The Sacking of The Libraries

Imagine if you will a scene in which a young Southern California boy and his mother are about to enter the Norwalk Library sometime during an evening of a school year shortly before the advent of the Internet.  (Note: I have nothing against the Norwalk Library - it's just that I happen to know where it is because I used to live in So. Cal.)  Let's say that the mom has taken the boy to the library so that he may search for books on treatments for mange in animals such as dogs and cats.  Let's also say that the boy needs this information in order to write a book report (remember those?) for his middle-school biology class.  However, just as the boy and his mom cross the threshold, a mysterious space-time bubble phenomenon transports them to a library built 50 or 60 years into the future.  Imagine that libraries of the future have been shaped by the evolution of commercial culture in ways that could not have been imagined by our hapless boy and mom pair.  

Thus, when the boy and mom go to an information terminal to look for books on veterinary medicine, the first thing they see is not the location of the books they desire, but rather a screenful of paid ads for vets, pet stores, pet treats, pet grooming supplies, cat and dog clothes, etc.  Bemused and befuddled by the screen, the boy and mom start walking around the library in search of a librarian.  Once they find her, they ask where the books on veterinary science are located.  The librarian asks whether they want to buy some dog or cat food while they are at the library, explaining that she gets a commission from every sale she makes.  Oh, and by the way, would they like a recommendation for a vet?  Perhaps some "natural, drug-free remedies"? Or maybe some shampoo?  In a state of both mounting confusion and mounting frustration, the mother of the boy grumbles that she is just looking for books written by veterinary authorities so that her son can write a book report for school.  "Besides," the mom says, "our family doesn't have any pets!"  Grudgingly, the librarian leads the mom and her son to the bookshelves that contain books on veterinary science and diseases in pets.  However, the boy and mom notice that most of these books are actually coupon books advertising veterinary services and pet hospitals in Southern California!  In desperation the boy and mom walk out, wondering what on earth happened to their library.  As they are walking through the parking lot to their car, a man sidles up to them and says, "I noticed that you were looking for information on treating mange.  You must like pets! I have some hamsters in the trunk of my car, and I'm willing to let you have one for a special low price..."

Although this scene may sound far-fetched, I'd like to suggest that this perverse "library of the future" accurately describes the state into which our society has increasingly evolved, and that this is a consequence of the monetization of information exchange.  The prime example of this is the evolution of the internet from its inception until now.  This evolution has been especially rapid and widespread during the last seven or eight years.  Perceptive souls can remember a time in which information that was transmitted electronically was not monetized, and those who provided information via the World Wide Web did so for reasons that had little to do with financial gain.  Indeed, the explosive growth of free exchange of information that occurred during the 1990's was a consequence not only of the growth of the Web, but also of the growth of the availability of technologies that allowed people to bypass traditional gatekeepers in order to publish their own creative content.  A case in point is the miniaturization and lowering of cost of technologies for recording and storage that allowed musicians to mass-produce recordings of their own performances without having to sign on to a record label.  (In fact, I own a few self-published CD's from such "indie" artists.)  Such technologies for self-publishing became known as "democratizing technologies" because they allowed large numbers of ordinary people to publish their creative content without needing access to costly centralized infrastructure.

The internet was originally born out of the need for large governmental agencies and public research institutions to share information easily and cheaply.  Yet the internet swiftly became one of the most powerful democratizing technologies, since it drastically reduced the cost any individual had to pay to reach a large audience quickly.  Moreover, the culture and worldview of the original architects of the internet prioritized its democratizing nature.  To quote from an Atlantic article titled, "The Rotting Internet Is A Collective Hallucination":

"The internet’s distinct architecture arose from a distinct constraint and a distinct

freedom: First, its academically minded designers didn’t have or expect to raise

massive amounts of capital to build the network; and second, they didn’t want or

expect to make money from their invention.  The internet’s framers thus had no money to simply roll out a uniform centralized network ... Instead, they settled on the equivalent

of rules for how to bolt existing networks together.

"Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system,

operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow

any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able

to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party. And because the

network’s creators did not mean to monetize, much less monopolize, any of it, the key

was for desirable content to be provided naturally by the network’s users, some of

whom would act as content producers or hosts, setting up watering holes for others to

frequent." (Emphasis added.)

Because access to the original internet was not centrally owned or controlled, the internet became self-curating.  In other words, websites naturally began to be ranked according to how many people found their content to be interesting or useful.  A website thus gathered many hits by being genuinely good.  Thus the early internet became a legitimate source of edification, education, often extremely high-quality information, and exhilaratingly interesting conversation between people who might not otherwise have connected with each other.  

But then certain individuals began to see how they could make money from this sudden outburst of connection and conversation.  The first monetizers were creators of centralized platforms for connecting people to each other.  These creators exploited a weakness of the proto-internet, namely the need for early participants to have somewhat deep knowledge of programming languages and things like Java and HTML.  Since most people did not have this knowledge, they welcomed such platforms as MySpace and Facebook which allowed people to connect with each other electronically without needing deep coding knowledge.  Once most users of the internet were aggregated by the owners of these platforms, it was only natural for corporations and capitalists to seek to monetize these platforms.  At first the monetization was rather clunky and clumsy.  (Remember when big corporations like the Ford Motor Company or Eaton were urging us to "like them on Facebook"?)  But the eventual form taken by platform monetization consisted of pushing advertising (both of the obvious kind and of more subtle, sneaky kinds) on these platforms.

Within the last seven or eight years, this pushing of advertising has conquered its final frontier: the monetization of search engines.  This is certainly true of Google (who are now owned by Alphabet Inc.).  But it is also true of Duck Duck Go, Bing, Brave, Smartpage, Yahoo, and every other advertiser-supported search provider.  Thus when one conducts a Web search using any of these engines, the top results are usually either ads or are webpages that have been monetized by hosting ads on them.  The mission of these advertiser-supported search platforms has thus changed from helping people effectively search for information.  The mission now is to direct people to advertising packaged as clickbait.  I'd like to suggest that this is leading to certain consequences which have possibly not been foreseen by the monetizers.

The first of these consequences is the increase in transaction costs, that is the costs involved in exchanges taking place in a given economy.   To quote from Transaction Costs, Institutions and Economic Performance by Douglass C. North:

"It is the cost of measuring the valuable attributes of the goods and services or the performance of agents in exchange that is the fundamental key to the cost of transacting."

In other words, in making an economic transaction between two parties, each party must spend time and resources to accurately determine what kind of value and how much of this value they are likely to get from the transaction.  When each side has unbiased information from impartial sources, the transaction costs are relatively low.  When the only information that is available comes from paid advertisers, the transaction costs become much higher, because part of the transaction costs consists of spending time trying to figure out how much the information sources are lying.  Case in point: about fifteen or twenty years ago, manufacturers of health supplements began to tout the health benefits of fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS).  Some of the things these manufacturers said began to be of interest to people suffering from intestinal disorders.  However, these sufferers were forced to take what they were hearing with a massive grain of salt, because some of the claims made about FOS were outlandish.  In order to make an informed decision regarding FOS, some of these sufferers turned to the internet, where they encountered a massive amount of unbelievable claims.  These sufferers were stymied until they discovered that FOS is also called inulin (not insulin), and they began to do Web searches with the keyword "inulin."  That was when they found the peer-reviewed papers from research institutions that enabled them to make an informed decision.  (Note: since then, things have undergone a further mutation.  Supplement manufacturers discovered that people were researching inulin and that searches for information on FOS were falling off.  So now these manufacturers have modified their Web advertising to push the fact that their products contain "inulin."  "A rose by any other name...")  From this we see the general principle that when people are faced with decisions regarding transactions that have potentially large consequences (either because of the money that must be spent or the effect of the transaction or both), an increase in transaction costs resulting from a decline in the quality of available information about the transaction leads to a decrease in the number and rate of transactions.  Or to put it simply, if when you walk into a market, you know that all the sellers in the market are lying to you, you tend to not want to spend your money.

The second consequence is a decrease in connected conversations resulting from the restriction of the free flow of free (as in free coffee) information.  Monetization of information flows often means that valuable and useful information is locked behind paywalls guarded by rent-seeking corporations.  This is especially true of the kind of academic knowledge formerly disseminated free of charge by publicly funded research institutions.  The flow of this knowledge is increasingly controlled by gatekeepers such as Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons Inc., the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and Science Direct.   The combination of monetization of the channels of conversation (through advertising) and monetization of the valuable things that may arise in any potential conversation (through rent-seeking and paywalls) produces a decrease in productive conversation.  This leads to a decrease in innovation within a society.  To see how innovation in the United States and the West has begun to decline, click here and here.  Note especially how at least one of these sources mentions the restriction of the free flow of information.  Also, a fictional case of this decrease can be found in a recent novel called Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang.  (Ms. Hao has a bachelors degree in physics and a doctorate in economics, is a mother of two, a social entrepreneur, a scholar who is part of a think tank in China, and a member of a new wave of Chinese science-fiction writers who have crafted extremely strong, thought-provoking and awesomely good stories.  More on the Chinese sci-fi phenomenon in another post.)  In that novel, set in the 22nd century, Mars has been colonized by humans (sorry, Elon Musk, but Ms. Hao doesn't mention you at all), and has successfully fought a war of independence to break away from the government and economy of Earth.  In her novel, Earth's economy is described as a hyper-monetized "information economy" obsessed with guarding "intellectual property" while the Martians have created a society of free information exchange in which citizens make contributions motivated solely by their desire to create.  As a result, the Martian society becomes more advanced technologically while Earth begins to stagnate.  Although this is a fictional example, I would argue that it reflects what is seen in real life in organizations, institutions, and societies in which the free flow of information is constrained.  Our problem in the West, particularly in the United States, is that we have failed to recognize the constraints which our very own hyper-capitalist system imposes on our own ability to have the sort of cross-disciplinary, spontaneous conversations in which disparate ideas collide to produce innovation.  The internet in its early days began to provide a forum for those sorts of productive conversations, but the monetization of the internet has begun to choke off those conversations.

I predict that this choking off will lead (perhaps has already begun to lead) to a third consequence: an increasing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, and an increasing push by many people to "get back to the garden"; that is a push by many people to re-create spaces in which neither information nor the channels of conversation are monetized.  I don't believe that I'm the only person who is becoming tired of high transaction costs.  And I don't believe that I'm the only one who is looking for a way to build spaces of connectedness and conversation that are free from the corruption of advertising and rent-seeking.   But those of us who seek to build such spaces must know that we must pay a price in sweat equity (that is, our own hard work) to build such spaces.  They don't come for free.  As the old internet adage goes, "If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product."  Perhaps some will need to work to build spaces in realspace where conversations between diverse partners can arise.  Such spaces will be the strongest form of the revival I am thinking of.  But such spaces may also be virtual.  However, for such virtual spaces to arise, the participants will need to learn to do for themselves many things which they have been taught to take for granted due to the ease of using centralized platforms for connection such as social media.  In the absence of these platforms, people who want to build networks of conversation and information exchange will have to take themselves back to the mindset that built the internet in the first place.  Some of us may have to learn coding (especially HTML); some of us will have to learn how to build our own Web crawlers.  Some of us may have to read books or take courses to learn these things.  Whether in realspace or in cyberspace, it will be interesting to see the ways in which groups of people reclaim spaces for constructive conversation.