Dumb pipes, platforms, and products
NOVEMBER 30TH, 2016 — POST 324
Please excuse the rambling.
Tech needs a minute. As unpredictable as the outcome of the election three weeks ago is the space in which its fallout feels most felt. As the crosshairs are still trained on Facebook because a perception that their platform allowed fake news to propagate, Big Tech as a whole is now being buffeted by scrutiny: scrutiny that makes specific charges of specific companies as well as scrutiny of the willingness with which we allowed these companies into our lives.
Writing for New York Magazine, Max Read recently extended his blame of Facebook for Trump’s victory to encapsulate the internet (or possibly Internet?) more broadly. It’s not just the tech side of the equation that has crept in Read’s latest piece but the specificity of the Trump victory is also eroding. In ‘Maybe the Internet Isn’t a Fantastic Tool or Democracy After All’, Read writes:
“The tech industry has disrupted the public sphere and has shown neither the interest nor the ability to reconstruct it.”
Whilst the headline makes specific reference to “the internet”, it’s clear who Read is talking about here: platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. We can intuit some criteria for why these companies are being seen as disruptive of “the public sphere”:
- the company’s platform supports a large number of users
- the company’s platform rewards quantity of engagement
- the company’s platform enforces a filter bubble (or “curation funnel”)
Now the companies that meet these aren’t the internet, but when they meet all three of these three criteria, it certainly makes them feel that they’re the whole pie. The reason for this mostly has to do with what these companies offer us: a “platform”. If there is one weapon in Big Tech’s arsenal for disrupting the public sphere, it is their capacity as platforms.
These platforms have long transcended far beyond the quality as “portals to the internet”, a quality many of us at least at some point saw value in. The “your friends are here” gambit of Facebook wore thin long ago, it’s long been about a lot more. The attraction of the platform proper extends from a perceived efficiency. Why go to all these different places to check news, IM/email people to find funny videos, and check into to my friends’ private Flickr galleries when I can just open an app?. The platform — by definition — is a mechanism by which we outsource our agency in surfing through the web’s dumb pipes to the decisions of other people: our friends, platform designers, and algorithms.
The mistake we’ve all made, the mistake I think most are picking up on, is that we’ve been doing this too long. We’ve elevated the platform too far above the dumb pipes it is meant to efficiently funnel toward us. We’ve done this for so long that there doesn’t appear to be anything left in the dumb pipes that can exist without the platform.
To take news media as an example, almost all publications rely on social traffic to get eyeballs on their stuff. They’re there because everyone is there, and everyone is there because everyone else is there. We’re locked in a bind that is both entirely pointless and seemingly impossible to escape. And the claustrophobia this understandably induces has everyone freaking out.
So if, as Read says, “the tech industry has disrupted the public sphere”, it has done so by creating mutated simulacra of it: spheres (or bubbles or funnels) that might kind of feel like a “global town square” even though transaction has long usurped interaction.
It is not insignificant that on the same publications that are decrying Facebook, Twitter, and Google are publishing glowing reviews of Snap’s Spectacles. Even though technically Snapchat — Snap’s app — is a platform, this concept has long curdled. Instead, Snap wants you to know it makes products: a fun virtual product that is essentially an asynchronous video phone and a pair of sunglasses to capture video. Whilst you can’t begrudge Snap for filling Snapchat with sponsored Lenses and ads, the primary use of its primary product (that asynchronous video phone) is interaction.
If you think I’m being idealistic here, look at the app. One exceptional omission from Snapchat given the trajectory of even more benign platforms (such as Medium) is numbers. The only numbers inside the app are there to indicate time of posting, or time between responses. There’re no follower counts. No “Like/Favorite/Recommend” tallies. No comments. So even if user time is transacted (minimally, though predicted to increase) with brands, user-to-user transaction is by-design eradicated. Snapchat is a product proper: a thing you “buy” that does a set of things for you.
How this interaction-first product approach could be laid out to touch more of the contents of the dumb pipes that underpin the internet is hard to conceive of, however. And it seems inevitable that some transaction-first, scale-skewed method of filtration will be unavoidable. It might then be the case that interaction and transaction ought to be kept separate. I don’t need to know a certain news story has been shared 500,000 times or a link retweeted 80,000 times. I really only care if one of the limited set of people I care about or respect wants to share certain information. I’ll take a YouTube link in iMessage, a news story recommendation from a prominent journalist on Twitter, or be shown someone’s day through images on Snapchat. The platforms themselves — using whatever metrics they can to operationalise “quality” of a recommendation — ought not be the ones to tell me what I should (and therefore shouldn’t) care about.
Here’s an experiment, internet. Remove all view counts, all likes, all share counts, all counts of everything that were invented to make computers able to understand loose concepts like “quality” and “value”. We don’t need computers to understand those things. We understand those things. If this experiment ever happened, we just might be left with something we can all get behind.
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Thanks, I really appreciate it.
