Spending time on Twitter means that you you will almost certainly be confronted with a mind numbing contradiction or *Bad Take* from an account with a large following. Inevitably, someone will remark, “I can’t believe this website is free”.
“Yes”, we say, “What else should we expect? You get what you pay for, and this website has never asked for a dime”.
Twitter…is free right?
Yes and no. Twitter is only free in the sense that it is a service offered for non-monetary payment. The payment that does flow from the user to the advertising platform (e.g. Twitter), is a type of digital alloy – a meld of user data,1 More specifically, identification and behavioral data. See e.g. Shoshana Zuboff, “The Age of Sureveillance Capitalism” (2019) and attention.2See e.g. Dipayan Ghosh, “Terms of Disservice” (2020) “The service operator can charge the consumer…[a] price…in the form of a nontraditional currency metric: a complex combination of the consumer’s attention and personal data”. This alloy is then packaged together with promises of consumer behavioral control and sold to advertisers. When people say “you are the product” of these services, it is because this tradeable digital alloy is comprised of human resources. We not only spend our time on Twitter, we also spend our data and our attention.
Our desire to attend to the expression of others, and to indulge our own narcissistic attendance to the branding and internal resonance of our own social media profiles, fills the honeypot set by social media. What else is an active user than a user who is present, in attendance, and ready to be measured.3An active user drinks deep of the knowledge of the honey! And gets brainworms! b/c this honey isn’t pasteurized for some reason, and there’s no mandate to do so. And so, social media is usually designed with the goal of capturing your attention and keeping it that way, yeah? Furthermore, when a platform starts benefitting from network effects and eschewing interoperability, then you get some serious undertow that reinforces (1) the sticky inclination of attention to stay folded in on itself,4It takes time to re-establish the aesthetic of a social media profile or the information quality of a newsfeed. It’s far easier to tend to the garden bed you’ve already established than build a new one. and (2) the ability of platforms to annex greater shares of user social graphs.
Which brings me to some recent comments in the very good and recommended newsletter, “Garbage Day” by Ryan Broderick. Broderick writes that “[t]he majority of major social apps we’ve been using for a decade were not designed to be good businesses”. This observation echoes some recent and persuasive criticism of the fantastic claims of surveillance adwizard mind control.5See e.g. Joseph Bernstein, “Bad News”; Cory Doctorow, “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism” Isn’t it reasonable to expect that advertising platforms have been doing what advertising firms have been doing since time immemorial – selling the idea of advertising rather than the results?6The peddlers of technological “black boxes” sometimes do the same.
If social media isn’t great business, if it can’t make us want a Toyota Celica, what happens when we turn the screws of profit into it? This question is not entirely rhetorical, the impact of social media use on mental health (particularly among young girls) is deeply concerning, as is the utility of social media in the antidemocratic toolkit.
As Broderick observes, those features that make social media enticing to a user are those features that are “unmonetizable”. If Twitter is actually a good tool at sorting through the info deluge, then why complicate that with opaque recommendation and amplification systems?7As suggested by Emily G. Gorcenski cited by Broderick. What makes TikTok tick? Is it the highly touted recommendation algorithm, or is it the filters and widgets; “a free Adobe Premiere for your phone”.
What’s the product? What’s the deal with advertising platforms?8Who are the adwizards that came up with this one?! Who pays who what? Can we answer these questions without acknowledging a restless tension between commerce and the internet?
The internet is better than any technology that’s ever existed in human history before now because it’s largely free and open and infinite. But we have only figured out ways to make money with it if it’s not that.
Ryan Broderick – Garbage Day
I suggest that some of the tensions between the internet and commerce reveal themselves in the fragmentation of social media platforms. Fragmentation being a phenomenon that moves the internet away from being “largely free and open and infinite”.
First, there is “platform fragmentation”. The large social media platforms operate like walled gardens. They are regions with impermeable borders. For example, this means I cannot send a direct message to my friend on Instagram using my Twitter account. On a higher level, it also means that user activity is concentrated in a few large companies which leads to another commercial tension: that social media platforms don’t compete on quality. They compete on gimmicks, or in the technocratic parlance, “social mechanics”.9“there are network effects around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different”. (Mark Zuckerberg in FTC v. Facebook, Inc., filed 2021) This fragmentation elevates and enables commercial profits10Nay, monopoly rents! at the expense of the social, open, internet.
Second, social media platforms need to be grounded in consumer trends. Thus, social media platforms that rely on advertising revenue are conditional on the ability to fragment users into targetable groups. The targetable groups are defined by the imperatives of advertising revenue and not user need. This is often portrayed as a benefit to the user. Easily find what’s relevant to you! I’d like to know what this “relevance” is because I feel like it’s a word for the machine, perhaps the business imperative, but not for the human.
Are these areas of tension appropriate sites of regulation in this space? Yea, probably. After all, the law has recognized zones of human behavior and actions that cannot form the subject matter of a contract. Perhaps there are uniquely online spaces and relationships that should similarly be no-fly zones. I mean, we all agree there are some things you shouldn’t slap an ad on…right?
Y’know, that’s probably a rabbit hole worth some time. Might even be a prompt for another blog post…from…and I’ve been meaning to do it to ’em:
*ahem*
“it’s my great pleasure to introduce, the original! straight shooter, no chaser – ear to the pulse; keepin’ it real as an honest forgery, hipper than a socket joint…it’s lit, it’s free, it’s…”
[drumroll]
A bit derivative
Stay tuned folks. And remember to like, subscribe, and ring that bell.