Scrawled in Wax

The next phase of capitalism? The commodification of human relationships. A revealing piece in the Guardian raises serious questions about complicity, resistance and the future of ad-supported content.

I have always found conspiracy theories distasteful. To me, they have always seemed like an attempt to evade the complexity of wide-scale issues, reducing a difficult problem such as poverty to the evil conniving of a few men ensconced in an office tower. That said, there is something remarkably troubling about Tom Hodgkinson’s stunning (if slightly paranoid) piece on Facebook in the Guardian this week.

In it, Hodgkinson digs into the ideological leanings of the VC’s behind Facebook’s meteoric rise. Most significant among them is Peter Thiel, a prominent right-wing investor who also spearheaded the growth of PayPal. Thiel, who is unsurprisingly in favour of a small-government free market approach, has not only written a book condemning multiculturalism as something that limits personal freedom but has also characterised the next wave of capitalism as the monetizing of day-to-day activity; in much the same way PayPal creates a business out of grandmothers buying stuffed animals from each other off eBay, Thiel and Co. look to the commodification of human relationships as the next wave of capitalist growth. Social networks and media are, in this model, merely mechanisms for advertising delivery.

What we end up with is a potentially unconscious disconnect between what online services purport to do (”connect people”, “bring the world together”) and the ideologies that users may inadvertently support. While one can set up, for example, a pro-union or pro-minimum-wage Facebook group, the money made from the ad-supported model supports an ideology that is explicitly opposed to such ideas. The point here is that Facebook is many things at once: it is simultaneously innocuous and insidious; a potential platform for the political engagement of youth in which all activity ultimately supports one ideology and one ideology only; or a way for sequestered teens to connect while being bombarded with ads.

While this all might sound paranoid - and might very well be - it highlights the problems we will face as all online services, including music and video, increasingly move towards the ad-supported model. What are the implications of participating in Facebook if one is oppsed to Thiel et al’s political viewpoint? How complicit are users in propagating the politics of the owners of services they use? What are the issues surrounding disclosure? Should we be alerted to the ideological stances of services that posit themselves as ‘neutral’? Or should the onus be on users to choose services, the financing of which supports their own ideological concerns - a sort of new mode of ‘voting with your dollars’?

Fundamentally, the tricky question is that of resistance. It’s a tough question to ask in the tech blogosphere - as soon as you do, people will assume you are trying to suggest some kind of traditional Marxist revolution. As I have said before, criticism is unwelcome in the technology blogging community. But there are serious questions to ask - I wonder to what extent the ad-supported model isn’t something akin to a sort of ‘false consciousness’: that we spend our time doing genuine, ‘human’ things - connecting with others, playing games, making dates to meet-up - and in doing so propagate a particular sort of ideology that we may be personally opposed to. I mean seriously - how many people do you know who would be comfortable with the idea of ‘commodifying human relationships’? Not many I would bet. And yet, we may very well be doing exactly that.

These are not simple questions. Unfortunately, save perhaps the few gadflies like Nick Carr, no-one will ask them - the technosphere is so overwhelmingly committed to the concepts of the free market and a sort of apoliticism, no-one will even care; this will be written off as more technophobic clap-trap. For this reason, it is all the more disheartening to realise that Hodgkinson was not the one to write this piece - he descends into Keen-esque ludditism and attempts to dismiss the internet as a mere extension of other technologies rather than the radical epistemological shift it represents. When Hodgkinson responds to very idea of social networks by asking “what’s wrong with the pub?”, he falls into the classic mistake that online networks were meant to replace face-to-face connections. And his insistence that “Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations” sounds like the usual alarmist clap-trap that ignores the potential humanist core of a persistent network of communication.

But fortunately this does little to lessen the implications of Hodgkinson’s piece. What remains to be seen is whether anyone will actually listen. Hit the comments if you have any thoughts.

[Update]: Slate has a piece up looking at how Facebook’s reliance on its users is kinda’ makes it like the Ikea of the intertubes.