Alternate Title: What Would Marx Tweet About?

A couple of days ago, as I was yet again wasting time on Twitter, it hit me: how on earth do those guys make any money? In one of those funny internet coincidences, people much smarter than me were also thinking the same thing at the same time and Twitter’s business model – or lack thereof – became the Techmeme-driven story of the day. Ideas were batted around and at the end of it all it seems that Twitter’s options basically boil down to inserting ads every 100 Twitters or so, syndicating their API in a way that doesn’t fracture the brand or just growing the service and waiting to be bought out.

While I’m curious to see how Twitter manages their deserved popularity, I’m also interested to see whether or not the experience of Twitter is still enjoyable once it obviously becomes ‘a business’. Right now, even though we’re well past the post-SXSW buzz that launched it, Twitter still feels fun. There are random conversations of all kinds going on between all sorts, from connecting bloggers and their readers to becoming a new microblogging outlet to providing up-to-the-minute election or news information. The lack of attachment to a larger company or its goals seems to turn Twitter into a bit of a neutral space. Sometimes just using Twitter can be a bit of narcissistic fun and occasionally, it can even feel as if one is participating in one of those ‘new forms of communication’ we keep hearing about.

Will this sense of liveliness change when Twitter figures out how to sustain itself? We know that no web presence can exist outside of an economic system – that much is obvious – but does monetization change how we relate to the web services we use? Recently, I wondered what the big deal was when last.fm was bought out by CBS. There, I argued that I didn’t really care that my activity had suddenly become monetized since I still enjoyed using the service and could suggest no alternatives. But in the comments, my very smart friend pointed out that one of the ways we get caught up in or trapped in modern systems is that we are called upon to enjoy them – that the reasons we like these services is not because we are being misled or hoodwinked but simply that it’s nice to be part of something and do what others are doing. The only potential problem is that consistently giving in to the things we enjoy is what enables, for example, purchasing nice, inexpensive clothes while not really thinking about the people who made them. To be a bit trite, enjoyment feels good but can have bad consequences.

Perhaps this won’t affect Twitter at all. But there is something to be said for the neutral feeling that Twitter has now, the simple fact that the only thing happening is connections between people (and fine, a lot of narcissism…) And maybe it’s because I am finally reading the original Marx right now, but resistance has been on my mind lately. When all web services become monetized and become so enjoyable and useful to us… will we ever bother to think that there may be other ways to conduct our lives, societies or economies?