Free = slavery.

I know I've said this before, but as I listen to Free (see previous post), I keep thinking about how the Internet is turning us into slaves. (See tag, "slavery.")

I keep hearing Chris Anderson lead me through all the various business models whereby entrepreneurs can plan their successes by embracing free. And the model that keeps bothering me is the one where we perform all the labor and someone else rakes in the cash.

When we use online: Google, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc., we do all the work. They provide the materials, from few to many, and we use the tools. The more who use, the better these sites become known and the larger they grow.

Does it really matter if I use Photobucket, or Picasa or Flickr? All I want to do is put my pictures someplace so I can share them with my friends. Are there other sites like Facebook? Probably, I don't really care because I don't want to tell my business to the world.

But what happens when Facebook develops a real dollar value? What happens to all the laborers who worked so hard to build Facebook into a place where everyone books his face? Do the people with the most friends get a cut of the money? What about Twitter? Will Ashton Kutcher take his 3,000,000 followers and leave to twittererer someplace else if someone doesn't pay up?

Is our labor worth anything, or do we just work the fields and never share in the bounty of the harvest? After all, someone feeds and clothes us, and rarely beats us; isn't that payment enough?

Has anyone ever thought to unionize Facebook users or Twittererers?

Why I am a slave, or Why the Matrix is real...

A post on The Atlantic Monthly, The Market for Privacy, says,

The erosion of historical notions of privacy at the hands of commerce is almost inexorable, ultimately because of Moore’s Law. You don’t need eavesdropping or other surveillance techniques when the infrastructure by which you communicate, travel, and buy things generates data as a by-product of each of these activities. This, much more than government spies, is the primary driver of lack of privacy.

The loss of privacy has been incremental. Only those of us who witnessed the time before the loss of privacy can perceive it; others born into this modern police state and indoctrinated since birth have lost the vision (or never acquired it), like being born behind the Berlin Wall as opposed to having it built in front of your eyes.

Like living in a Dean Koontz story, we see monsters.

I've been saying this for ten years: people will tell a website their name, zip code and how often they masturbate, but if the government wants to know your favorite flavor of ice cream, they suddenly invoke the Bill of Rights' protections.

The author then asks the question,

But what if I had the practical ability to charge commercial entities for access to or use of information of this sort? It would, first, go from a free good to a scarcer resource, and second, I could protect those parts of my transaction history that I feel to be most sensitive. In effect, we need a functioning market into which I can sell my transaction history.

Again, I tell people that we should all incorporate ourselves and trademark our lives as artists and claim those protections that corporations claim, that my private and web activities are trade secrets, and even my public activities are protected by copyright because I am an artist and each moment of my life has a real economic value. And we could brand ourselves and tattoo little registered trademark ® and copyright symbols © on our bodies.

But again, we lost these rights long ago, when the first of us donned that Nike logo tee-shirt and did not bill the Nike Company for our labors. We fucked up, and now we are slaves.

The Effing Librarian goes to Washington.

Now that I've seen that New York Times op-ed piece ("Pay Me for My Content") on how Facebook, MySpace, Google owe us payment for our labors,

"Most of the big names in the industry — Google, Facebook, MySpace and increasingly even Apple and Microsoft — are now in the business of assembling content from unpaid Internet users to sell advertising to other Internet users."

I'm wondering if there are already law firms out there filing documents in preparation for a huge class action lawsuit against the social networking sites, anticipating that gigantic payoff.

If so, based on my blogging, I'm looking forward to being subpoenaed:

Lawyer: The Effing Librarian. Is Effing your first name?

Me: Morfle lorfle forfle torfle.

Lawyer: Could you please remove the paper bag from over your head?

Me: Mmmf. (I remove the bag partway so my mouth is exposed) Could you repeat the question?

Lawyer: Is Effing your first name?

Me: I'm afraid I can't answer that on grounds it may incriminate me.

Another degree of Slavery

This is cool. Adobe is going to make a free version of Photoshop available on the Web.

Like Adobe Remix, the hosted Photoshop service is set to be free and marketed as an entry-level version of Adobe's more sophisticated image-editing tools, including Photoshop and Photoshop Elements.

I can't wait. Since I already work for Google and Facebook and LibraryThing for free, I need another company to exploit my labors.

Obviously, the trend it to have us use programs that increase visibility for corporations (free advertising), yet allow them to maintain brand solvency. We edit photos which tag them with the product information and possibly unique markers which allow for the company to build a searchable database of items, and we do this work for free. Then the corporation can use that database to expand its capital by quantifying the value of the assets in dollars. We labor for no payment; they profit. I think that's slavery. Or serfdom.

We are told that use of the product is payment. My profile in Facebook allows me to meet other nerds. My Gmail allows me to update other nerds on the progress of the Watchmen movie. And all these things have a specific dollar value to these companies that is not equal to the utility provided to me. If Facebook is valued at $15 billion and there are 15 billion users, I guess I don't feel so bad that my profile is worth a dollar: I shouldn't feel that they exploit me then. But if the number of users means that my profile is worth $250, I want my cut. In cash.

So I look forward to another company exploiting the working class. Because soon we will rise up. Rise up. Rise up! Well, not me. I just had one-too-many beers and I'm feeling sleepy (yes, I know it's 7 a.m., so what.) But you go ahead. I'll catch up later. Power, baby.


But as far as the program is concerned, I'm looking forward to it. I need help. I suck at using layers. I can only think one-dimensionally.

I really want to use the program to edit all of my Kate Jackson photos: remember, she was the smart Angel, Sabrina Duncan. I always wanted to be smart like her, except I wanted Farrah's hair. And now that I'm a beautiful, successful librarian, both my wishes have come true.

Why I am a slave.

So I watched that Information R/evolution video, and something looked familiar, and I remembered that we just got that Everything is Miscellaneous book by David Weinberger, so I ran and grabbed it off the shelf. And this is why I am a slave in the new digital world:

The jacket flap on Weinberger's book says,

Information is most valuable when it is thrown into a big digital "pile" to be filtered and organized by users themselves.

Instead of relying on experts, groups of passionate users are inventing their own ways of discovering what they know and want.

Smart companies do not treat information as an asset to be guarded, but let it loose to be "mashed up," gaining market awareness and customer loyalty.

And that is why I am a slave. Companies are letting me do all the work for free while they increase market share by becoming more visible.

It's like when kids started wearing t-shirts with company logos on them, and I'd ask if the company paid them to wear and advertise their product, and the kid said, no, I just like the shirt. It didn't seem like a big deal, but it's evolved into another aspect of them against us. The corporations slowly conditioned us to accept our role. Sure, they might pay a celebrity to wear a corporate logo, but millions of us do it for free.

The companies own the tools and trademarks, but say, look how cool this is, and then we play, and they get rich.

This is not some paranoid conspiracy. This is just the truth. And there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Facebook was just valued at 15 billion dollars. Why? Because people use it. And people populate the site with personal data. There is the value. But how do the users share in those billions? The billions that couldn't exist without them? Do the billions in any way relate to the utility? Is Facebook a better product today than it was last year? Search engines are the same way. If Google is worth 185 billion, again, most of that is from current and future revenue based on people using the search engine and viewing ads, the shareholders gain from that; but what of the users. You could argue that the quality of the product is the benefit to the users, but is that really a satisfactory answer? The Internet exists with or without Facebook or Google and the other search tools. I don't need a search tool to find eBay or Overstock; I saw the ads on TV.

As librarians, as experts in information retrieval, I can see why everyone thinks we are unnecessary, that they can make sense of this disorderly "digital pile" of data themselves. Disorder is just as natural as order, so most people think order is just as easy as disorder. But the Internet is like a game of 52 Pick-Up; it's like a thousand games of 52 Pick-Up. Disorder is too easy. One of the ideas from the book seems to be that from this seeming disorder, will come order. And I don't doubt that. But I have little faith that any of us will see the same benefits that the information holders will.

The new world of digital data has no logical place with no definite location. Is this information? People are free to tag this data however they wish, without experts restricting how the data are categorized. But people are lazy. A search for DSCF0001, a generic identifier for a digital picture, turns up over 150,000 items. So people are not renaming their digital photos with any significant file names. How many more people are tagging their photos with "fun" or "omfg"? And that doesn't account for all those who can't spell. And even with a free spellchecker such as the one built in to this text editor, I let misspellings slip.

One part of that video shows the line, "together we created more information than the experts." But do we own it? Without the search tools, will you ever be able to find it? Information has become a true commodity, and the value of that commodity, unlike traditional commodities, relies on it being endless. Information is no longer just valuable because only a few people know it, but also because many access it. What are we paid for this labor?

I'm not saying this for nothing; people need experts. If there is no future for librarians, will I become some kind of techno-terrorist raiding the world's information archives? "Information needs to be free," we will cry, "and if it will not be free, we will destroy it." I think there's a novel in there somewhere.

I haven't read that book, yet, but I wanted to get some of my ideas out so I wouldn't forget them. And anyway, this is a blog with no pretense at being anything except my own crazy thoughts. You don't come here for enlightenment; you can go pretty much anywhere else for that. You come here because you thank God you're not me. And you come here for the pie.