The Blind Giant (5 page)

There’s nothing specifically digital about breaking an injunction, of course, but there is a feeling among some Net users that the online world is a special case, a free speech zone, and that in cyberspace it is entirely appropriate to divulge what a print journalist, subject to national laws, dare not. On the other hand, government and legislation have also designated digital communications as a special case, asserting that they do not merit the same kind of protection given to older media. In November 2011 a US judge ordered Twitter to give up the data, despite filings by the
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the individuals named. The ACLU response was trenchant: ‘The government shouldn’t be able to get this kind of private information without a warrant, and they certainly shouldn’t be able to do so in secret. An open court system is a fundamental part of our
democracy, and the very existence of court documents should not be hidden from the public.’

In the context of copyright, the famous statement by
Stewart Brand, publisher of the original
Whole Earth Catalogue
, has become a motto for those who believe any information once released into the digital wild is communal property, and that creativity – taking place in the context of a shared global cultural heritage – is not uniquely the property of whoever creates, but also of everyone else. What Brand said in 1985 and restated in 1987 was: ‘Information wants to be free.’ There’s more to it than that, of course, and the full quote from his
The Media Lab
is prescient – or, at least, insightful:

This philosophical clash has become an often vicious legal battle in the real world. The ethos of groups such as the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the
Free Software Foundation (FSF) (in which the word ‘free’ means not just ‘given away’ but also ‘ungoverned’ or ‘unshackled’) evolved in opposition to the growing sense among lawmakers and corporations – and, to be fair, some citizens – that the Internet had to be regulated, whether for reasons of security and criminal law or for the purposes of making money. These Internet freedom advocacies are not primarily manifesto organizations, with a list of positive statements in their pockets. The early generation of Internet pioneers didn’t need a manifesto, because they all knew what they were doing – indeed, in most cases they knew one another – and so saw no point in articulating what they believed in because they
lived it, wrote it and coded it all the time. Rather, although they have clear statements of identity, the EFF and the FSF are in the first instance an attempt to retain and defend a spirit that existed before the Net was big enough to need a constitution, when it was acted and known by all who participated. The EFF, in particular, came in part out of a massively misguided United States Secret Service raid on a company called
Steve Jackson Games (SJG), which must rank as one of the all-time law enforcement fiascos; although, in keeping with the sense of the Internet as being ultimately a consequence-free environment, no one actually died.

Briefly, the Secret Service raided SJG and confiscated their computers in pursuit of a document which was alleged to have been illegally obtained from the telecoms company
BellSouth. SJG was at the time in the process of making a role-playing game with a cyberpunk tone, which perhaps explains somewhat why the Secret Service agents, having confiscated the company’s online bulletin board and files (called ‘Illuminati’), apparently decided that they had uncovered ‘a handbook for computer crime’. The Secret Service retained the confiscated computers for several months, and finally returned them stripped of much of their data. The company sued, and the trial judge found against the government, determining: ‘there has never been any basis for suspicion [that SJG] have engaged in any criminal activity, violated any law, or attempted to communicate, publish, or store any illegally obtained information or otherwise provide access to any illegally obtained information or to solicit any information which was to be used illegally.’

Nonetheless, by that time the company was in dire financial straits. As a result of discussions on the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (the WELL), one of the earliest digital communities which is still active to this day,
Mitch Kapor of Lotus,
John Perry Barlow of the band the Grateful Dead, and
John Gilmore, then an employee at technological powerhouse
Sun Microsystems,
founded the EFF. The Steve Jackson Games case established electronic mail as having the same protections under US law as a phone conversation – a protection which, apparently, has not yet reached Twitter. (Obviously, Twitter is premised on sharing thoughts with a wider audience than a phone call, but that does not immediately mean that the private data of a user should be less well protected in law.)

In other words, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is at root the digital resistance, seeking to preserve the ideals of a digital environment which was still small and built on notions of community and cooperation. Likewise, the Free Software movement was and is a response to the rise of proprietary
operating systems and the attempt (presently successful) by Apple and
Microsoft to use operating systems as a springboard to
dominance over how people access information and view content over the Internet. This is worth remembering as one encounters these organizations, and their central themes: we’re not seeing them now in a pure state, but rather as they try to codify a more diffuse ideal of the living Internet in the face of activities by corporate and government power to control, limit, censor and commodify what the key players in the EFF and similar organizations took to be an opportunity to leave behind these kinds of capitalistic, nationalistic and paternalistic ways of being, and seek a better world. The hard part of any revolution begins not with conquering the enemy – the Internet, after all, has become as ubiquitous as any reasonably high-level technology can be in our fragmented world – but with what comes next: the encounter between the dreams of the revolutionaries and the smaller, more specific concerns of the people they think they represent.

The hope, then, was that the free (unfettered, not necessarily unpaid) flow of information would redeem a world staggering along in the aftermath of the greed-is-good culture of the 1980s and the sudden demise of the Cold War as the defining paradigm of our lives. The template for the perfect creative endeavour in
this early stage of the commercial Internet was the garage band (a label subsequently appropriated by Apple for their bundled music production software). The idea was a group of musically talented individuals using digital technology to mix their work and the Internet to distribute it directly to the world without the involvement of a conventional industry power structure. There are echoes of this notion in Google’s founding, and in the small start-ups that can so rapidly ascend to the digital heights;
Blogger, for example, was a side project which birthed an entire culture of online diarists and commentators.

That may have seemed possible in the 1990s; now the situation is more complex and difficult. The massive number of people attempting the same thing makes discovery – making your creative product not just available but known about – rather than distribution, the barrier to success. More, as the share-and-share-alike attitude to content has proliferated, content has either become cheap or free, or it has been shared without permission of the creator. The downward pressure on price is so strong that many have given up charging directly altogether, and propose to make content available without monetary charge either on a simple advertising-funded model, on a merchandizing model where content induces fans to buy related material or hardware, or on a cross-subsidization model which sells the data generated by users as demographic information to advertisers.

Online ads, however, sell for about one-tenth of their print counterparts, because the Internet has an endless supply of advertising hoardings. It turns out that these models require in most cases a huge number of visitors to a discrete website, or a distributed network of sites like a radio-telescope array, each contributing a small share to a larger entity. Similarly, merchandizing sales are not usually a reliable revenue stream. As an example: the Internet has spawned any number of webcomics – short strips of ongoing storylines, some in the comic-book style, others in the older three- or four-panel strip. Of these, a vanishingly
small number are known to be self-sustaining, let alone actually profitable.
Wikipedia lists a total of twenty-three creators presently reported by third parties to be making money from their work online. The cross-subsidy models, meanwhile, are undesirable in another way: cross-subsidization is essentially a bit of sleight of hand in which a service appears to be free, but is in fact paid in kind.

What is presently emerging sometimes appears to be the opposite of the creative democracy: a centralization of the ability to profit from content, in which hubs such as
Amazon, Google and Apple take a percentage of millions of sales and thrive on the creation of an ecosystem of app developers and content makers who rarely break even. It applies in every niche of the online world; one of the most talked about
iPad apps of 2011 was
Nursery Rhymes
, by developer ustwo. This storybook app for children had a secret weapon: busy parents could call from elsewhere and read to the children they couldn’t be there for in person. The feature inspired all manner of positive and negative comment, the most pointed of which was probably the title of the review at
CrunchGear:
‘Nursery Rhymes Storytime
reminds you of the blasted lunar hellscape that is your life’. The app went to the top of the charts, and was discussed everywhere. The developer calculated the investment cost at £60k, and the money coming in at £26k – a shortfall of £34k. And that was a popular application; only a very, very few apps will do better.

Apple, of course,
profits from every single sale. The economics of the Internet, as presently constructed, do not favour the old dream of small content makers. Instead, they seem to produce an inevitable trend towards consolidation and gatekeeping. Rather than trading the fusty cultural chains of the conventional media for a bright new world of digital cottage industries, we are in danger of exchanging one bottleneck for another. Even the much touted original ebook writers such as the hugely successful
Amanda Hocking work through a hub (Amazon) rather than
going it alone – and Hocking herself has now signed with a conventional publisher.

The Internet is sometimes heralded as the end of the middleman. In fact, at the moment, it’s more like the ascension of the middleman to an almost godlike status – it’s just that the old middlemen have in many cases been cut out of the loop. And while aggregate sales of every app, song, movie or book are enormous – and the hubs take a piece of each sale – the individual sales of an individual product may not be enough to pay for its production.

The present Net style of commerce favours the giants – just as the old pre-digital one does – and in some ways, it is defined and created by one in particular.

It is pointless to discuss the Internet age and its cultures without reference to Google. The search giant is at the heart of how we use the web, and its rise – not by chance – is coincident with the rise of the Internet as a part of everyday life. It can’t be said too often, not just in relation to Google but in general, that there is no set outcome of digital and technological evolution. What we choose now will affect what happens next. The future is in flux, and we are – more consciously than ever before – choosing a path ahead as we choose small conveniences and commercial options. So we should make even quite minor choices about digital matters with some care.

Google defined the Internet we have now by making possible real search. Before Google, finding things on the web was, if not difficult, at best unwieldy. Search companies didn’t actually want you to find what you were looking for too fast: their goal was to have you on their pages long enough to advertise to you. Early search sites were portals, hoping to hold your eyes for a while before letting you go. The key property in commercial web design back then was ‘stickiness’. At the same time, the order in
which searches were displayed was arbitrary or even perverse. AltaVista searches ranked results by the number of times a term appeared on a given page, so a site which featured ‘goal’ sixteen times was deemed more relevant to a search for ‘goal’ than one which used it only ten. You can still find, on old personal pages from the early days of the web, buried repetitions of words, white text on white background: ‘goal goal goal goal goal …’ going on and on for hundreds of lines in an effort to attract the search engine’s attention. It’s one of the earliest and crudest forms of what is today an industry in itself:
Search Engine Optimization.