The Blind Giant (20 page)

In the meantime, the popular understanding of what is and is not okay, either legally or ethically, is confused by the shouting, and rests on knee-jerk reactions and inaccurate perceptions. For example, many buyers of books believe that the bulk of the cost of a paper copy is physical and therefore reason that the electronic version should be massively cheaper. While there are considerable savings in the production of an electronic book, and many publishers have yet to take full advantage of the digital workflow,
it’s also true that a large part of book production cost is human: paying editors and writers and so on. So yes, you are indeed paying for intangibles, but those intangibles are people. Moreover, the high price of an ebook during the period of the hardback publication is nothing to do with the physical cover – obviously – but a tariff for early access, something that publishers have failed to communicate largely because the idea of explaining pricing decisions to consumers remains alien: the old media industries are not at all used to having to make a case for themselves. They are continually playing catch-up.

The most recent example of this in my life is
Amazon’s free ebook lending system, where the company ‘lends’ readers one ebook at a time for an indefinite period. In fact, in many cases, Amazon is buying the ebook from the publisher at full price and passing it on without charge to the consumer. The only reason I can see for doing this is to create and corner the market in ebook lending, then turn around to publishers and demand terms for access to a thriving industry. In other words, Amazon is purchasing itself yet another arena in which to be massively dominant. The problems with companies owning a given market outright are too obvious and well-known to enumerate, but that is potentially the price to the consumer of the ‘free’ ebook scheme.

While some may feel ambiguous about paying for pattern – the most common interpretation of ‘information yearns to be free’ these days is that anything that can be digitized should be given away – almost everyone now uses their own pattern as currency. We trade our personal data to sites such as Facebook in exchange for services that are notionally free at the point of use. But in fact, they’re not. The currency of the Internet, as we already know, is
attention. Facebook is not free: you pay for it with your data, which is then traded on to get attention – and not just your attention, specifically, although ads will be targeted and tailored directly to you, but the attention of the group or groups you represent, the cross-referenced, modelled, Platonic you.

The peril of this kind of ‘free’ lies in the clouding of what’s actually taking place. What price would you put on your personal data if I just flat out asked you to sell it to me? Obviously, some of it is relevant to the security of your bank account and your credit card, so you might have to go to the trouble of changing your pass phrases, a considerable aggravation. Then there’s the creepy factor: the idea that I might plug you into a machine and learn secrets, or just truths, about you; that I might then be able to influence you in subtle ways to do things you might feel weren’t really in your interests. I’d know details about your friends and family by implication, too. So for comparison: what value would you put on Facebook’s service if you had to pay for it directly? A pound a month? Ten? You surely would not expect to pay more for it than you do for your broadband connection. Let’s set an arbitrary figure of £200 a year, which seems astronomically high to me. Is that value lower or higher than the price you’d put on your personal data, considering what might be done with it?

Beyond the point of individual discomfort with the exchange of information for services is the issue of what happens to a market where the whole point of most pricing strategies is to prevent the consumer from getting an accurate understanding of what a product costs relative to what it is worth. Our economic system, and indeed our version of liberal democratic capitalism, rely at root on the admittedly overstretched and tarnished notion that the market makes good decisions about price based on the collective, rational self-interest of those buying and selling. If one side of that equation is deprived of information – deliberately and for the express purpose of preventing them from making decisions as they otherwise would – the paradigm of our society is broken; weight and influence are accorded to products that are not the best they could be, and to the companies that make them. The deliberate creation of pricing strategies that occlude the reality of the transaction undermines the basic assumptions of our system. (You might say: ‘Fantastic! We’re undermining the
system from within, man! We’re letting the inherent contradictions of the machine tear it apart!’ In which case, great. But you need to have a plan for how to prevent the eventual collapse of the machine from killing a lot of people.)

It’s something we don’t often consider, but in our kind of society, buying is voting. That’s to say that the decision to purchase your groceries from, for the sake of argument, your local
Tesco is an endorsement not just of your nearest supermarket and their stock, but of every action taken by the Tesco company anywhere in the world. Every purchase made at Tesco increases their turnover, raising their profile, and therefore also their influence in any lobbying they may undertake. It also represents a lost sale to their competitors large and small, because you won’t go and buy food for that week from them and you would have had to buy food somewhere. As the company’s market share increases, Tesco is able to be more robust with suppliers, too, demanding better rates. For the company it’s a virtuous cycle; for others, that’s not so clear.

It may mean that the Tesco style of doing business becomes the only viable one, a complaint made about chain
supermarkets in general quite often in connection with the revitalization (or destruction) of local community town centres (a government report commissioned in 1998 found that ‘when a large supermarket is built on the edge of the centre, other food shops lose between 13 and 50% of their trade’).
⁹
The savings created by economies of scale may be balanced by intangible or hard-to-measure costs, either environmental (as goods are moved to central depots and then out again around the country) or social (as small grocers and local businesses fail to compete with the giants around them). They may not be local: the buying power of major chains can affect the national markets of other countries. Farmers needing to meet a price point may seek and receive greater subsidies from the government, further unbalancing the already bizarre economics of global agriculture.

If this seems familiar and grindingly depressing, of course, it is. This is the problem of connectedness we discussed earlier: how is it possible to encompass all these variables and arrive at a right action that is also one you can actually carry out and live with? It may sound great to refuse to buy from supermarkets, but it can involve considerable extra effort and expense, and even then, you aren’t guaranteed to have done the right thing. But note well: this isn’t a problem resulting from digital technology, but rather from the nested structures of globalization and the inherited consequences of empire and colonial history. That’s not an instruction to hang your head in shame because you carry a European or American passport: rather it’s an acknowledgement that the issues are complex, that they did not spring from nowhere, and that they are locked in and hence hard to deal with in a positive way. All that’s changed is that our technology has begun, inevitably, to make us aware of them, and of the reality of the faceless people around the world and two doors down who suffer in consequence of them.

There’s another aspect to the discussion of services that are notionally free at point of use. When you pay for a service in personal data, you aren’t a consumer. You are not, as media theorist
Douglas Rushkoff observes pointedly, Facebook’s customer.
¹⁰
You are the commodity in which the company behind the service trades. Rushkoff suggests that users fundamentally do not trust Facebook, because they know there’s a tension between what they want the service to do and what the service provider needs from it. And it’s certainly true that in my experience of using the service, it is set up to avoid giving me perfect control of my data. When the new
Instant Personalization service was rolled out recently – a service that allowed Facebook to pass data to partner websites to allow them to customize their services for Facebook users – it was impossible to switch off before the service
went live. In the run-up to the launch, the option to disable Instant Personalization was visible (buried deep in the site’s somewhat arcane privacy settings interface, where many users never venture anyway) but not alterable. To turn it off, you had to wait until after it was switched on.

Being a consumer, a customer, implies a measure of control over the nature of the relationship. The provider of a service sets out to please the customer; unhappy customers generally mean that a company is doing less well than it could. Customers assume – and receive – a certain level of care. The service is set up to make things work well for them. The commodity, on the other hand, gets the minimum necessary attention to keep it in a marketable state. More, companies will always try to get more and more out of their resources; it’s the natural momentum of capitalism. Perhaps the best way to change your understanding of who’s on top in the context of companies that use this business model is to compare them with livestock farms. The farm animals might imagine that they are the beneficiaries of the farmer’s efforts. Pigs get mash and a place to live; cows get open fields, barns when it’s cold and plenty of hay. They even get medical care and, in extreme cases, massages. They are, of course, not the customer. For some of them, this will become apparent when they are brought into a narrow pen and emerge as sausages. For others – cows on dairy farms, for example – the prognosis is less stark. They will simply live a life of ease from which others will profit.

It’s impossible, in this society, to go through life without ever being treated as a commodity. And it’s not as if commodification renders a person powerless. I’m writing this page in the week of 4 July 2011. The
News of the World
newspaper, founded in 1843 and with a circulation in April of 2.6 million, will cease to exist on Sunday. The reason: the massed disdain of the British public. The paper has been caught hacking the mobile telephones not just of celebrities and politicians (an invasion of privacy that interested the readership only in passing, and which was by and
large settled by out-of-court payments) but of murder victims and their families, possibly compromising evidence in ongoing investigations and – in the case of
Milly Dowler – causing loved ones to believe that she might still be alive. The final straw was the discovery that the paper had also intruded on the private grief of the families of dead British servicemen. Campaigns appeared, on Facebook and elsewhere, boycotting the paper, and advertisers withdrew. What was a going concern a month ago is now a ruin because the readers used their status as a commodity and simply refused to be sold any longer. The shockwaves from this very public self-destruction are still bouncing around: there are rumours of investigations in the United States, and the Murdoch news empire is for the moment greatly weakened.

In the general run of things, however, power flows in the opposite direction: in tiny, essentially useless amounts from each person to a central pool where storage and analysis can transform it into money and significant influence. We tend to assume that that power is benign, especially in the case of Google, whose playful animations, goofy logo and renowned ‘Don’t be evil’ motto have made it the most trusted commercial brand in modern history. We cannot assume that that will always be the case. Google is, after all, a corporate entity, subject – impossible as it may seem now at the height of its strength – to takeover, and to changes of policy. Or to being broken up; Google has brushed up against anti-trust legislation any number of times recently. If you feel comfortable with Google having all that information, let me ask again whether you feel equally happy with it in the hands of
News International (the parent company of Fox News), the agri-giant Monsanto, or BP?

Accepting
commodification has other downsides, one of which is that it probably contributes to a phenomenon called
deindividuation, which is a strange and powerful thing I’ll come back to later. Another is what Eli Pariser writes about in
The Filter Bubble:
the creation of a bubble of information that confirms
what you want to believe is true. When you’re a commodity, it’s in the interests of those who sell you to streamline you, make you more predictable and thus a more appealing target for marketing. Pariser’s warning is compelling and important: increasingly, the search results I see online are different from the ones you see. Google results, since 2009, are personalized according to various datapoints the company has about you when you search. The broadest ones are things like physical location, but your search history is a factor, too. As Pariser puts it, as of 2009, a search for a contentious topic like ‘proof of climate change’ will return different answers for a sceptic or an environmentalist. The danger is that our online interactions become not so much an encounter with the wider world, but with our own preconceptions: a feedback loop that simply confirms everything we want to believe.