The Malaise
I only encounter subscription paywalls after clicking through to a single article that was linked to by someone else, or hurled in my direction by the various recommendation algorithms that manipulate and torment me on a daily basis.
I’m pretty sure it’s the same for you. I mean, since social media and algorithmic feeds took over the world, does anyone actually navigate directly to the homepage of a paywalled site, that they don’t already pay for?
Anyway, at the point of clicking that link to that article, I’ve decided to commit time to reading just that one article. Suddenly I’m told I can’t read just that one article, and instead must commit to a paid subscription. With this paid subscription, my commitment to read one article will balloon into a far larger commitment to read many additional articles.
My appetite for good writing1 in genres and on topics that I’m interested in, and the general availability of it, far outstrips the time I have available to read it. Consequently, I’m already crushed under the weight of a towering reading pile in the form of books and articles designated to be read later. For most of these books and articles, later will never come. The pile I must read grows far more rapidly than the pile I have read. My reading-list debt only gets deeper. So deep has this debt become, that I’ve admitted defeat, accepted I will never be able to haul myself out of it, and have declared total reading-list-bankruptcy.
The moment I’m faced with the online subscription button to initiate the payment process, the prospect of a commitment to add countless further, as yet unknown articles to my state of reading-list-bankruptcy, immediately spooks me out of subscribing, but also spooks me out of my initial commitment to read that one article I’d originally clicked through to read.
In other words, the predicament in which I find myself is that I’m faced with two problems. My first problem is that I’m already overwhelmed by an oversupply of content, one that is in fact entirely bottomless. My second problem is that despite my state of content-bankruptcy, I’ve decided I wish to consume this single additional article. One more article that just so happens to be placed out of reach, behind a paywall. One more article that was not already in my reading list. Access to even it alone, will deepen my bankruptcy. The time spent reading it could otherwise have been spent reading one from my existing debt. So the second problem itself already threatens to worsen the first, pushing me further into the red.
Wait, it gets worse. Faced with these two problems, I’m offered a solution. But only to my second problem (never the first). In order to access the one article, I must pay for a subscription and receive in addition, many further articles. While my second problem remained unsolved, my first problem remained unchanged. Now the solution to my second problem, promises to make my first problem significantly worse.
In short, once an article I wanted to read is placed behind a subscription paywall, access to it demands commitments of time and money far beyond the value of that initial article. I can neither afford nor justify in good conscience, subscribing to countless sources of content that I can never hope to consume.
There’s more to the psychological burden of the accumulation of unread content than financial pressures alone. It’s also time pressure. This pressure stems not only from the time required to read the articles, but also the overwhelming pace of the passage of time made manifest by the relentless arrival of new articles. This month’s interesting articles land before I’ve managed to make much of a dent in last month’s. It’s not just an accumulation of lost time or lost money, it’s an accumulation of regret, of missed opportunities, of paths untravelled, the growing stretch of road in the rear view mirror and a brutal reminder of the diminishing road ahead.
To avoid such an overwhelming backlog, I must be more ruthless when choosing what to add to my reading list, but subscriptions deprive me of that ability.
I believe these mounting time pressures are part of what drives so many of us into the dysfunctional embrace of microblogging and video shorts, and threaten to prevent us from allowing ourselves the time or space to consider anything deeply, leaving us merely skimming the surface wherever we direct our attention.
Is it just me, or does this whole subscription thing seem totally broken to you too? We wouldn’t stand for such an arrangement when we wanted to buy something to eat, or anything tangible for that matter. It’s a fair point that tangible goods are commonly packaged in bulk bags and sometimes unavailable individually, and tangible goods can sometimes be bought through subscription services that offer financial savings in exchange for a long term commitment. There are even tangible products that are only available if you subscribe, but it’s certainly the exception not the rule. It would mostly be viewed as a crazy business decision to refuse to sell customers the single tangible product they wanted and insist that the only way they can acquire it is to agree to ongoing payments. Payments far beyond the value of that single item, in exchange for the item they wanted and countless others that they never wanted at all. So why is this the accepted model for digital content?
In part at least, the problem is the fault of the banks (isn’t it always?) and the companies managing and processing online transactions. Everyone wants a bite of the cherry, so Micropayments —modest charges like 50p to read a single article— are rendered economically unviable as the transaction charges would outweigh the profits.
The Source
There’s been a lot of talk of late bemoaning the general state of the internet, a good deal of it a backlash against the 5000 word clown shoe that is The Tech Optimist Manifesto, published by Andreessen Horowitz, that I touched on in my previous post2.
So how did we get into this mess? Well, a useful description of the trajectory of business priorities commonly followed by online companies including many of the now most used parts of the internet, that helps us understand the slide towards dysfunction and the forces that propel it, is the process of Enshitification.3
Coined by Cory Doctorow back in January, Enshitification refers to three common phases in the development of web services. The stages of Enshitification flow something like this:
In the first phase, the company values users’ interests and gathering as many of them as possible above all else —the company often makes significant financial losses during this period.
During the second phase, the company’s business partners are prioritised at the expense of their now captive users, whose attention is sold to the company’s new business partners and at a cut price in order to gather as many business partners as possible —the company begins to make back some of their earlier losses.
During the third phase, the company’s shareholders are prioritised over everything else, to the detriment of the users and the now captive business partners —the company begins to rake in vast profits.
The company remains in this third phase even while their user numbers dwindle, until a sufficient number leave for it to become unprofitable. Unfortunately, once established as the incumbent monopoly within the marketplace, with all competition eradicated, these companies can take a very long time to die. Of course, once a shiny new cash cow or breakthrough technology comes along and opens up a new market opportunity, then this cycle of pump and dump begins afresh.
The enshitification of the internet as a whole, has been moving apace ever since the tech bros responded to our collective refusal to exchange our hard earned money for digital content and services, with a technological re-instantiation of the advertising industrial complex upon ever more sophisticated, pervasive and invasive systems of surveillance.
In the absence of alternatives deemed viable at the time, internet businesses pretty much all embraced the advertising model of funding the supply of online content and services. I recall that back then, in the late nineties and early naughties, to the majority, everything on the internet all seemed far too immaterial, intangible and frictionless to distribute, for it to be worth exchanging, you know, actual, real money for.
In a piece for Technology Review, titled, How To Fix The Internet4, Katie Notopoulos chronicles the current woeful state of the internet and how we got here and as the title suggests, also proposes ways to fix it. Notopoulos points a finger at one of the internet’s early founding principles, that “information wants to be free” —as she says, meaning “free” in all senses of the word— as a factor that contributed to our proclivity to refuse to pay for the stuff that was suddenly so easily distributed by it.
Our reluctance to pay for digital content lead inexorably to the freemium model of advertising backed services. The whole, “if you’re not paying for the product then you are the product”, thing. And with this being the only game in town, the era of Surveillance Capitalism began. The term Surveillance Capitalism is conspicuous by its absence from Notopoulos’s piece. Instead, the fluffy “ad personalisation” or the clever sounding “ad targeting” are used. I worry this may signify a shift away from using the term Surveillance Capitalism for some reason.
I don’t know. The account Notopoulos provides of the internet’s history is otherwise sound. She diligently takes us from arpanet through to the forces that nudged it towards the freemium model and the demonic hellscape that rises out of the ad driven, attention above all else, business model. But the problem with pulling this particular punch —even if it’s perhaps, as my good friend put it, an attempt at a “lighter touch” where a gentle tap is deemed more appropriate than a whack with a sledgehammer— is that it ignores the elephant in the room that is capitalism. In so doing, it confines analysis to the surface, to the symptoms rather than the sickness and circumvents acknowledgement of the fact that the nature of things we are able to build —be they technologies, institutions, or even cultural artefacts— are inevitably shaped by the socio-economic systems they emerge from.
If we want to deeply explore what went wrong with the internet and why, or figure out how to attempt to fix it without repeating the same mistakes, then it’s going to be very difficult without taking a long hard look at capitalism itself and all the shortcomings and problematic tendencies, inherent in its current configuration.
The Rehab
Notopoulos rightly cites recent positive developments, like tentative shifts away from the centralisation of the online services we use, towards a more distributed model, one that has the potential to dilute and distribute power over the automated moderation and recommendation algorithms that dictate what is seen and in turn, increasingly, what gets made.
Signs that many of us are finally choosing to pay for content online are indeed encouraging. Only by paying for content do we have any hope of removing the stranglehold and some of the disfiguring impact the advertising industrial complex currently has on our culture and society —at least while our society operates within the current capitalist system. But it’s essential that content creators receive fair payment for the value they create. And the failure to find a really good way of doing that is at least one of the preconditions that result in the enshitification of the internet we have today. At this point in the post, I’m not going to get started on rebuking web 3.0, so let’s just leave that one for another time.
There are valid concerns that alternative, perhaps more piecemeal implementations of paying for online content would result in more self censorship in the interests of what’s most likely to sell, not less. Like clickbait on steroids. But we already have content creators, in all mediums and across all platforms, bending their creativity to yield to the tyranny of the recommendation algorithms. What’s more, only a tiny fraction of those that spend a great deal of their time generating content online are able to support themselves and their families without taking on other work. So I’m not convinced the system of creator remuneration we currently have is the only viable option. Nor am I convinced that it’s the only way that would leave content creators both able to make a living and able to avoid creative enslavement.
It’s difficult to image it would ever be possible for a system of remuneration to afford creators the luxury of indulging full time in the creation of content that nobody wants. Clearly there’s a world of possibility between complete creative slavery and total freedom in this regard and it’s difficult to conceive of alternatives that would be free of any of the issues outlined, especially without that long hard look at and reconfiguration of capitalism itself. But there have to be better ways of configuring things than the way they are right now.
In the interests of offering up at least some kind of solution, even if it is undoubtedly both naïve and simplistic, here’s an idea that, I believe, would at least be an improvement on the current subscription model for written content.
Part of the problem with the subscription model we have, besides the account I gave at the start of this post, is that it preys on our absent-mindedness. Arguably it even relies upon our inability to remember to cancel subscriptions. Another part of the problem with the subscription model is the time limit within which you need to have found the time to extract sufficient value in order to justify the fee you’ve paid.
So, why not do away with both of these problems? Remove the auto renewal subscription mechanism entirely and replace it with a single one time fee. Next, no longer enforce a strict time limit, charge me £5 up front for access, so the charge immediately outweighs the transaction fee, and just let that credit sit there indefinitely. Then simply monitor the content I choose to consume. Hide all but the intro of paid articles, with the addition of a read button. Clicking which, will deduct a fee from my available credit and reveal the full article. And repeat. Until I eventually exhaust the pot.
But, but, but… I hear you cry. Yeah, I know, I’m sure I’ve hugely over simplified and glossed over many significant drawbacks and obstacles. Not least of which, the bean counters would likely reject it for fear that the profits might drop. But maybe they wouldn’t? Maybe, after clicking that link to that article I’d decided to commit time to reading, faced with the prospect, not of a subscription but a one time payment, with no time limit and less impact on my reading-list-bankruptcy, maybe I wouldn’t be spooked out of getting my wallet out entirely, or spooked out of my initial commitment to read that one article? Maybe this small payment from me and others like me, as opposed to no payments from me and others like me, would actually bring a net increase in profit? Providing, of course, that this option did not reduce by a corresponding or greater amount, the payments coming from those that were previously opting into the time limited paid subscription model.
It’s worth mentioning existing alternative ways of supporting content creators. There’s the donation model facilitated by services like Buy Me A Coffee5 and Ko-fi6. And the patron model facilitated by services like Patreon7. Established writers like the aforementioned Cory Doctorow, have also made highly successfully use of services like Kickstarter8. These alternatives seem to work for some but I’m yet to be convinced they provide a good solution for the majority. Perhaps it’s the influence of capitalism or perhaps it’s just human nature, but the absence of a direct transaction in the use of donation or patron style approaches, the absence of a clear exchange of one thing for another thing, your money for a specific piece of content, will I fear, always limit their appeal and therefore their efficacy in supporting the efforts of the majority of content creators.
In 2008 Kevin Kelly proposed that what content creators need to do in order to make a living, is not to attempt to game the recommendation algorithms and go viral, but to steadily amass 1000 loyal fans9. The idea seems to have gained traction recently and the grass roots approach and focus on depth rather than breadth, of direct relationships rather than ones mediated through gatekeepers like record companies or publishers, is an attractive one that chimes with the need for a more distributed internet. But the idea itself provides little in terms of the specifics of how to build these 1000 relationships, other than acknowledging that it will likely be a full time job in itself. What’s more, it requires those adept at creating content to be adept at creating relationships and as we all know being creative and being social, do not always go hand in hand.
There have to be other solutions that would provide ways of delivering written content to interested readers, that serve all parties involved; the writers, the readers and the platforms. Ways that lessen the burden of the accumulation of unread content, that ensure creators receive fair remuneration and that afford them acceptable creative freedom from the tyranny of the recommendation algorithms. The way the subscription model is configured right now, doesn’t feel like it works well for the majority of creators or consumers, or anyone apart from the banks and those processing the transactions. Perhaps therein lies the heart of it? The options available for the systems we can build are heavily dependent upon the way our socio-economic system is configured, and increasingly the configuration of the one we have, primarily serves those making money out of money, far more readily than it serves those trying to make a living by creating content.
Epilogue
Talking of the state of the internet and its trajectory, the elephant in the room right now, that I neglected to touch on here, and that will without doubt, adversely impact both the oversupply of written content and in turn its valuation, is of course, AI. Let’s leave that for another day. I will be exploring it in some depth, in other posts in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, I’ll just leave you with this quote from a piece for Tablet Mag, by David Samuels, titled The Chained Reader10.
The arrival of large globally networked social media platforms powered by AI, which is the context in which 21st-century humans do most of our reading, has further fractured the more than 600-year-long intimate relationship between the humanist reader and the author, to the point where it is becoming difficult to speak about the reader’s experience of a text independent of the social media response, which is being consistently gamed by the hidden hands of political operatives, large corporations, intelligence agencies, and other arms of the state.
Oh, we do live in interesting times, don’t we?
I promise you, the irony of my bemoaning the psychological burden of accumulating unread content in a long post and then even having the audacity to ask you to subscribe to future posts, is by no means lost on me. That said, in the absence of something better than the available paid subscription model for supporting my writing, I’d really love to have you as a subscriber anyway, so be my guest and go freemium (ad free forever!).