Just let me pay for it!
Google account lockouts and alternatives to the attention economy
In October of 2019, I suffered some property and data loss. Without getting too deep into the details, the end result was me getting locked out of my Google account. The recovery phone number I had set up was apparently just not enough for the almighty account recovery form to give me my account back. Maybe it was because, as a digital nomad who always uses a VPN, my IP address pops up all over the world. Whatever the cause, I was locked out.
The experience taught me a few things.
If you use GSuite, you have 24/7 support. Google Ads? Support. Google Maps developer? Support! But if you’re one of the millions of people who use the free services Gmail or Google Drive, there is nobody you can contact if you get locked out of your account. You are 100% on your own. And you know what?
It makes perfect sense.
It all comes down to two things: incentives and attention.
Let’s examine Google’s incentives. They benefit in two ways from you using their products. First, they get your attention, which is the key to the advertising business model. They need a great mass of attention for companies to trust them as an advertising channel. Second, they get your data, which they use to learn more about you, show you more effective ads, and we’re back to point #1.
OK, I know what you’re thinking: I’ve heard this all before! It’s just the same old mantra of “you are not the customer.” Welcome to 2020, thanks for joining us! Just stick with me a bit, OK?
Let’s say you get locked out of your account. What are you going to do? Stop using Google products? No, of course not. You’re going to create a new Google account and start over. Even if you really tried, it wouldn’t take long before someone shared a Google doc with you and you’d have to dive back in.
So why should Google provide you any support? So long as you keep feeding them data and letting them show you ads, what difference does it make which account you’re using? They know you’re still you. A support department would involve a bunch of infrastructure and labor costs, and all Google would get in return would be angry support calls that do nothing for either employee morale or the bottom line.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to paint Google as some uncaring corporate machine. Given Google’s business model, ignoring you is not just a logical business decision. It’s the correct business decision.
Unless it makes them look bad, that is.
The Solution
I did eventually get my account back. How?
Seriously. I had spent two months on an emotional roller coaster as idea after idea promised and then failed to get me back into my account. Then I send a simple tweet at Google with some shaming invective and a couple screenshots, and they actually respond! A couple DMs later and I’m looking at this form.
By this point, I had scoured the internet for any scrap of information that might help me get back in to my account. There is no reference to that recovery form anywhere. As far as a Google search will take you, that form does not exist. Hell, half the reason I wrote this article is just to include a link to that form.
Why is it so hidden? Well, take a look at the second text field:
That’s right. That form exists specifically for people who have publicly posted about their account recovery issues. In other words, that form exists to make negative public attention go away.
There it is again: attention, only this time it’s working against Google. Positive attention fuels advertising, and negative attention makes it necessary to I guess fix stuff sometimes or whatever. Who would have thought, in those idealistic early days when the possibilities seemed so bright, that the internet would come to find itself strung out on advertising and public shame? How did we all become slaves to our own attention, even as it became the fuel of the digital economy?
Bugs in the system
Let’s back up a bit and examine an excerpt from a few paragraphs back, except I’ve switched around the emphasis:
…if you’re one of the millions of people who use the free services Gmail or Google Drive, there is nobody you can contact if you get locked out of your account.
Free services? But… why?
There’s some bug in our cognitive wetware that leads us to consistently devalue the digital. We’ll collect vinyl or CDs but steal MP3s. We’ll pay for a movie ticket but torrent Game of Thrones. We’ll go into lifelong debt for a college degree, but an online course better not cost more than a cup of coffee! And despite the fact that Google’s services have turned each of us into a nearly omnipotent oracle of all human knowledge, it’s somehow become the norm to expect it to cost nothing (or $0.99, at most!).
Of course attention became the currency of the digital economy! The problem comes when we don’t recognize the harmful and truly bizarre system of incentives this creates.
A thought experiment
Imagine I start a food truck serving only the best vegan Ethiopian / Japanese fusion. Imagine further that you don’t pay for my culinary creations directly. Instead, the queue to my truck is lined by posters, video displays, and maybe even barkers from other companies. You slowly make your way through this gauntlet, enduring a barrage of solicitations and sales pitches for everything from Pepsi Co. beverages to Patagonia outerwear.
Of course, my food truck doesn’t sell any of these products. Instead, if an advertisement succeeds in enticing you, you have to temporarily leave the queue and enter the nearby store to acquire it. You might even forget about your lunch plans and leave the food truck queue altogether. Oh no, lost customer! Except you were never going to pay me for the food. Either way, my friends over at Cuisinart are going to throw me some change for the new non-stick wok my would-be diner just walked away with, and I didn’t even have to power on my microwave to reheat your peanut wasabi soup. Savings!
Or maybe, through sheer force of will, you reach the window and order that delicious soup. Obviously, I want my food to be good enough that you keep coming back. Otherwise who will buy all those woks or sunglasses or whatever? But it only needs to be just good enough, and if I were to face a decision that pitted increased advertising conversions against the quality of the soup or service, you know which way I’d go. Yes, I know you’ve been waiting 30 minutes for your injera dumplings, but I’ve got some schmuck from Prada on the line about their referral fees for shoes and why even start a food truck if you can’t nail down at least a 10% conversion rate for designer footwear?
This is patently ridiculous. Why should a food truck have any concerns beyond good food and good service? Yet it’s exactly the framework we’re enforcing on our digital service providers by our unreasonable expectation of free everything.
Let me pay for it!
This problem likely has its root in some idealistic intention to democratize access to information services by making them free. The internet should be free for everyone! We’ll recoup the cost elsewhere. That sounds honorable, but there’s no overcoming the optimizing power of the free market. Once you define the rules of the game, the invisible hand will squeeze whatever peg it can into that human-nature-shaped hole. Intentions are great, but at the end of the day behavior is driven by incentives.
Which leads us to a guiding principle: if something brings you value, you should pay for it. Simple, right?
So, Google… just let me pay for it! Give me and every other person that recognizes the value of your services an option to pay for them. Seriously, I’m asking for you to let me give you money for something that I can currently get for free. In return, you’ll be incentivized (and able to afford) to provide your customers (which we would finally actually be) with dedicated support personnel, resources, and a true sense of ownership instead of the current feeling of conditional access that could turn to trespass at the whim of big King G. And I’m not talking about this weaksauce Google One nonsense with its “Google Experts” that seem to be little more than lightly trained outsiders with no real power to intervene on your behalf should the need arise. I’ll do my part, Google, but you gotta do yours.
The problem is that the norm is already set in. People expect free, and it would be unrealistic to hope for some spontaneous groundswell in support of paid services that put long-term well-being ahead of short-term gratification. So if a grassroots, bottom-up effort isn’t in the cards, how about something top-down? Could a mandate from on high drag us out of this mess, kicking and screaming?
Make them let me pay for it!
Consider that the free market isn’t free in the absolute sense. There are certain things you can’t do. Society is a constantly ongoing conversation about how we want to live, and which types of businesses are and are not legal is a fair topic of conversation. Consider, then, that advertising as a business model could be a giant mistake that we’ve all been just a tad slow to recognize because who the hell understands economics anyway?
Before you write me off as an anti-capitalist lunatic, I want to present you with a historical example: insider trading. It was not so long ago that “insider trading” was just “trading”. Of course you would use your insider connections to make money! Isn’t that what business is about? To be fair, it’s not necessarily obvious on its face that insider trading should be illegal. In some parts of the world, it’s still fair game. But at some point in some places, people decided that allowing this practice didn’t help foster the type of society they wanted to have. So they leveled the playing field a bit, and insider trading went the way of the 16 hour work day.
So, is it possible that advertising is to the late 20th and early 21st centuries what insider trading was to the late 19th and early 20th? That, simply due to the geometry of something as complex as the digital economy, advertising inevitably traps us in some kind of local maximum and keeps us from reaching the true summit of our potential? And could taking the advertising business model off the table force us off our asses and back on the trail, to push through the discomfort of a small downhill descent as we trek toward a higher peak than ever before?
Pay me for it!
Or maybe, if such a peak exists, we don’t need the heavy hand of legislation to force us toward it. Perhaps this is a market opportunity just waiting to be exploited. For example, the privacy-oriented Brave web browser blocks ads and trackers by default. Instead, it offers users the choice to opt in to view non-tracking (“privacy-respecting”) ads in return for cryptocurrency (the Basic Attention Token, or BAT). You can then use that cryptocurrency to directly pay the bloggers and content creators who currently rely on advertising for income. Put simply, you get paid for viewing ads, and you pay content creators for producing the content you value.
Brave is an interesting idea — in fact, it’s been my default browser for a while now—but in the end attention is still the primary currency being traded. “Attention” is right there in the token name, as if you could pull a Rumpelstiltskin and magic the messy business away by simply pointing at the attention trade and calling its name. Moreover, Brave’s focus on “privacy” actually undermines the effectiveness of its advertising model. Should I opt in to view an ad, no tracking data means the ad is virtually guaranteed to be irrelevant to my interests. BAT seems little more than a cryptographically verified and transferable proxy for the amount of my time I’ve allowed to be wasted by things I don’t care about.
An aside on privacy
Respect to Brave for getting the ball rolling, but I think its efforts are under-powered and possibly misdirected. I really don’t care that much about “privacy,” at least not in the absolute sense.
Privacy, like the data it protects, is morally neutral. Now, it might just be an empirical fact that societies with norms of privacy tend to produce happier people; but if so I would argue its validity is contingent on the types of societies that exist in the world today. I find it extremely unlikely that it must be true across the space of all possible societies, or even across the subspace of those societies that we could construct right now given our current knowledge and technology.
To be more concrete, I’m perfectly fine with companies collecting whatever data they want about me so long as it doesn’t compromise the ability of my family, friends, and business associates to choose otherwise if they so desire. Snooping on an email conversation with my mom is not bad in principle, but only if she isn’t also OK with it.
I personally love that airline confirmations in Gmail usually trigger a new event getting added to my calendar. I would then be ecstatic to find waiting for me in my inbox a list of suggested activities, museums, cafes, and the like, all finely-tailored to my tastes. If my every arrival in a new city was greeted with the location, prices, and hours of the nearest gyms with a squat rack, I would seriously lose my shit. These are all examples of how my life might be improved by giving up privacy.
Something completely different
Consider: in the current model, an advertiser works for a provider of goods or services, collects my data and that provider’s money, and helps the provider sell more stuff. Advertisers compete to win bajillion dollar contracts for advertising campaigns broadly targeted at millions of people. Their goal is to help the provider acquire customers with the highest lifetime value at the lowest cost of acquisition. It looks like this:
Notice how convoluted this relationship is. Why is an email provider (or social media platform, tech blog, workout tracking app, etc.) getting in the middle there? So, crazy idea: what if we just straightened things out a bit? Something like…hold on, its a bit stuck…grunt…mother of…RARGH…panting…alright, like this:
Now, I’m paying the advertiser! In fact, we can’t rightly call it an advertiser anymore. I use the name “curator,” and their job is to improve my life by finding those goods and services with the most value to me.
Before we go any further, I probably need to convince you that I haven’t completely lost my mind. As we said above, our guiding principle is that if you value something, you should pay for it. Well, you either value ads or you don’t. If you don’t, let’s just get rid of them instead of using them as a way to subsidize our free use of the stuff we actually value. But if you, like me, think there’s value in receiving recommendations from a trusted source, then you should pay for it like any other service.
The curator would still have to collect and analyze my data to do their job effectively, but perhaps I own that data (blockchain?) and curators bid for access that lasts exactly as long as I choose to remain their customer. By “bid”, I mean that one curators might offer an all-inclusive subscription while another has something bare-bones that’s cheaper but with a per-purchase fee. I choose which one works best for my purchasing habits. Based on the data I’ve shared, the curator then recommends goods and services I might enjoy.
So let’s take a look at those incentives again. In the current model, as bemoaned at length above, advertisers serve the interests of the providers because guess who pays the bills? In the new model, curators would not be allowed to take money from the providers! Providers might have no say over how their goods or services are displayed to me. As the steward of my interests, the responsibility for an honest representation of what’s being offered — and the penalties for false advertising — falls with the curator.
Successful curators will need to develop hyper-specialized services targeting individuals, not demographics. Specialization requires data, and more data means better recommender systems. This circle, in which the most capable also become increasingly capable of further improvement, is no stranger to the current system of tech monopolies and warped incentives. However, under this new model the circle is virtuous, not vicious. A curator’s success is measured in its ability to make me happy, which is also the surest path into the (now walled) garden of green customers (and data). In other words, in the new model curators are incentivized to offer me — their customer — the best possible experience because who pays the bills now, bitch!?
Maybe it’s a crazy idea. Maybe it’s mostly nonsense, but what we have now definitely isn’t working. We need something new and crazy to shake things up and get us moving in the right track. We’re not going to solve it in one fell swoop, but each attempt can unearth some kernel of wisdom that we’d have never otherwise found and that ultimately inspires the next brave idea. Each new innovation could reshape the public consciousness bit by bit. And maybe, after untold iterations, we’ll look back one day with bewilderment at our current predicament and find it unrecognizable. How did we ever get ourselves into that mess?
