Social media created and operated by a for-profit company, no matter what it says when it starts off about the rights of content creators, will inevitably at some point be compelled to monetize some aspect of its operations that the content creators did not want to be monetized.

This is not a mistake, or a complaint about poor management practices. The only poor practices here are typically about communication from the company about the inevitable changes whenever they arrive, and perhaps about the aggressiveness or destructiveness of the particular form of monetization that they move towards.

The problem is not with the technology, either. Uber could have been an interface developed by a non-profit organization trying to help people who need rides to destinations poorly serviced by public transport. It could have been an open-source experiment that was maintained by a foundation, like Wikipedia, that managed any ongoing costs connected to the app and its use in that way. And that’s with something that was already a product, a service, a part of the pay economy.

Social media developed by entrepreneurs, backed by venture capital, will eventually have to find some revenue. And there are only three choices: they sell information about their users and content creators, even if that’s just access to the attention of the users via advertisements; they sell services to their users and content creators; they sell the content their creators gave to them, or at least take a huge cut of any such sales. That’s it.

And right now except for a precious few big operators, none of those choices really let the entrepreneurs operate a sustainable business. Which is why so many of of the newer entries are hoping to either threaten a big operator, get a payout and walk away with their wallet full (and fuck the users) or are hoping to amass such a huge amount of freely donated content that they can sell their archive and walk away with their wallet full (and fuck the users).

If the stakes are low, well, so be it. Ephemeral social conversation between people can perhaps safely be sold off, burned down and buried so that a few Stanford grads get to swagger with all the nouveau-richness they can muster. On the far other end, maybe that’s not such a great thing to happen to blood tests and medical procedures, though that’s more about the hideous offspring of the social media business model, aka “disruption”.

But nobody at this point should ever be giving away potentially valuable work that they’ve created to a profit-maker just because the service that hosts it seems to provide more attention, more connection, more ease of use, more exposure.

Open access is the greatest idea in academia today when it comes to make academia more socially just, more important and influential, more able to collaborate, and more able to realize its own cherished ideals. But open access is incompatible with for-profit social media business models. Not because the people who run academia.edu are out of touch with their customer base, or greedy, or incompetent. They don’t have any choice! Sooner or later they’ll have to move in the direction that created such alarm yesterday. They will either have amassed so much scholarship from so many people that future scholars will feel compelled to use the service–at which point they can charge for a boost to your scholarly attention and you’ll have to pay. Or they will need to monetize downloads and uses. Or monetize citations. Or charge on deposit of anything past the first article. Or collect big fees from professional associations to for services. Or they’ll claim limited property rights over work that hasn’t been claimed by authors after five years. Or charge a “legacy fee” to keep older work up. You name it. It will have to happen.

So just don’t. But also keep asking and dreaming and demanding all the affordances of academia.edu in a non-profit format supported by a massive consortia of academic institutions. It has been, is and remains perfectly possible that such a thing could exist. It is a matter of institutional leadership–but also of faculty collectively finally understanding their own best self-interest.

———————

History 82
Histories of Digital Media
Fall 2014
Professor Burke

This course is an overly ambitious attempt to cover a great deal of ground, interweaving cultural histories of networks, simulations, information, computing, gaming and online communication. Students taking this course are responsible first and foremost for making their own judicious decisions about which of many strands in that weave to focus on and pursue at greater depth through a semester-long project.

The reading load for this course is heavy, but in many cases it is aimed at giving students an immersive sampler of a wide range of topics. Many of our readings are both part of the scholarship about digital culture and documents of the history of digital culture. I expect students to make a serious attempt to engage the whole of the materials assigned in a given week, but engagement in many cases should involve getting an impressionistic sense of the issues, spirit and terminology in that material, with an eye to further investigation during class discussion.

Students are encouraged to do real-time online information seeking relevant to the issues of a given class meeting during class discussion. Please do not access distracting or irrelevant material or take care of personal business unrelated to the class during a course meeting, unless you’re prepared to discuss your multitasking as a digital practice.

This course is intended to pose but not answer questions of scope and framing for students. Some of the most important that we will engage are:

*Is the history of digital culture best understood as a small and recent part of much wider histories of media, communication, mass-scale social networks, intellectual property, information management and/or simulation?

*Is the history of digital culture best understood as the accidental or unintended consequence of a modern and largely technological history of computing, information and networking?

*Is the history of digital culture best understood as a very specific cultural history that begins with the invention of the Internet and continues in the present? If so, how does the early history of digital culture shape or determine current experiences?

All students must make at least one written comment per week on the issues raised by the readings before each class session, at the latest on each Sunday by 9pm. Comments may be made either on the public weblog of the class, on the class Twitter feed, or on the class Tumblr. Students must also post at least four links, images or gifs relevant to a particular class meeting to the class Tumblr by the end of the semester. (It would be best to do that periodically rather than all four on December 2nd, but it’s up to each of you.) The class weblog will have at least one question or thought posted by the professor at the beginning of each week’s work (e.g., by Tuesday 5pm.) to direct or inform the reading of students.

Students will be responsible for developing a semester-long project on a particular question or problem in the history of digital culture. This project will include four preparatory assignments, each graded separately from the final project:

By October 17, a one-page personal meditation on a contemporary digital practice, platform, text, or problem that explains why you find this example interesting and speculates about how or whether its history might prove interesting or informative.

By November 3, a two-page personal meditation on a single item from the course’s public “meta-list” of possible, probable and interesting topics that could sustain a project. Each student writer should describe why they find this particular item or issue of interest, and what they suspect or estimate to be some of the key questions or problems surrounding this issue. This meditation should include a plan for developing the final project. All projects should include some component of historical investigation or inquiry.

By November 17, a 2-4 page bibliographic essay about important materials, sources, or documents relevant to the project.

The final project, which should be a substantive work of analysis and interpretation, is due by December 16th.

Is Digital Culture Really Digital? A Sampler of Some Other Histories

Monday September 1
Ann Blair, Too Much to Know, Introduction
Hobart and Schiffman, Information Ages, pp. 1-8
Jon Peterson, Playing at the World, pp. 212-282
*Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars From Gutenberg to Gates, pp. 1-82
Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet, selection

Imagining a Digital Culture in an Atomic Age

Monday September 8
Arthur C. Clarke, “The Nine Billion Names of God”, http://downlode.org/Etext/nine_billion_names_of_god.html
Ted Friedman, Electric Dreams, Chapter Two and Three

Film: Desk Set
Colossus the Forbin Project (in-class)
Star Trek, “The Ultimate Computer” (in-class)

Monday September 15
Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think”, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
Paul Edwards, The Closed World, Chapter 1. (Tripod ebook)
David Mindell, “Cybernetics: Knowledge Domains in Engineering Systems”, http://21stcenturywiener.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Cybernetics-by-D.A.-Mindell.pdf
Fred Turner, Counterculture to Cyberculture, Chapter 1 and 2
Alex Wright, Cataloging the World: Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age, selection

In the Beginning Was the Command Line: Digital Culture as Subculture

Monday September 22
*Katie Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late
*Steven Levy, Hackers
Wikipedia entries on GEnie and Compuserve

Film: Tron

Monday September 29
*John Brunner, The Shockwave Rider
Ted Nelson, Dream Machines, selection
Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence, selection
Neal Stephenson, “Mother Earth Mother Board”, Wired, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

Monday October 6
*William Gibson, Neuromancer
EFFector, Issues 0-11
Eric Raymond, “The Jargon File”, http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html, Appendix B
Bruce Sterling, “The Hacker Crackdown”, Part 4, http://www.mit.edu/hacker/part4.html

Film (in-class): Sneakers
Film (in-class): War Games

FALL BREAK

Monday October 20
Consumer Guide to Usenet, http://permanent.access.gpo.gov/lps61858/www2.ed.gov/pubs/OR/ConsumerGuides/usenet.html
Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace”
Randal Woodland, “Queer Spaces, Modem Boys and Pagan Statues”
Laura Miller, “Women and Children First: Gender and the Settling of the Electronic Frontier”
Lisa Nakamura, “Race In/For Cyberspace”
Howard Rheingold, “A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community”
Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen, selection

Hands-on: LambdaMOO
Hands-on: Chatbots
Hands-on: Usenet

Monday October 27

David Kushner, Masters of Doom, selection
Hands-on: Zork and Adventure

Demonstration: Ultima Online
Richard Bartle, “Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades”, http://mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm

Rebecca Solnit, “The Garden of Merging Paths”
Michael Wolff, Burn Rate, selection
Nina Munk, Fools Rush In, selection

Film (in-class): Ghost in the Shell
Film (in-class): The Matrix

Here Comes Everybody

Monday November 3

Claire Potter and Renee Romano, Doing Recent History, Introduction

Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, short selection
World Wide Web (journal) 1998 issues
IEEE Computing, March-April 1997
Justin Hall, links.net, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zQXJqAMAsM&list=PL7FOmjMP03B5v3pJGUfC6unDS_FVmbNTb
Clay Shirky, “Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality”
Last Night of the SFRT, http://www.dm.net/~centaur/lastsfrt.txt
Joshua Quittner, “Billions Registered”, http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.html
A. Galey, “Reading the Book of Mozilla: Web Browsers and the Materiality of Digital Texts”, in The History of Reading Vol. 3

Monday November 10

Danah Boyd, It’s Complicated: The Social Life of Networked Teens
Bonnie Nardi, My Life as a Night-Elf Priest, Chapter 4

Hands-on: Twitter
Hands-on: Facebook
Meet-up in World of Warcraft (or other FTP virtual world)

Michael Wesich, “The Machine Is Us/Ing Us”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
Ben Folds, “Ode to Merton/Chatroulette Live”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bBkuFqKsd0

Monday November 17

Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble, selection
Steven Levy, In the Plex, selection
John Battelle, The Search, selection

Ethan Zuckerman, Rewire, Chapter 4
Linda Herrera, Revolution in the Era of Social Media: Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet, selection

Monday November 24

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, selection
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think, selection
Mat Honan, “I Liked Everything I Saw on Facebook For Two Days”, http://www.wired.com/2014/08/i-liked-everything-i-saw-on-facebook-for-two-days-heres-what-it-did-to-me

Hands-on: Wikipedia
Hands-on: 500px

Monday December 1

Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom, selection
Gabriella Coleman, Hacker Hoaxer Whistleblower Spy, selection
Andrew Russell, Open Standards and the Digital Age, Chapter 8

Adrian Johns, Piracy, pp. 401-518

Hands-on: Wikileaks

Film: The Internet’s Own Boy

Monday December 8

Eugeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here
Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything, selection
Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? , selection

On one side, you have disciplinary associations like the Modern Language Association and the American Anthropological Association that have somewhat similar traditions of tying assessment and promotion to the publication of a monograph that are to varying degrees embracing open-access publishing and digital dissemination and trying to work out new practices and standards.

On the other side, you have disciplines that have no particular obsession with the idea of the published monograph as the standard.

Whether or not the published monograph is or ever was a good standard for judging the worth of a historian’s scholarship, how long does the AHA think that historians can stand alone in academia as a special case? “Oh, we don’t do open-access or digital distribution until we’ve got a real book in hand and are fully tenured, those few of us remaining who are in tenure-track positions, because that’s a fundamental part of history’s particular disciplinary structure.”

Um, why?

“Because history dissertations take a long time to write and thus need protection?” Right, unlike anthropology or literary criticism or other fields in the humanities. FAIL.

“Because many publishers won’t publish an open-source dissertation?” Right, so this assumes: a) the dissertation will be so little revised that the two texts would be essentially identical and b) but the magic fairy-dust of a book makes it the real benchmark of a properly tenurable person. E.g., “Oh noes, we couldn’t decide if someone’s scholarship was tenurable from a dissertation that is nearly identical to a book”. Here’s where the real fail comes in because it reveals how much the disciplinary association is accepting the clotted, antiquated attachment of a small handful of tenured historians to their established practices even when those practices have had any semblance of reason or accommodation to reality stripped from them.

Let’s suppose that university presses do stop publishing essentially unrevised dissertations. I can’t blame them: they need to publish manuscripts that have some hope of course adoption and wider readership, sold at a reasonable price, or they need to price up library editions high enough that the remaining handful of “buy ’em all” libraries will make up for the loss of libraries that buy in a more discretionary fashion.

You can understand why the publishers who are largely following option #B would not want to publish monographs that were marginally revised versions of open-access dissertations, because even the richest libraries might well decide that buying a $150 physical copy is unnecessary. But by the same token, again, why should a tenure and promotion process value the physical copy over the digital one if they’re the same? Because the physical copy has been peer-reviewed? Meaning, if two scholars who do not work for the same institution as the candidate have reviewed the manuscript and deemed it publishable, that alone makes a candidate tenurable? Why not just send out the URL of a digital copy to three or four reviewers for the tenure and promotions process to get the same result? Or rely more heavily upon the careful, sophisticated reading of the manuscript (in whatever form) by the faculty of the tenuring department and institution?

What the AHA’s embargo embarrassingly underscores is the extent to which many tenured faculty have long since outsourced the critical evaluation of their junior colleagues’ scholarship to those two or three anonymous peer reviewers of a manuscript, essentially creating small closed-shop pools of specialists who authenticated each other with little risk of interruption or intervention from specialists in other fields within history.

Thirty years ago, when university presses would publish most dissertations, you could plausibly argue that the dissertation which persistently failed review and was not published by anyone had some sort of issue. Today you can’t assume the same. Maybe we never should have given over the work of sensitive, careful engagement with the entire range of work in the discipline as embodied in our own departments, but whether that was ever a good idea, it isn’t now and can’t be kept going regardless.

Suppose we’re talking about option #A instead, the publishers who are being more selective and only doing a print run of manuscripts with potential for course adoptions or wider readership. Suppose you use that as the gold standard for tenurability?

That’s not the way that graduate students are being trained, not the way that their dissertations are being shaped, advised and evaluated. So you would be expecting, with no real guidance and few sources of mentorship, that junior faculty would have the clock ticking on their first day of work towards adapting their dissertations towards wider readability and usefulness. That’s a dramatic migration of the goalposts in an already sadistic process. You could of course change the way that dissertations are advised and evaluated and therefore change the basic nature of disciplinary scholarship, which might be a good thing in many ways.

But this would also accelerate the gap between the elite institutions and every other university and college in even more dramatic fashion: writing scholarship that had market value would qualify you for an elite tenure-track position, writing scholarship that made an important if highly specialized contribution to knowledge in a particular field of historical study would qualify you for more casualized positions or tenure-track employment in underfunded institutions that would in every other respect be unable and unwilling to value highly specialized scholarship. (E.g., have libraries that could not acquire such materials, curricula where courses based on more specialized fields and questions could not be offered, and have little ability to train graduate students in fields requiring research skills necessary for such inquiry.) In terms of the resources and needs of institutions of higher learning, it arguably ought to be the reverse: the richest research universities should be the institutions which most strongly support and privilege the most specialized fields and therefore use tenure and promotion standards which are indifferent to whether or not a scholar’s work has been published in physical form.

Yes, it’s not easy to move individual departments, disciplines or entire institutions towards these kinds of resolutions. But it is not the job of a professional association to advocate for clumsy Rube Goldberg attempts to defend the status quo of thirty years ago. If individual faculty or whole departments want to stick their heads in the sand, let that be on them. An organization that aspires to speak for an entire discipline’s future has to do better than that. The AHA’s position should be as follows:

1) Open-access, digitally distributed dissertations and revised manuscripts should be regarded as a perfectly suitable standard by which to judge the scholarly abilities of a job candidate and a candidate for tenure in the discipline of history. A hiring or tenuring committee of historians is expected to do the work of sensitive and critical reading and assessment of such manuscripts instead of relying largely on the judgment of outside specialists. The peer assessment of outside specialists should be added to such evaluation as a normal part of the tenure and promotion process within any university or college.

2) The ability of a historian to reach wider audiences and larger markets through publication should not become the de facto criteria for hiring and tenure unless the department and institution in question comprehensively embraces an expectation that all its faculty in all its disciplines should move in the course of their career towards more public, generalized and accessible modes of producing and disseminating knowledge. If so, that institution should also adopt a far wider and more imaginative vision of what constitutes engagement and accessibility than simply the physical publication of a manuscript.

I begged to differ. I still do, but with less blithe assurance than I had back in 2005. There were more blogs then than now, but what I was doing and most bloggers were doing didn’t really undercut what should have been the distinctive content advantage of print journalism. What online content creators were doing, however, without necessarily knowing it, was unbundling print journalism, and most audiences were paying for the whole bundle.

Around 2005-2007, you could get reviews of both popular and elite culture online, in a much wider range of attitudes and writing styles. You could read a vastly better and wider range of opinion and commentary on the news than the moribund, hopelessly establishment editorial pages of virtually any print newspaper or magazine. You could get better classifieds via Craigslist. You could often get better really local news via neighborhood listservs and similar community sources. If you didn’t care much about anything beyond the lede, you could get a quick feed of the major and minor news of the day through various aggregator blogs.

What the unbundling of journalism demonstrated is that most of its readers had completely forgotten the history of how all of that came to be bundled in the newspaper in the first place, and eventually created reasonable livelihoods for staff writers. Unbundling also revealed that the assumption that readers most valued long-form reportage by skilled and experienced writers was false. That was the most expensive kind of content to create (large salaries for the punditocracy squatting on the editorial pages aside) but not really what most of the audience was buying.

Fast forward to now, and this is how we’ve arrived in a world where Nate Thayer is asked by the Atlantic to donate his content for free so that he can “gain a platform for exposure”. This is a bad place to have arrived. So what’s to be done about it?

A few thoughts:

1) Comic books and long-form serious reportage may be in the same place. Meaning, they’ve been sold primarily in serial, short format through a very particular retail architecture, and both the creators and the retailers of this content have built their lives around the cash flow that this format created. But increasingly if audiences are willing to pay for work, they’d rather buy it in long-form: trade paperbacks for comics, non-fiction books or other long-form formats for reportage. Adjusting to this change in the market is going to kill some businesses outright: the comic-book store, the average daily newspaper. But it doesn’t have to put all the creators out of business–they just have to find new distributors and get used to creating work intended to be bought and consumed at that longer scale.

2) Readers who want original information need to stop visiting sites that want to cheap their way around acquiring it, and sites that want those readers and their eyeballs need to stop relying on a model of spraying content out like a firehouse. Yes, I’m talking boycott, at two different ends. More people who create content, even folks who are indeed trying to “get exposure”, need to refuse to let organizations that can pay publish material for free and to enforce ownership rights when they go ahead and try to do it anyway, and more readers who consume content need to pressure sites like the Atlantic to cut that shit out or they’ll stop clicking. Either go ahead and be the HuffPo, and there’s only room for a few aggregator sewers at the bottom, or earn your eyeballs with distinctive content that you paid for.

3) However we get there, a publication platform that allows reasonably priced, no-hassle micropayments for a la carte purchasing of medium-length reportage and other writing that has minimal DRM could have a huge impact. Similarly, I can imagine something a bit like Kickstarter on a much smaller and more focused scale that would let non-fiction writers raise an advance for long-form work that requires travel or similar expenses in return for copies of the work when it’s produced.

4) Long-form reportage has to be saved from the last “investigative journalists” of the mainstream print and television media. Meaning, the people who have done it well and want to keep doing it well have to very clearly distinguish what they do from the insider-access blowjobbery that has been mistaken for “investigative reporting” ever since Woodward and Bernstein sauntered into the scene. Among other things, this means giving up once and for all the tedious formulation of “objectivity” that dominates mainstream American newspapers while equally rejecting the hack-job partisanship of think-tanks and the Beltway punditocracy. A long-form reporter in the new marketplace has to have a real voice, a distinctive style, a good eye–and thus create something that stands out and is worth the money being asked for it. This is the key thing about all cultural markets that are emerging: the work that does more than enhance the reputation capital of its creator, that is a valuable commodity in its own right, has to be distinctive and better. It has to be, in this context, the opposite of the highly standardized craftwork that was the pride and joy of mainstream print journalism in the latter half of the 20th Century. The long-form reportage that people will buy has to throw out its style guides, its pyramids, its sense of belonging to a guild and a profession. Of course, in an America where nothing else (healthcare or retirement savings, for example) is even remotely friendly to individuals who are selling their own content or services directly, this is not a happy-looking alternative, not yet. Happy or not, it’s the alternative to having to give up work for free to a freshly minted M.A. in online journalism who has been trained to give up work for free. (This might be where unbundling eventually goes for many professions, including higher education…)

Why is Facebook such a repeatedly bad actor in its relationship to its users, constantly testing and probing for ways to quietly or secretly breach the privacy constraints that most of its users expect and demand, strategems to invade their carefully maintained social networks? Because it has to. That’s Facebook’s version of the Red Queen’s race, its bargain with investment capital. Facebook will keep coming back and back again with various schemes and interface trickery because if it stops, it will be the LiveJournal or BBS of 2020, a trivia answer and nostalgic memory.

That is not the inevitable fate of all social media. It is a distinctive consequence of the intersection of massive slops of surplus investment capital looking desperately for somewhere to come to rest; the character of Facebook’s niche in the ecology of social media; and the path-dependent evolution of Facebook’s interface.

Analysts and observers who are content with cliches characterize Facebook as sitting on a treasure trove of potentially valuable data about its users, which is true enough. The cliched view is that what’s valuable about that data is names associated with locations associated with jobs associated with social networks, in a very granular way. That’s not it. That data can be mined easily from a variety of sources and has been mined relentlessly for years, before social media was even an idea. If an advertiser or company or candidate wants to find “professors who live in the 19081 area code who vote Democratic and shop at Trader Joe’s in Media” they can buy that information from many vendors. If that were all Facebook was holding, it wouldn’t have any distinctive wares, even imagined, to hock. All it could do is offer them at a bargain rate–and in the global economy, you can’t undercut the real bargain sellers of information. Not that this would keep Facebook from pretending like it has something to sell, because it has a bunch of potentially angry investors ready to start burning effigies.

What Facebook is holding is a type of largely unique data that is the collaborative product of its users and its interface. But if I were a potential buyer of such data, I’d approach my purchase with a lot of caution even if Facebook managed to once and for all trick or force its users into surrendering it freely to anyone with the money to spend. If my goal is to sell something to Facebook users, or to know something about what they’re likely to do in the future, in buying Facebook’s unique data, what I’m actually learning about is a cyborg, a virtual organism, that can only fully live and express inside of Facebook’s ecology. Facebook’s distinctive informational holding is actually two things: a more nuanced view of its users’ social networks than most other data sources can provide and a record of expressive agency.

On the first of these: the social mappings aren’t easily monetized in conventional terms. Who needs to buy knowledge about any individual’s (or many individuals’) social networks? Law enforcement and intelligence services, but the former can subpeona that information when it needs to and the latter can simply steal it or demand it with some other kind of legal order. Some academics would probably love to have that data but they don’t have deep pockets and they have all sorts of pesky ethical restrictions that would keep them from using it at the granular level that makes Facebook’s information distinctive. Marketers don’t necessarily need to know that much about social networks except when they’re selling a relatively long-tail niche product. That’s a very rare situation: how often are you going to be manufacturing a TARDIS USB hub or artisanal chipotle-flavored mustache wax and not know exactly who might buy such a thing and how to reach them?

Social networks of this granularity are only good for one thing if you’re an advertiser or a marketer: simulating word-of-mouth, hollowing out a person and settling into their skin like a possessing spirit. If that’s your game, your edge, the way you think you’re going to move more toothpaste or get one more week’s box office out of a mediocre film, then Facebook is indeed an irresistable prize.

The problem is that most of us have natively good heuristics for detecting when friends and acquaintances have been turned into meme-puppets, offline and online. Most of us have had that crawling sensation while talking to someone we thought we knew and suddenly we trip across a subject or an experience that rips open what we thought we knew and lets some reservoir, some pre-programmed narrative spill out of our acquaintance: some fearful catechism, some full-formed paranoid narrative, some dogma. Or sometimes something less momentous, just that slightly amusing moment where a cliche, slogan or advertising hook speaks itself from a real person’s mouth like a squeaky little fart, usually to the embarrassment of any modestly self-aware individual.

Facebook could, probably will, eventually wear down its users’ resistance and stop labeling or marking or noting when it is allowing a paying customer to take over their identities to sell something to their social networks. We’ll still know that’s happening to a friend up until the day that an AI can use all that data to so convincingly simulate our personal distinctiveness that there’s no difference between the AI’s performance and our own. At which point, so what? Because then my accurately simulated self will just be selling or persuading on behalf of that which I would, with all my heart, sell or persuade, in the voice I would normally use to persuade with.

As long as Facebook’s potential customers want to use my social networks to sell something I wouldn’t sell, in a way I wouldn’t sell it, most of the people who “know” me through Facebook will know that it’s not me doing that, and they know that better and better proportionately in relation to the amount of information I’ve provided to them all through Facebook. (E.g., the best protection from being puppeteered is paradoxically more exposure rather than less.)

So what of the other unique information Facebook holds, a record of everything I’ve “liked”? Surely that’s information worth having (and thus worth paying Facebook for) for anyone desperate to sell me products, persuade me to join a cause, or motivate me to make a donation? Not really (or not much), for two reasons. First, because existing sources of social and demographic data are generally good enough to target potential customers. If you know who the registered Democrats with graduate-level education making more than $75,000 a year are in Delaware County Pennsylvania, you have a very good understanding of their likely buying habits and of the causes to which they are likely to donate. If you’re selling something that has a much more granular target market, it’s almost certainly more efficient and cheaper to use a more traditional media strategy or to rely on social networks to sell it for you simply because they’re interested in it. If you’re the budget-photography company YongNuo, you don’t need spend money to mine my Facebook likes and posts to see I’m interested in moving into studio-based strobist photography: existing networks of hobbyists and professionals are sufficient to acquaint me with your products. If you’re trying to sell a Minecraft pendant necklace, your potential customers are going to do a fine job of notifying each other about your product.

More to the point, if I’m trying to sell you a product or a cause and I find you through data-mining your pattern of “likes” on Facebook, what is it that I’ve found? Maybe not the “you” that actually buys things, shows up to political rallies, writes checks to a non-profit. I’ve found the algorithmic cyborg that clicks “like” on Facebook, half-human and half-interface, formed out the raw stuff of things that are clickable and linkable and feed-compliant. Which is sometimes a set that overlaps with what can be bought and done and given in the rest of our lives and sometimes is very palpably not. If my sales or success depended on the liking of Facebookborgs reliably translating into behavior elsewhere, I’d be on very thin ice. And I’d just as soon not pay much to get onto thin ice.

—–

So what about the rest of social media? Do they have something to sell, something worth investing in? Sometimes they do, and that brings me back to Flickr and 500px, where I started this series. What Flickr and 500px have to sell, first and foremost, is not information but services: data storage, a form of publication, and access to a community with a narrower focus than “all of life”. Both of them have at least a rough model for how to make a bit more revenue on the backend, through facilitating the sale of community members’ images to any external buyers (while giving the creator of the image a cut of the revenue). That is not a business model that is going to make them megabillions, but it’s very likely a sustainably profitable enterprise when all is said and done. It rests on a fragile foundation, as Flickr in particular has discovered. Your paying customers have to care enough about the social capital they have invested in the service to pay for it, the publishing interface has to be updated to look contemporary and run on contemporary hardware, and the archive has to be searchable enough that external buyers (whether it’s someone looking for a canvas to hang on their wall or a media organization looking for stock footage) can sift through it. All of which takes work for a labor force that has to be kept lean and cheap. One slip and your users, the real source of your value, are going to pack their bags and content for the next new thing. When that starts to happen, it can cascade quickly into collapse. If you do something to try and slow the flight of content and participation, by making content difficult to extract or erase, you might spark the equivalent of a bank panic.

There’s one other social media business model that demonstrably works, if in the spirit of 21st Century financial capitalism: it’s the digital version of a pump-and-dump. Set up a specialized social media service, lure a venture firm or investor in that’s looking to bet a bit of money on the next new thing, spend a bit of money on an interface design, put on a dog-and-pony show that gets the restless digerati in the door and providing some kind of content. If dumb luck is really with you, maybe you stumble into the next YouTube or Twitter, you somehow provide a space or tool in a niche that no one knew existed. If dumb luck is sort of with you, you’re Instagram and you get bought up by bigger fish who need to prove to their investors that they’re working towards a profitable business model and are using acquisitions as a distraction from tough questions. In that case, your business model is to be someone else’s business model, only you can’t say as much without shining a spotlight on a naked emperor’s private parts. In the worst case (probably) you burn someone’s money, earn some salary, get some experience, and have a story or two to tell to your next investor–or at least build a resume that gets you hired at a real company.

Social media that provide a service that is sufficiently valuable that people will pay for it, however little, have a business model that is not only sustainable but that doesn’t require them to constantly breach the trust of their users or work against what their communities want.

Social media that have no business model except trying to monetize the information that users provide to them will, sooner or later, be required to breach trust and demolish whatever is useful in their service, to come back again and again with new interfaces and terms of service that lie or conceal or divert. Even if they get away with it for a time, they’re selling a product that is far less valuable than the innumerable info-hucksters and digital prophets (or even protectors of privacy) think it is. In some ways, it might be best if Facebook just got it over with and gave itself permission to sell every last scrap of information it’s holding: what we might all discover is that there’s hardly anyone at all who will pay for that service at the scale and price that Facebook needs them to pay.

Blame is coming down heavy on MIT and JSTOR, both of which were at pains to distance themselves from the legal persecution of Swartz even before news of his suicide broke, particularly JSTOR, which very early on asked that Swartz not be prosecuted. Blame is coming down even more heavily, as it should, on federal prosecutors who have been spewing a load of spurious garbage about the case for over a year. They had discretion and they abused it greviously in an era when vast webs of destructive and criminal activities have been discretionarily ignored if they stem from powerful men and powerful institutions. They chose to be Inspector Javert, chasing down Swartz over a loaf of bread.

But if we’re talking blame, then there’s a diffuse blame that ought to be conferred. In a way, it’s odd that MIT should have been the bagman for the ancien regime: its online presence and institutional thinking about digitization has otherwise been quite forward-thinking in many respects. If MIT allowed itself to be used by federal prosecutors looking to put an intellectual property head on a pike, that is less an extraordinary gesture by MIT and more a reflection of the academic default.

I’ve been frustrated for years, like other scholars and faculty who take an interest in these issues, at the remarkable lassitude of academia as a whole towards publication, intellectual property and digitization. Faculty who tell me passionately about their commitment to social justice either are indifferent to these concerns or are sometimes supportive of the old order. They defend the ghastly proposition that universities (and governments) should continue to subsidize the production of scholarship that is then donated to for-profit publishers who then charge high prices to loan that work back to the institutions that subsidized its creation, and the corollary, demanded by those publishers, that the circulation of such work should be limited to those who pay those prices. Print was expensive, print was specialized, and back in the age of print, what choice did we have? We have a choice now. Everything, everything, about the production of scholarship can be supported by consortial funds within academia. The major added value is provided by scholars, again largely for free, in the work of peer review. We could put the publishers who refuse to be partners in an open world of inquiry out of business tomorrow, and the only cost to academics would be the loss of some names for journals. Every journal we have can just have another name and be essentially the same thing. Every intellectual, every academic, every reader, every curious mind that wants to read scholarly work could be reading it tomorrow if they had access to a basic Internet connection, wherever they are in the world. Which is what we say we want.

I once had a colleague tell me a decade ago that this shift wouldn’t be a positive development because there’s a digital divide, that not everyone has access to digital devices, especially in the developing world. I asked this colleague, whose work is focused on the U.S., if she knew anything about the costs and problems that print imposed on libraries and archives and universities around the world, and of course she didn’t. Digitized scholarship can’t be lost or stolen the way that print can be, it doesn’t have to be mailed, it doesn’t have to have physical storage, it can’t be eaten by termites, it can’t get mold on it. If it were freed from the grasp of the publishers who charge insane prices for it, it could be disseminated for comparatively small costs to any institution or reader who wants access. Collections can be uniformly large everywhere that there’s a connection: what I can read and research, a colleague in Nairobi or Beijing or Moscow or Sao Paulo can read and research, unless their government (or mine) interferes. That simply couldn’t be in the age of print. Collections can support hundreds or thousands of simultaneous readers rather than just the one who has something checked out. I love the materiality of books, too, but on these kinds of issues, there’s no comparison. And no justification.

The major thing that stands in the way of the potentiality of this change is the passivity of scholars themselves. Aaron Swartz’s action, and its consequences, had as much to do with that generalized indifference as it did with any specific institution or organization. Not all culture needs to be open, and not all intellectual property claims are spurious. But scholarship should be and could be different, and has a claim to difference deep in its alleged values. There should be nothing that stops us from achieving the simplest thing that Swartz was asking of us, right now, in memory of him.

The silly view is the magical thinking of digital utopians, that a new communicative technology has the intrinsic power to banish all questions of scarcity, to be the rising tide that floats every boat except for the CEOs of big companies, to liberate human creativity and invention to its fullest potential, to automatically make a commons where we shall live out our happy future. In this perspective, early modern copyright was a purely negative invention of rent-seekers and 19th Century professionalization nothing but monopolization by a small set of bourgeois aspirants.

The depressing, loosely Marxian view is that digitization is the kind of material transformation and social reorganization of production that enables the subjugation of independent or artisanal labor. That the production of profit-making expressive culture and of professional services was largely outside the control of industrial and monopoly capital until the late 20th Century because capital lacked the technological and social means to reorganize and control value in those domains up to that point–but that digital technologies, algorithmic processes, the production of a massive surplus of credentialed professionals by educational institutions and concerted attacks on the civic authority of professions and artists to set the terms under which they perform their work have succeeded in proletarianizing professionals and cultural workers. In this paradigm, advocates of digitization are just useful idiots for 21st Century capitalism, enabling private ownership and profit to fully penetrate professional institutions and exposing the everyday production of cultural works to “openness” while large companies like Google, Apple, Comcast or Disney become much less open.

The first view is simply wrong in its account of the history of intellectual property and professionalization, though there are episodes and dimensions of that history that fit this sketch. It’s also far too technologically deterministic. It’s the kind of view that deserves the critique offered by the second interpretation, because it’s worth at least paying attention to the dangers of uneven ‘openness’. If Google, Apple, Comcast and so on are allowed to sit behind impregnable castles except when they sally forth on intellectual property pillages or fling legal serfs at one another, then culture’s old burghers should do their best to keep control of a few free cities and hold out as best they can.

But I think both views are impoverished as descriptions of what’s happening and as guides to further action. Let’s just say for the moment that we buy into the language of “disruption”, which has the virtue of intermingling positive and negative meanings, in part depending on whether you’re the disruptor or the disruptee. But the word and its some of its less negative synonyms (disjunction, interruption, intermission) also offer the possibility that we are being offered a chance to see many accustomed practices in new ways, to reimagine some of our work and aspiration, to reorganize and retool.

So what can we learn? I’ll restate a few points that I tend to repeat a lot at this site:

1) That the professions had become far too closed both institutionally and substantively, too quick to exclude or disdain rivalrous or alternative forms of expertise and practice. The great force of authentic innovation and service that gave the professions their power and wealth in the 19th Century was dissipating, replaced by rent-seeking and timidity. Paradoxically, this is also what made it so easy for each of them to be tackled in isolation by profit-seekers and regulators. Professionals were, over the course of the 20th Century, less and less socially connected to one another as an overall group and progressively less concerned with an overall ethos, a general sense of responsibility, mission and commitment to quality that applied to any professional in any field. The current ‘disruption’ hasn’t yet led to professionals reconnecting with each other–each group has tended to face its own crisis in isolation, in parochial terms, and even to cheer as other groups or professions lose their favored place at the table. Nor, for the most part, have any professional communities really tried to re-engineer the institutional structures of their work to reconnect with larger publics, to embrace a wider conception of their mission and expertise, or to reinfuse their practices with innovation. But there’s still time for most, if not all, of the major professions of the 20th Century to move in that direction.

2) That the middlemen of 20th Century culture industries, editors and publishers and producers and administrators, were vastly too narrow-minded in their assessment of what could count as “good culture”, and even what could sell as “profitable culture”. Some of this can be attributed to the overhead costs of 20th Century mass and elite art and culture. Those costs made risk-adversity be sensible. But many brokers of taste, including critics inside and outside of academia, ended up believing in a vision of exclusivity. In fact, they ended up believing in it even when they said they didn’t, and continued to believe in it well after the underlying economics of cultural production changed for all but a very small subset of forms and genres. What the Great Disruption has revealed as an absolute fact is that there are a great many more people capable of writing, filmmaking, acting, photographing, reporting, cooking, staging, editing, programming, sculpting, storytelling, singing, painting etc. quite well, many more works to value or view or read than there once were. Moreover, some enabling technologies have let many people see behind the curtain to find that what was taken as great individual originality was in fact mastery of craft secrets and techniques. At the same time, most of us can see that there is still a very big difference between exceptional work (defined in a variety of ways) and ordinary “good” work, and equally that there is still bad culture. As the message of Ratatouille suggests, it may be right than anyone can cook, but not that everyone can–and that there are still artists like Remy whose work is distinctive and highly valued. After the disruption has run its course, the real question will be whether we can find a way to reward ‘ordinary’ creators for the value they generate in a way that is commensurable with their work and whether ‘extraordinary’ creators will still be in business in some fashion. My thought is yes to both–and it will be important to find an answer that suits both groups of producers.

3) In the 20th Century, we accepted the institutionalized, routinized use of people with ostensibly high-value professional training for tasks that didn’t require their expertise. Or well before the intrusion of certain kinds of rationalizing economies, the professions devalued their own work. Professors moved to marginalize and massify teaching before their administrations required them to do so, doctors moved to minimize contact with patients before insurers asked it of them, law firms assigned young lawyers to mechanically process large bodies of documentation in the discovery phase of litigation, and so on. The professions cleared the way for their own reorganization and mechanization largely to create more privileged terms of labor for the most senior or powerful professionals. This was a brief moment in the history of the professions, especially marked in the 1960s and 1970s, but it opened the way for what came later. If the current disruption has positive value, it might be to spur professionals to identify far more sharply what kinds of labor require extensive credentialing and training and to understand where there is a mismatch between the needs of the professions and the training they have insisted upon to this point. Some of this has already happened, either under duress or as a creative response to changed circumstances. More needs to happen.

(Army of Darkness reference for the uninitiated.)

I hereby volunteer: the next pundit who talks about how MOOCs are going to save higher education some big bucks needs to meet me for drinks at the establishment of his or her choosing, I’ll foot the bill, and in return I just ask for the chance to politely and rationally CHEW THEIR FUCKING EARS OFF. And then if they really want they can write an op-ed the next week and pretend they thought of everything I said by themselves and I’ll never let on otherwise.

Do you really WANT TO SAVE SOME MONEY using INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY? Ok, try this one on for size. Why weren’t you blathering on asking why the heck we all bought Blackboard or if you really want to go into the dark ages, WebCT, for years and then kept buying it when we had a less expensive (though not free, if you look at support and management costs) open-source alternative? Especially asking why institutions that didn’t even necessarily need a course management system bought them and got stuck with them and came to see them as indispensible when at least some of the time they were really just exotic devices for password-walling-off fair-use excerpts of material used in classes?

No, no, even better. All the institutions who can create consortia and companies to offer MOOCs seemingly on a wild impulse, try asking why have they been incapable of creating far bigger and more ambitious consortia for open-access publishing of scholarly work, something that’s been technically and institutionally plausible for a decade. I’ve always heard that the first problem is the stubborn desire of individual institutions to go it alone, maintain their independent identity. But suddenly hey presto! MOOC-collaborations galore. Maybe it’s because the for-profit publishers whose monopoly pricing has punched hundreds of universities in their unmentionables didn’t want an open-access world to come into being, and whispered in the right ears. If the idea of big savings and ethical transformation in higher education bundled together makes you so hot you want to call your publisher right now and pitch “The World Is Open” or some such thing, this is your meal ticket, not MOOCs. MOOCs are the freak-show tent off to the side by comparison.

If you want to talk about savings, those are two big areas: platforms and products that could be hacked out cheaply if only faculty and staff user communities were as flexible and adaptable and mildly literate about information technology as everyone else in the world and were therefore also universally pressuring for open-access publishing created and maintained by truly massive consortia of higher education institutions.

But that’s not what the mainstream media pundits are blabbing about everywhere because none of them know shit about higher education budgets and none of them know shit about information technology and none of them lift a finger to know anything more than whatever it is they heard from some guy whose brother’s friend knows a guy who knows a guy. They just open their columns to the most top-level stream of today’s information buzzery and let it dump into their column inches like an overflow sewer in a hurricane.

Again, pundits, let’s talk. MOOCs are damn interesting, you betcha, but seriously, if you think they’re about to solve the labor-intensivity of higher education tomorrow with no losses or costs in quality, you have a lot of learning to do. Not just about the costs and budgets of higher education today, but about the history of distance learning. Right now you guys sound like the same packs of enthusiastic dunderheads who thought that public-access television, national radio networks, or correspondence courses were going to make conventional universities obsolete via technological magic. And hey, if you’re that keen on the digital, skip the drinks, I’m happy to educate you via email.

I hadn’t encountered Joel’s blog before, so I hope I’m not reading this piece out of the context of his usual commentary. In any event, my response isn’t entirely about this one entry. I’ve only been to two events that were trying to be “unconferences” in some sense, and I’ve never been involved in trying to facilitate one, so there’s nothing about his critique that strikes too close to home, no wound it inflicts on me.

But there is something in the response that frustrates me, and it’s not just about unconferencing. There’s a pattern here that extends across a much vaster terrain. As I said in my Twitter feed, “Do as thou wilt” and “Ur doing it wrong” don’t add up. Joel is hardly the first person to try and say both of them at once.

Let’s take unconferencing. The idea here, as I see it, is to not just systematically question everything that doesn’t work about an existing model of conferencing, collaboration, and meetings but to invent new forms and practices that act on that critique. That alone makes the movement or whatever you want to call it a great thing: there’s nothing worse than endlessly circling around an awareness of how broken or stale existing practices are while feeling condemned to repeat them indefinitely. The one time I sat on a major professional association’s program committee a decade ago, I suggested that it would be a great idea if we just dropped virtually all of the standard paper-presentation sessions in favor of roundtables, workshops and spontaneous discussions, a sort of proto-unconferencing move. But there wasn’t any space in business-as-usual to entertain that idea. It was clear that if I were serious about it, I’d have to make it a crusade. My colleagues weren’t against a change exactly, but they felt there were reasons why we had a lot of small, boring sessions attended by six or seven people who passively listened to papers being read to them and changing that would cause serious problems for many members. Crusading on this subject struck me as a bit lower on my priority list than getting an unnecessary root canal. Smarter by far to just do an end run and invent new practices under new banners, as unconferencers have.

It’s the new practices part that seems to me to be the point: that unconferencing opens up what had been a closed, ritualistic and expensive domain that put very high transaction costs on collaboration, discovery and conversation between people with shared interests and projects.

It sticks in my craw when a move to openness becomes an occasion for a new closure. Which is how I read Joel’s complaint: that the unconference should have a purity test, its own Dogme 95 policed by dour adherents, that it has to be the dialectical opposite of the conference in every respect. In that case, you do not mean UN, you mean ANTI. Which will require the perpetual zombie reification of an ancien regime mode of conferencing as well. Every anti- needs its pro-, every post- needs its unhyphenated Other. To “un” something seems to me not to commit to a perfect opposite but to seek a massive radial evolution of new forms, to open a space, to emancipate.

What I hear in Joel I hear a bit of when #Occupy meetings insist dogmatically on human mics, circles and so on. Or the way that I can remember student activist meetings I participated in the 1980s mandatorily concluding with a sort of offbrand pseudo-Maoist self-crit session. Moves intended to criticize the rigidity and hierarchy of some other form of group or collaboration sometimes harden quickly into their own form of exclusionary orthodoxy, their own fetishized manners. To me a perfect unconference or rally or online collaboration or what have you would be a jam session, a moveable feast. Improvisation has signal, it has pattern, it has structure, it has plans, but it also has the freedom to say or play what it seems right to say or play at that moment. Whatever works is what I want to be free to do, what the work of the “un” ought to accomplish, to make working an always-provisional, always-scrutinized, always-open value. Let a thousand models bloom, and then cross-pollinate.

This isn’t just about one mode or tradition of collaborative practice. Ultimately this distinction, this different sense of what it means to “UN-” something, strikes right to the heart of the most extravagant and exciting promises that congregants gathered in the house of Shirky try to uphold. I really believe you cannot set yourself against attempts to protect worn-out traditions through enclosure and monopoly with your own enclosures, your own moves to exclusive ownership. Otherwise it just comes off like an attempt to evict the old sheep farmers so that you can breed goats on the same fenced-in pastures, a casting of one brand name against another, a strategy of transfer-seeking.

Openness is a sensibility long before it is found expressed in anything more concrete, and it requires a delight in the mutations and adaptations that follow from an intervention into a closed space. It rests on a gentleness of regard towards the practical and imaginary moves made by others, an encouragement of remixing and reinvention.

It doesn’t even matter if the end of a right, a freedom, a possibility will ultimately hurt that powerful interest. The contemporary businesses who have registered a powerful stake in exceptionally restrictive monopolies over intellectual property have themselves been enormous beneficiaries of a conception of the public domain as a fundamental and irreversible right of a free society. No matter: they would now see it ended. Better to kill the future than live in a present where you can only have two Ferraris in the driveway.

Hollywood and the music industry have tried repeatedly to kill media technologies and practices which ultimately have returned them enormous profits. I have in my basement industry-produced videotapes that if Jack Valenti had had his way would never have been sold to me. There was money that left my pocket and went to the businesses he represented. And yes, I have videotapes I recorded off of television. Many of those I purchased in another media format later precisely because having videotapes sustained my desire to have those films and shows available for viewing. Videotaping (or making audio tapes) was the precondition of the explosive growth of a market for older visual culture as a consumer commodity. Think back to the early years of television: it never occurred to any of the people producing and owning that intellectual property that it might have value in the future. The more that we have been able to buy and copy, the more that we want. And much of the time, the more that we will pay for.

Enclosures don’t just hurt the commons, they ultimately hurt the new lords of the manor. This is part of the point of rights, of limited government, of checks and balances: that to safeguard the future even of the powerful, you have to restrain everyone from getting everything they think they want right here, right now.

What’s increasingly apparent about law, rights and liberties in the United States is that we have lived in our times in a bubble, an interregnum, a moment where some agencies and operations of the U.S. government, most particularly the Supreme Court of the United States, have moved to align the operations of law and authority with a properly expansive vision of human freedoms and Constitutionally-protected rights. That moment is passing, the pendulum swinging to more Gilded Age norms of brutalist law enforcement, oligarchic license, and an open sanction to the use of military power at the whim of the executive.

Nowhere is this clearer than with intellectual property and the public domain. The Court’s majority in the Golan v. Holder decision are only the stone that seals the tomb, not the murderers who slit its throat. Which means what it has always meant: that those of us who believe in a public domain, whose professions are defined by a sacred commitment to its existence, whose lives were enriched by its existence, will have to fight every day forever to bring it into resurrected glory and then to hold dear its life when we do so. Waiting for the Court, the Congress, the President, the government, the powers-that-be, to live up to the trust they hold, or even to recognize where their own long-term self-interests lie, isn’t good enough. It was comforting for a time to see justice and freedom advance from those precincts, but that led to leaving the door unlocked for burglars.