their busi­ness models or flex­i­ble in their pric­ing (you have to take this with a grain of salt, coming from me. I think the Swedish(?) policy of having everyone’s tax bill be public is a great idea). Usu­ally, though, this seems to be the best way to post­pone the inevitable decline of a web ser­vice, although some of your users will inevitably com­plain that start­ing to charge money is actu­ally part of your decline.

Go down the path of adver­tis­ing, though, and you’ve basi­cally sub­mit­ted to your fate. It seems easy at first, because ad com­pa­nies like Google have made it really easy to drop stuff right in. You make a little bit of money, but not really enough to pay anyone. So you have to make more changes. You real­ize that you’re actu­ally answer­ing to two sets of cus­tomers now, and only one of them is paying you. So you make com­pro­mises. Over time, you real­ize that your adver­tis­ers are win­ning every time their desires come into con­flict with those of your users. Even­tu­ally your users real­ize this, too. Then they leave, if they have any place to go.

Google is enter­ing this phase right now. They weath­ered the own­er­ship prob­lems and the exter­nal CEO, and any number of other issues that could have sunk them. But inex­orably, since it holds the purse strings, the ad-​​serving part of their busi­ness will take over, and will ruin the user expe­ri­ence and use­ful­ness of their ser­vice for every­one. Already there are issues: if you run ad-​​blocking soft­ware (which is within your rights. If they don’t want cus­tomers who don’t see ads, they’re wel­come to turn you away, which is within their rights), or soft­ware that keeps them from track­ing you else­where on the web, it breaks basic search most of the time. At this time, there is no real exit, so you can only chose voice and evasion.

These are hard times. Busi­ness models are in vio­lent flux. Many com­pa­nies are not sure where their next dollar is going to come from. I sym­pa­thize with people who’re using ads to patch together a busi­ness that they love into some­thing that works. The market isn’t fair or per­fect or even good, most of the time. I am not sure that there are good answers. Pre­mium ser­vice pric­ing is only a par­tial solu­tion, and isn’t going to work for every­one. Inde­pen­dent artists are a par­tic­u­lar quandary. It’s time, though, to start look­ing around for solutions.

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.