I have just finally gotten around to reading Jaron Lanier’s book, Who Owns the Future, and it has given me much to think about. It has been the most recent focus of the book club I participate in, chosen because we read extensively about both politics and digital media. Lanier argues that the increasing focus on digital networks, while initially quite positive, has shifted to take wealth and influence away from the middle class, contributing to a general recession. While many of us contribute content and attention to create a meaningful experience, the central computer companies make nearly all of the money. If you are not paying for the product, you are the product is often used as an explanation for what seems to be free services. Sometimes, things go even further, and you both contribute content and pay to do so.
Lanier identifies a common pattern across what he describes as Siren Servers. He uses the term “Siren Servers” to describe large, centralized computing platforms that lure everyone into using “free” services, vacuum up data at a massive scale, analyze it with superior computer power and algorithms, and then concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few who control those servers. There is a certain “bait and switch” element, intended or perhaps not, in what tends to happen. Users are attracted and invest time in various ways and these investments result in a network effect that traps them in various ways. They may build connections with others who are loosely joined, offering advantages, but they cannot be easily moved to a different network. They may invest in creating content that has aggregate value, but might also be challenging to move. The switch occurs as those behind the server act to “decouple risk” so that it moves to those using the system and is not shared with the system.
By chance, I happened across a Medium article, “Medium writing platform exhausts its potential by eliminating incentives from subscriptions …” by Jamen Mendes. The similarities to what Lanier described immediately struck me. Mendes notes that during its origin, Medium shared the monthly subscription fees with content creators and members, based on how much paid subscribers engaged with individual authors’ work. Medium gradually shifted away from this model to completely abandon sharing subscribers’ subscriptions in favor of ad revenue provided through individuals or organizations willing to pay to increase the degree to which their posts would appear in the stream of titles sent to users and reader activities other than reading (claps and interactive comments). Mendes contrasts the present Medium system with Substack, which uses a more direct relationship between subscribers and author compensation.
As a content creator (aren’t all social media users), this is the first time I have considered some of these issues. Obviously, there are differences between the companies Lanier writes about and Medium. Medium is tiny compared to the corporations Lanier targets, which rely on collecting and selling information to ad companies and others interested in user behavior data. Medium is not a player in manipulating political matters or the economy. However, there are parallels in what Lanier describes as risk. Like other Medium subscribers over the years, I acknowledge that the changes made were not done without acknowledgment, but the rationale was never clear to me. I understand that the backend necessary to support micropayments models requires storage and compute, but why was this not adequately incorporated into the original business model? Lanier’s perception of shared risk somehow converting to user risk does seem to apply.