Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Paying For It (the dislike club part II)

Episode Date: November 25, 2014

Our mini-series about the internet continues. This week we take a close look at the fundamental business model of the web – advertising. In 1993  your host was a founding member of an international monkey wrench gang that fought billboards in outer space. He recently ran into one of his old comrades in Midtown-South (Manhattan’s tech district) and discovered that his side actually lost the war. Ethan Zuckerman, the man who invented the pop up ad, admits that we must rethink the fundamentals of the web, and activist, writer, and filmmaker Astra Taylor questions whether the internet actually benefits independent creators. The Dislike Club is  a story-in-progress, it will play out on the podcast over the next few weeks and then culminate December 21 on Radiotonic, from ABC RN’s Creative Audio Unit.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Paying for It. The internet promised that it would empower independent media makers like myself, that we would finally get out of the clutches of this cabal of media executives. And yet, things aren't that different. as an independent filmmaker and a writer. I don't feel that amazingly empowered. Activist, writer, and filmmaker Astra Taylor has been championing independent thinking, social justice, and alternative media since she was 12 years old. Back then she had her own zine, Care. Kids for animal rights and the environment. And

she personally distributed it to bookshops and health food co-ops. I sent it to the Vegetarian Times and they listed it in the back, which to me was like being on Good Morning America. This was before the internet. Today, that kid could easily create a Care Facebook page or a Care Twitter account. But in her new book, The People's Platform, Astra Taylor questions whether the internet has actually changed anything for independent creators.

I was very surprised that I started thinking about technology. This is not something that I identified as. I didn't identify as a geek. I wasn't somebody who lived for my computer. But technology is interested in you in this world, right? You can't get away from technology. It's the sea we're all swimming in. It's like everything we do from, you know, our love lives to our jobs to our filmmaking is all mediated through the internet right now. And so as my second film, Examined Life, was being released in late 2008, 2009, it was kind of the peak of the Web 2.0 hype about how artists were going to seize the means

of production. That is, I suppose, what was so striking to me. The fact that there was this potential outlet, the web, and yet I wanted to still go through an independent distributor and still show my film at cinemas and still do a kind of conventional release. And this reached a head when some people somehow got an advanced copy of my film and they cut it into little bits and they uploaded it onto YouTube. And I wrote them all very nicely, and I said, would you take it down for a couple months?

I'm really happy you like the film, because I want to do a theatrical release. And once that's done, you can put it back up. And they basically told me they weren't going to take it down, in no uncertain terms. And in fact, they were very offended that I had the gall to ask. And they told me philosophy is free, and therefore, this film that I spent two years making belongs to everybody.

At the time when I was having these back channel conversations with these YouTube uploaders, I was attending a lot of Web 2.0 internet conferences. And many of these speakers who were writing articles and writing best-selling books were saying, this is going to be great. All you have to do is put your stuff online and wait for it to get popular and wait for it to go viral.

And then the world will be your oyster. Resources will follow. Brand partnerships will follow. You'll have it made. In a way, Astra is like the smart little kid in that story about the emperor and his new clothes. She's showed up for the parade, but she can't muster the enthusiasm or adulation our new Silicon Valley overlords demand of us. As they march by, tossing shiny gadgets into the crowd and trumpeting ideas like open, participatory, and free, Astra Taylor has the courage to raise her voice above the din

and say, really? There really is no such thing as free online because we're actually all paying with our attention and our data. And there's an enormous and growing digital economy based on advertising. I mean, Google is ultimately at its root an advertising company. So is Tumblr. So is Facebook. We are the product that these companies are selling. So all of our contributions, be they just our conversations with our friends or films that we've worked on for a long time, are being

fed into this advertising machine. I did not become an independent filmmaker, an independent journalist, to become, you know, a handmaiden of marketers. That goes against the entire grain of what I'm doing and what I stand for. And yet, I'm told over and over and over again by people who are professional technology pundits and commentators on our culture today, that the only thing to do is to embrace this tendency. So yeah, sign up with YouTube and put the ads on your videos, or better yet, partner with brands, you know, and let them subsidize you. These are the new Medici's of our age. But no company partners with you without an agenda and their agenda is increasing their reach increasing their market share and increasing their power a filmmaker was talking about how great it

was that his film was sponsored by a cell phone company and how much creative freedom he had so I watched it and every 90 seconds someone was caressing this brand of cell phone. I was also watching a short mini documentary on a popular site the other day that was about the music scene in my hometown. And it was sponsored by a beer manufacturer. And so here are all my friends being interviewed, and they're playing in the clubs I went to as a teenager. But there are all these loving shots of the beer light and the beer cups and the beer mugs. And it just, it just seems so sad that that is what we're told to embrace. I could actually live with that being one corner

of our cultural realm, but the fact that we've decided that that is our cultural realm is very depressing to me, especially because it coincides with having this amazing new technology. It's like we have electronic telepathy, and yet we're still stuck in this old-fashioned model where the beer commercial has to pop up before we can have our conversation. It just seems there seems to be a huge disjunction there. And the idea that the technology is somehow going to subvert the dictates of this funding structure to me is totally absurd. I think of advertising dollars online as a kind of artificial fertilizer. Like they just, they grow, it helps like the daisies grow, you know?

And it's like soft little inoffensive flowers when what we need are like, we need thistles, we need things that are pokey and unappealing and more wild, you know? And it just, it makes the entire cultural, more sort of compliant and safe. It has a distorting effect on art. We have completely succumbed to the advertising model. And we are all in these commercial partnerships because that's the model that's funding the entire internet. So if I use Twitter today, ultimately I'm in this advertising economy. So I want us to start thinking about how we excise ourselves from that or just at least create some spaces that are non-commercial and also digital. Despite all the talk about new business models and new opportunities online, the models that we're being encouraged to embrace are depressingly retrograde.

Partnering with brands is a diminished utopianism. It doesn't house us, it doesn't clothe us, it doesn't feed us. Advertising doesn't make the world more beautiful. It doesn't make the world more enlightened or inspiring. It's a future that I think we should say no to. In 1993, a company called Space Marketing Incorporated announced plans to launch an advertisement into outer space. A luminous billboard that would orbit the Earth. A logo visible to anyone and everyone who raised their eyes up to the heavens.

Space Marketing tried to keep its client's name under wraps, but rumors circulated. McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Exxon, Pizza Hut, Walmart, Nike. But as the rumors spread, they fueled a revolutionary cause, an international anti-advertising movement, a space-age monkey wrench gang dedicated to stopping the launch of this ad by any means necessary. I was a founding member of the Bozeman, Montana chapter, and we met regularly to discuss what could be done. Bombs, catapults, lasers. There was even a former astrology professor willing and able to hijack the rocket and sacrifice his life to ensure that humanity would be spared this abomination.

But then, one day the project was called off and Space Marketing Incorporated disappeared. After a few celebratory drinks, we disbanded our revolutionary cell. I never saw anyone from that time again. Until the other day. I was walking up Broadway, staring at my iPhone, when a man riding a city bike jumped a curb in front of me.

He ripped off his Beats headphones and shouted out, Benjamin, is that you? It's David, one of my old comrades. For a second, I think this must be a sign from above, because I've been having so much trouble getting this dislike club thing off the ground. With David, I won't be the only member anymore. But as I moved to embrace him, I noticed the giant crocodile on his shirt. Now, back in the day, David outright refused to wear any article of

clothing adorned with a logo, even undergarments. He was militant. In fact, when Naomi Klein talked about the activist she met researching her 1999 book No Logo, I always assumed that she must have crossed paths with him. But here he was, standing in front of me, wearing one of those new Lacoste shirts, one specifically designed for the Asian market, where small logos are unacceptable. He notices that I'm staring. Don't be a hater, he says. Just because I have a bigger crock than you, don't be a hater, bro. As David locks up his city bike, he informs me that he had just come from a meeting at Facebook. They are going to license my ad tech, bro. Do you know what that means? I nod my head and bump his outstretched fist with mine, but to tell you the truth,

I am totally clueless. David insists that I come directly to his office in the meatpacking district and see with my own eyes just how awesome his new advertising tech is. And before I can say anything, he calls an Uber. The office turns out to be a desk at one of those new co-working spaces near the water. I love it here, David says. Everyone here is like the CE bro of their own personal brand. The secret project turns out to be a piece of code that David calls the stalker ad. When he sees I'm having trouble following, he breaks it down for me. Say you want to stalk a woman, he says.

Well, if she catches you trailing her at work or at the gym or at her apartment, she's just going to get freaked out. She might even call the cops. Any real stalker understands that in order to gain a woman's trust or respect, he must always be one step ahead. When she shows up at the club, he has to already be there. When she walks into the supermarket, his shopping cart should already be half full. And when she goes to the gym, he should already be a mile in on the treadmill next to the one she likes to use. There is no

ambiguity in the message. Resistance is futile. There's nowhere to hide. We are meant to be together. This, David shouts out, is how real stalkers play the game. So,

you are doing this with ads, I ask? Yes, he replies. And Facebook just agreed to put it to use. Next month, we'll be doing a massive test with a multinational client. But don't ask to tell me who it is, bro. I can't do that. But you can guess. It shouldn't be that hard. McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Exxon, Pizza Hut, Walmart, Nike. Ads are miserable, right? I mean, they suck. No one likes them. We've all trained ourselves not to click on them. And so to try to convince investors that ads are somehow going to be worth money, because it's very clear that no one likes them, no one wants to encounter them,

we've had to make them more and more intrusive and we've functionally had to put people under surveillance so we have to watch the other websites you've been to we have to promise that we're setting up a demographic and psychographic profile for you we have to watch and see that you decided not to buy this pair of socks on amazon.com and then we're going to chase you around the rest of the web to try to hound you down until that moment where you finally purchase the goddamn socks. We are now under commercial surveillance at sort of virtually all time. Ethan Zuckerman is the director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT. When we first met in 2004, he just co-founded Global Voices, a platform for international bloggers and activists. Ethan's always been one of my favorite writers about the potential and promise of the internet.

But lately, he's been doing a lot of thinking about the past, the early gold rush days of the web. So let's roll back to 1996. It was a simpler time. In 1996, Ethan was the chief tech guy for one of the first big commercial web platforms, Tripod.com. Tripod started life offering people free homepages. And so most of our content was what at that point was called UGC, user generated content. And this was very scary for advertisers. They were used to the idea that they could buy an ad in time. And of course, there would be high quality editorial content around it. But who knew what you were going to get if you had users putting up homepages? Maybe it would be libelous. Maybe it would be scandalous.

And this is where our CEO came to me and said, look, we've got a really serious problem. Ford found an ad banner running on a site that had gay porn on it. And they freaked out and they pulled their ads with us, fixed the problem. And I ended up sort of coming up with the idea of the pop-up ad. Yeah, Ethan Zuckerman is the guy who invented the pop-up ad.

He admits to this in an article he wrote recently for the Atlantic's technology site. Ethan and I were actually emailing about this piece before it went up, so I knew that he was hoping it would lead to some serious discussion about advertising, the fundamental business model of the web. But that is not what happened.

What happened was a number of news outlets picked up on the detail that I had confessed to inventing the pop-up ad, and then that ran as a little story on CNN money, and it got picked up by like 40 outlets in 12 hours. And at that point, my phone sort of started to ring off the hook with people, you know, asking if I would come on the radio or come on television and admit to my crimes. And so I decided just to stop responding to this. I actually sort of went offline because I was starting to get tweets and email

that were actually quite vicious, including in a couple of cases, death threats. I saw that Ethan Zuckerman, the guy who created the internet pop-up ad, is finally apologizing 20 years after his invention was introduced. Yeah, unfortunately, still no word from the guy who invented Adobe Flash Player. Even Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Fallon made fun of Ethan. But after a few days, people found someone else to hate and the internet moved

on. And Ethan came out of hiding. When I finally came back online, I tried to read all the hate mail. I tried to read everyone who'd sort of responded to me. And out of the whole thing, my favorite tweet came from some new Twitter user. He was an egg icon, so it was pretty new. And it just said, Ethan Z, I do not accept your apology. This is your Frankenstein monster. You should be able to kill it. You know, my first reaction was, okay, here's somebody who just doesn't know anything, right? Like, you have no idea how little power I have in the world. There's, like, no way that I can decree that we're going to stop using pop-up ads. But then the longer I sort of thought about it, the more I sort of felt like, no, no, no, I actually like, I think he has it right.

I think we're way too accepting of aspects of our lives that just don't work very well. I think all of us sort of go through life interacting with really badly screwed up, broken systems and just sort of going, okay, that's the way it is. I'm on the web some scary number of hours a day. And the right side of my window is filled with ads I don't want for things I will never buy that I have edited out of my head. And 99.99% of the time, I just ignore that because that's the way the world is. And I'm sure on some level, there's a logic that sort of brought us to that place. But it's really only that 0.01% of the time that I sort of look at this and go, this is crazy.

Facebook, by virtue of being utterly massive, makes money off of advertising. The trick is that our attention to Facebook is worth an incredibly modest amount of money. It ends up being in the neighborhood of a dollar per quarter. And so what this sort of says is that Facebook is able to survive as an advertising entity by capturing some tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of our attention and selling it to an advertiser. I think for people who use and love Facebook, I'm not one of them, but I am someone who uses and loves Twitter. If you said to me, hey, Ethan, you can have Twitter for a dollar a month from now to eternity, and no advertising, we won't collect your data, and we won't sell it to you,

I would sign up in an instant. And I think you might get enough people to do it that you would have a profitable service. What you would not have is a service that could promise that it's a billion-dollar business this year and a $10 billion business in three years and a $100 billion business further out. And that's why they won't do it. It's not that it's a bad business. It's just that it's a limited business.

It's a service, and it's people paying for the service. And that's not the sort of fantastic dreams that people have for these networks. There are alternatives. Well, that's been the message I've always walked away with every time I've had the pleasure of talking with my friend, Ethan Zuckerman. But as he turns his attention to advertising, the fundamental business model of the web, Ethan Zuckerman. But as he turns his attention to advertising,

the fundamental business model of the web, I can't help but note a new sense of frustration and urgency. A sense that soon it'll be too late. I really want to think about how we change this on a very deep and fundamental level. When I wanted to figure out how to make it possible for a political activist in Malaysia to have a web page, I was not thinking, how am I going to put him under surveillance and try to figure out how to sell him socks that he doesn't want to buy? But that was the unintended consequence of sort of where I went with it. We are just far too accepting of that

as an ordinary everyday reality. And I'm just sort of wondering when we sort of look at this and say, you know what, this just isn't a good way to support most of the web. For most of what we want to do, we just have to do Walker Theory of Everything. This installment is called Paying for It. This is part two of a special Theory of Everything miniseries called The Dislike Club.

It's a story in progress that's playing out on the podcast over the next few weeks, and it will culminate December 21st on Radiotonic from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's RN's Creative Audio Unit. This installment featured Astra Taylor and Ethan Zuckerman. The program was produced by myself,

Benjamin Walker, with sound design from Bill Bowen. Special thanks to Erica Lance and Mathilde Biot. The Theory of Everything is a founding member of Radiotopia, the world's best storytelling, listener-funded podcast network.