From Library Babel Fish, July 15, 2014
Joshua Kim raised a question yesterday that helped me build the bridge I was trying to construct between two stimulating blog posts that seemed connected, though I wasn’t sure how. One, a Gigaom post by Laura Hazard Owen, describes the ways some writers are framing the Hachette-Amazon dispute in terms that echo Tea Party rhetoric: we’re scrappy independents standing up for freedom against the elites and the snobs! That kind of framing appears in all sorts of tech-disruption rhetoric, which positions the individual entrepreneur as the vital change-agent fighting bravely against the power of established businesses – using the platform of an emerging megacorporation. The new (in this case, represented by one giant Internet business) and the old (represented by five giant publishing corporations) are pitted against one another in a death match, and only the new offers freedom from tyranny. Either that, or its a rapacious, bullying destroyer of culture, depending on your point of view.
The other blog post that grabbed my attention was a really excellent provocation by Nick Montfort, The Facepalm at the End of the Mind, in which he assembles a set of bullet points in response to the ways people have reacted to the Facebook manipulation study published in PNAS. Each statement, starting with “do you want your money back?” leads to another, cumulatively indicting our own carelessness in allowing the Web to be privatized. The final bullet point is the clincher:
Why did people who communicate and learn together, people who had the world, leave it, en masse, for a shopping mall?
I think the reason is partly that a whole lot of people didn’t really have the Web in the first place. They might have used Prodigy for a while, or Compuserve, or AOL. They might have dabbled in USENET or Yahoo Groups. They might have set up a blog, once Blogger made it exceptionally easy to publish to the Web (before it got swallowed up by Google). They might have even used an RSS feed reader like Google Reader (before Google killed it). But it wasn’t until Facebook combined simplicity with size that we had one platform to rule them all. (Remember MySpace and Friendster? Yeah.) This giant-sized network effect is the monopoly of the 21st century. Google and Amazon are also in that category. Nobody can compete with anything that attracts nearly everyone, and that massive amount of attention gives them enormous power. It’s so big people seem to feel they can’t not be there. (Actually, there is life without Facebook, and it’s fine.)
There is an alternative to this kind of corporate data-sucking dominance, and it scales, but it’s not without barriers. Yochai Benkler calls it “commons-based peer production.” To participate you need to have some skills, some free time, and some connection to the common project – because it won’t be linked from everywhere as Facebook is and it’s doubtful all of your relatives and friends and your ninth grade English te