Why the internet needs its own May Day
In another fine moment in the age of ‘techlash’, a Facebook executive reportedly told news outlets that they either comply with the new changes in how the company spreads their content, or they’re going to hold their hands as they die, as if they were in a hospice.
The power of social media giants over our lives (personal or business-wise) has been apparent for some time. Most of our communication is done online, and most of those channels are controlled by a handful of gigantic tech companies, so the cries of anti-trust laws have been roaring up recently, as we slowly realize that the “power of the network effect” is a total and complete enclosure of human communication.
What is notable in this most recent piece of news is really the hubris, the blatant show of might, of talking from a position of power instead of a negotiation between equal parties.
It reminds one of the age of robber barons, another metaphor that has picked up recently, on how they treated their workers, who had no other option but to comply.
But the workers did find other options, and fought back fiercely, accomplishing many victories from the 8 hour workday to the right to have a weekend— and we can too.
I would argue, that we need to.
And what do we have to do with workers you ask? Well, let’s look at how we talk about the uneasiness of the situation, and adopt a different frame of mind if we are to get out of this mess.
The problem of the dominant discourse
Whenever this subject comes up, if you follow the conversations that come up, the dominant theme seems to go along these lines:
- Well, you are free to quit Facebook or Google or Twitter and use another service;
- Surely, if the problem is so bad, someone will come up with something that’s better and by virtue of that quality, will out-compete the others
- Thus no government intervention is necessary, resort to individual solutions, adapt, and wait out the tide.
This is what I would call the tech-libertarian approach. While the argument is logically sound, it falls short on the face of reality. Instead of refuting these arguments one by one, I’d like to highlight an underlying thread in these, which explains why it’s sound as a theoretical solution, but will never deliver a real one.
The reason for that is the axiom of these arguments assume a Service-Consumer relationship. However, the relationship is an Employer-Worker one.
The reason why this is difficult to see from the onset, is that we are all undoubtedly consumers of the information that is passed through these websites. However, we’re all also the content generators of the website, and that’s the number one driving force behind these platforms: the entire UX is designed to make us submit more and more content (and more importantly: data), and the delivered value adds up to the enormous stock values of these companies.
This is also the underlying reason why whenever a new competitor comes to the fray, if it’s successful enough (in so far: it gets traction, users), it is instantly gobbled up by the tech giants.
Obviously you could say at this point, that if we were employees, we would get wages or some sort of compensation for this work. And we do. That compensation is convenience for the most part.
For the people who live off of producing content, whether it’s news, entertainment or anything else? If you look at Youtube and the class of professional content creators, or the outlets working on a “per pageview compensation” basis, the relationship becomes more apparent.
The power of these algorithms is that it globalizes the race-to-the-bottom on the price of content. And at the end of that, nobody, but the platform wins — and those actors who can pony up the advertisement costs to keep the whole thing running.
The second issue here is with the rise of what you would call “true” alternatives, such as Diaspora or Mastodon. These services were brought to life in a valiant effort to break the domination of “Big Tech” — however, they still operate with the same -false- premise, and because they didn’t consider that premise to be false, did not consider some of the more pressing issues.
To put it bluntly: they were conceived as engineering problems. The “Unique Service Proposition” was: we’re not as creepy as they are, so rational consumers will choose us in the long run, and we’re gonna win.
However, if we switch our premise, the problem immediately stands out as political, and thus requires (and offers!) some political solutions.
Growth Hacked Enclosure and the ‘Attention Oligopoly’
There’s been plenty written about the various creepy practices Big Tech deploys to keep our attention — the most panic-baiting being on the subject of so-called “dopamine feedback loops”. While it came as a surprise to a great number of people, anyone who has worked in product design knows that there’s only a few metrics you really need to engineer towards: engagement and user retention.
The first one explains the features that were designed to keep you hooked. The second one simply means that we want to keep the user using our service (in our service) rather than at a competitor. And the easiest way to do that is to give the user no alternative service, meaning establishing a monopoly on the given service — argued for by such top-minds as Peter Thiel in “Zero to One”.
To do that, you have to solve what the industry calls a marketplace-problem: get both suppliers and customers at the same time. And from the Facebook like and share buttons to “retweet” widgets and so on, this is where Big Tech managed to conquer the market — until it left no alternative.
And with millions of dollars spent on user acquisition on one side and these engineering feats on the other — collectively called “growth hacks” — they managed to completely colonize communication and the flow of information.
Because once you have a certain level of traction on both sides, you can rely on users on either side to become dependent on your platform. And as long as no reasonable alternatives come up, no individual solution can emerge to combat your domination. (This is especially true in local markets where the growth of certain platforms is lopsided and left to some random fact of early adoption and traction, whether it was cheap mobile data or conscious trend-hopping by a certain segment or whatever)
To translate this to the original proposition: these efforts are not simply “user acquisition drivers”.
They are cornering of the “user generated content market”, and thus the recruitment of millions of workers, a good portion of which increasingly become dependent on the platform for personal communication or their livelihood.
And that is an effect and new state that cannot be broken by individual action or a new competitor entering the market.
More sinister is the fact, which will never be visible through the service-consumer lens is the fact that in the domination of attention, it leaves little to no incentive for collective action. It has strike-breaking built in: as long as only a portion of the users/producers stay away from the platform, the missing space is occupied by those who don’t, and they receive a reward, while the “boycotters” are instantly penalized.
Hence: May Day.
A story of worker struggles of yore
The turn of the 19th/20th century for workers was not a pretty one. Working conditions were abysmal, and their struggles for better conditions were often broken up in very bloody ways. Unionists faced persecution, and people didn’t really have the option of switching workplaces.
And yet they fought against all odds, and eventually — they succeeded.
A big part of that success comes from the Haymarket Affair/Massacre/Riot, in which a workers protest for the 8-hour work-day ended in the deaths of many, and an international scandal.
Their demands were not met.
Big Tech is not killing us (not directly, if you look at the statistics of selfie-related deaths or texting related accidents). But the workers of yore were globally organized, with even less effective technology than what we have now.
But what they did after, is that the Sixth Conference of the Second International called for a global strike against their working conditions, on May 1st (May Day). To do so until their demands are met.
And in most parts of the world, May Day (or Labour Day, or International Workers’ Day) is a public holiday — even if it took many other bloody battles for the demands for the 8-hour work week to be met. May Day marked an important mile stone in the workers’ struggle, that the workers willing to fight, and that they had a capacity to harm the system that was ultimately dependent on them.
If we accept the premise that ultimately, what gets published on the internet, whether or not we’re compensated for it by money or by convenience, is our work, then we can also demand better working conditions.
Simply waiting for legislation to solve our problems won’t help — we have to collectively show that we’re willing to fight.
If it means organizing days where we collectively try out new platforms or stay off of the net, starving the machinery of our work, they will hear us. The concrete demands are yet unclear — maybe a push for ethics in UX design is also in order, if not the complete break up of the tech oligopoly.
That’s a conversation for a different day, involving a lot more participants. But if the biggest websites could threaten an internet black out against the FCC in the war over net neutrality (in their power struggle with the ISPs), surely, we can pick up the struggle ourselves.
With or without them — is a question for later.
In the meanwhile, stop thinking of yourself as a social media user. You’re also the social media worker. And your thoughts are worth infinitely more than whatever the current stock value of Big Tech is.
