Brokenland Note:
In the Club
4 June 2015
An Op-Ed piece about advertising in today’s Times caught my eye — you bet it did. Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, addresses her essay to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and implores him to let her pay for her access to the social network. She argues that even if a quarter of Facebook’s users paid one dollar a month to subscribe, the company would be far more profitable than, making about twenty cents per user per month, it is now. Why should we pay? To gain access untainted by the refractions of advertising, of course. We should no longer be steered this way and that by Facebook algorithms designed to soften us up to respond to advertising. We should merely connect with one another, which is what a lot of people mistakenly think is actually happening.
And, if Tufekci’s argument is correct, Facebook’s shareholders would be richer. But, Tufekci notes, there is a strong structural bias against making such a change. Her explanation is interesting.
Micropayment systems that would allow users to spend a few cents here and there, not be so easily tracked by all the Big Brothers, and even allow personalization were developed in the early days of the Internet. Big banks and large Internet platforms didn’t show much interest in this micropayment path, which would limit their surveillance abilities.
Why would “big banks and large Internet platforms” worry about their surveillance abilities? We can be sure that they do, because of their cringing response to Bitcoin. But why? And, assuming that platforms such as Facebook would make more money from the micropayment model than from the advertising model, why is there so little interest in giving it a try?
Thinking about this led me pretty quickly to the Dark Ages. Yes, it’s time once again to stroll out to left field.
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The received opinion about the Dark Ages — the long stretch between “the Roman Empire” (forums) and “the High Middle Ages” (cathedrals) — is that the “collapse of the Roman Empire” left the people of Europe unprotected against “invading barbarian hordes,” who raped and pillaged &c. Eventually, these barbarians settled down and got respectable. Charlemagne! Then there was a second wave of invading barbarian hordes. The newly respectable kings fought this second wave and eventually defeated it. This time, things settled down enough for everybody to take off for the Holy Land and the Crusades. (More fighting, please note.) Meanwhile, Christian bishops and priests did what they could to keep culture alive, if not exactly robust. The Dark Ages were dystopian and apolcalyptic — nobody was ever really safe — but they get their name from the fact that records, when they were kept at all, were often lost, and we don’t actually know what happened when. Or we know just a few things.
The foregoing account is not wrong, but it is incomplete: it leaves out the formation of the European aristocracy. The things that we associate with aristocracy, such as hereditary titles, estates, precedents, and positions at court, did not develop until the very end of the Dark Ages. During the preceding six or seven centuries, it was, more simply, a class of warriors that arrogated violence unto itself by what we should call the continual upgrade of weapons. When the horse became essential to the fighting man’s armory, membership in the warrior class was confined to those who could raise the money to pay for the animals — to buy, feed, and train them. And there was only one way to raise that kind of money. At a time when nobody got rich in business, money came almost exclusively from agricultural rents. (Wealth, I ought to say. There was very little money.) Long before the hereditary nature of aristocracy was sorted out, membership in the club of warriors was limited to armed men on horses. It would take the leveling effect of gunpowder to put an end to this racket.
The more I read about the Dark Ages, and the more I think about the period, the more gratuitous all that fighting becomes. Warding off barbarian hordes? The size of the hordes was grossly exaggerated. And for a long time they were bought, not fought, off. Distant rulers would direct that a portion of local taxes be distributed to the newcomers — a convenient arrangement that further splintered the late Empire. No, the fighting was not defensive. It was expansionary. Take another look at Charlemagne. Charlemagne’s grandfather, Charles Martel, turned back the Moorish invasion of France at Tours, in 732. Charlemagne himself would become the invader: of Bavaria and other German territories, of Northern Italy, and, famously, of Spain. Why? Why not.
There was nothing else to do. The Dark Ages were characterized by an ecclesiastical monoculture: the Catholic Church exercised a monopoly on cultural activities such as architecture and literacy as well as on the social regulation of marriage and morals. Everything that the Church did was a kind of prayer. By the Tenth Century, you either worked, prayed, or fought. The fighters were sanctioned by the theory that they were defending the priests and the serfs. More recently, this kind of defending is called “protection.”
Now, as we say goodbye to the Dark Ages, I want you to imagine modern warriors. Imagine that you are alone with two baseball players. One is a Yankee, the other a member of the Red Sox. On the field, each these men will do everything he can (within the rules) to best the other. But do you suppose for an instant that either of them is going to prefer you to the other player as a best bud? So it was with the warriors of the Dark Ages. So it was with the aristocrats whose swan song was the July Crisis in 1914. World War I was no more necessary than a baseball game.
And so it is, I venture to suggest, with the men and woman who are bagging seven- and eight-figure salaries today. Where does all that money come from? Increasingly, it comes from twenty cents per user per month, from serfs like you and me who produce pathetically small gains that, properly aggregated, make a small club of superpeople rich. If we were allowed to sell those gains ourselves, in the form of micropayment subscriptions — if the advertising model were as passé as feudal violence — there would be much more commercial opportunity for everyone and much less accumulation for anyone.
Can you see why those banks and platforms aren’t interested in micropayments. They’re not interested in us, not at all. They’re great friends — and rivals — just as things are.
Zeynep Tufekci tells us that Mark Zuckerberg has spent thirty million dollars to acquire the homes adjacent to his own. That’s one way to achieve privacy — a pretty offensive one, don’t you think?