"User Generated Content" & Ownership: The User as Citizen
Current controversies with both Livejournal/Six Apart and FanLib have one stark issue in common: the conflict between corporate desire to profit from users and the content they generate, and the users' own sense of ownership not only in their content and creativity, but in the hosted services they use to publish that content and to connect with others online.
Companies invest in commodities. Users invest in communities.
With FanLib, most fans have no trouble seeing the wolf, simply because its sheep's clothing is so poorly stitched. But the same problem is lurking beneath the surface of nearly every site we use online, including, as we were forced to confront this week, Livejournal itself.
At core are issues that go much deeper even than the internet, to basic conflicts in modern consciousness between private and corporate ownership and the meaning of public space. In modern cultures, particularly in the US where a large number of social networking websites used by fandom are hosted, even physical public space is devalued and diminishing. Many physical gathering spaces that are interpreted by users as public are in fact privately owned, from shopping malls to movie theaters and bowling alleys and even some parks. Modern American life is disastrously short of truly public physical spaces in which its citizenry can connect with each other in a completely constitutionally protected environment.
So too online - but exponentially more so. The online services we use to build community are owned almost entirely by corporate entities of one type or another, and subject to contractual terms of service in many ways designed explicitly to privilege the interests of the company over those of the user. The bandwidth we require to connect to the internet is access rented to us by our internet service providers, who in turn bind us to their own terms of service as mandatory exchange for the privilege of connecting.
That's why there's no such thing as "free speech" on Livejournal, because only a government with a constitutional mandate is required to provide its users with free speech. However, as civil liberties advocates have reminded us for years, the right to speech is only as good as the right to access to venues in which speech can be heard. And in an environment where public spaces are relatively rare, including the internet, there are strong arguments for corporate responsibility in voluntarily refraining from restrictions on user speech.
But is that enough? When we think about our relationship to Livejournal, do we really just think of ourselves as users? Or is our relationship to the company and its service much more complex? My relationship to Livejournal is not merely a one-to-one contract between myself as an individual and the company Six Apart. It's first and foremost a relationship between myself the member and Livejournal-as-collective-noun: the community. I don't see myself as a Livejournal user. I see myself as a Livejournal citizen.
Back when brad first sold LJ to Six Apart, I posted that it signified to me the end of the era in which LJ legitimately felt like "ours." We'd gone from a benevolent socialist dictatorship to benevolent oligarchy, and despite assurances from authority figures, as users and citizens we did notice a change. At the same time, though, I remember - along with many of you - urging Six Apart not to forget to dance with the one what brung 'em. Six Apart might have bought Livejournal, the commodity comprising the code and servers and implementation and brand and employees, but they hadn't bought the one thing on which all others hinge, because they hadn't bought us. Six Apart might own LJ, but despite our not being recognized as such in law, so do we.
This issue of ownership is much bigger than Six Apart and Livejournal, because it's really about how we as a culture construct the new class of relationships between citizens and businesses that is embodied by the interactive, hyper-connected social nodes that form the new structures through which modern humans are organizing our public lives.
I'd like to propose that any business entity that is primarily driven by and dependent on an active and content-generating user base be obligated to assign some share of real and actualized decision-making power to democratically chosen representatives of that user base. Obviously I don't expect to see this spring into being in law overnight, or even perhaps at all, and I'm not sure that would even be appropriate. But I would like to see businesses encode this principle into their very structures in such a way that we the users - we the citizens of the social web - can count on a certain measure of rights and due process, beyond what we are legally owed by a corporate entity.
How could this be implemented? We'll need to explore both the implementations possible for a business to bind itself to the principle of user citizenship, and the means through which users might realistically and without undue burden to the companies be properly empowered. Voluntary codes of conduct and statements in favor of user speech are a great starting point, but don't come nearly close enough. It means a great deal that Livejournal stands behind user speech, but at the end of the day there is no way to hold it accountable to its promises apart from leaving. As citizens we have invested often years of our lives in these communities, and for most of us in fandom our LJ world is now broader than fandom alone. We've made friends and found lovers and shared our sadnesses and our joys, and we owe it to ourselves to find an alternative to simply walking away.
Businesses could take a concrete step by writing user representation into their bylaws. Mandate user representation on boards of directors - and make sure it's a voting, not an honorary, position. Create clauses to protect users from the very first seed of a new startup idea, and make sure it's in the official agreement when venture capital signs on. Bindingly set aside a percentage of stock at every IPO to be offered first to the active, long-term user community, with a maximum number of shares per real person (rather than user account). Create explicit avenues of communication from the user base to the managerial decision-making structure, and commit to honoring the concerns of the community. Create a user issues ombudsperson, if the company doesn't have one already. Commit to informing the user base of important changes in advance, and providing a reasonable period for comment whenever possible - and be prepared to justify any situation in which business needs deem it impossible.
That's just a sampling of potential ideas, but it's a start. Companies choosing to go this route could explicitly sign on to a core set of Users Rights Principles (actual hokey name TBD), providing incentives for users to enter into - or remain in - relationships with subscribing companies. By creating solid, binding loyalties from the company to the user, companies would steeply increase both user loyalty and positive brand association. Users appreciate quality services, and the opportunity to share our work and our lives with others that the structures provided by web businesses allow us. But we are no longer simply willing to give our content and our labor away for free and watch others profit, while our own communities are undermined.
The companies built and equipped the kitchens; we brought the food and cooked the meal. We deserve a seat at the table. As stakeholders, and as potential shareholders, we can pull our own weight with what we offer a company to more than compensate for the cost of accommodating us.
Yes, I'm serious about this. I think, if we work at it, we could make a serious case to Six Apart to include explicit user rights protections in its IPO filing, whenever that comes about. As a venture-capital funded company, Six Apart is bound to go public sometime (or be bought by an even bigger fish). When it does, we need to be sure that we, the users who have invested much more than mere dollars into building Livejournal into what it is, are protected and given a permanent voice. Venture capitalists invest dollars in commodities. Users invest our words, our time, our labor, our hearts, and our very souls into building communities. We have as much a right to profit from an IPO as the monetary investors and other folks with stock options. They're the monetary investors; we're the social investors. If they profit monetarily, then at minimum, we should profit socially. We need, and deserve, a structurally binding voice in the way the sites through which we build our communities are run.
If this idea intrigues you, please help flesh it out further and poke holes in all its presumably many flaws. We need to think of what kind of user protection clauses we'd like to see - what rights would be the most critical to import or modify from the government realm into our contractual relationships with online service providers? What additional responsibilities might we as a community be willing to accept in exchange for those rights? Would different methods be appropriate for different categories of online service or for differently structured companies? Can we come up with a core, simple set of principles that could be publicized and to which companies could sign on in support, even before taking more concrete actions? How would we most like to see these principles adopted and implemented?
Let's think about this more, work out the kinks on a simple starter plan, and let Six Apart be our pilot case. If anyone has reason to listen to users right now, it's 6A, and in practice they already subscribe to some of the implementations I would put forward as model best practices. We have a unique moment in the history of the social web, here, to try shifting the balance of power and still let everyone win. I think we owe it to ourselves to try.
eta: Since folks have asked: Yes, you can link this. Anywhere, on or off LJ.
eta: I posted something like a follow-up, dealing with the current second round of strikethroughs, here.
Companies invest in commodities. Users invest in communities.
With FanLib, most fans have no trouble seeing the wolf, simply because its sheep's clothing is so poorly stitched. But the same problem is lurking beneath the surface of nearly every site we use online, including, as we were forced to confront this week, Livejournal itself.
At core are issues that go much deeper even than the internet, to basic conflicts in modern consciousness between private and corporate ownership and the meaning of public space. In modern cultures, particularly in the US where a large number of social networking websites used by fandom are hosted, even physical public space is devalued and diminishing. Many physical gathering spaces that are interpreted by users as public are in fact privately owned, from shopping malls to movie theaters and bowling alleys and even some parks. Modern American life is disastrously short of truly public physical spaces in which its citizenry can connect with each other in a completely constitutionally protected environment.
So too online - but exponentially more so. The online services we use to build community are owned almost entirely by corporate entities of one type or another, and subject to contractual terms of service in many ways designed explicitly to privilege the interests of the company over those of the user. The bandwidth we require to connect to the internet is access rented to us by our internet service providers, who in turn bind us to their own terms of service as mandatory exchange for the privilege of connecting.
That's why there's no such thing as "free speech" on Livejournal, because only a government with a constitutional mandate is required to provide its users with free speech. However, as civil liberties advocates have reminded us for years, the right to speech is only as good as the right to access to venues in which speech can be heard. And in an environment where public spaces are relatively rare, including the internet, there are strong arguments for corporate responsibility in voluntarily refraining from restrictions on user speech.
But is that enough? When we think about our relationship to Livejournal, do we really just think of ourselves as users? Or is our relationship to the company and its service much more complex? My relationship to Livejournal is not merely a one-to-one contract between myself as an individual and the company Six Apart. It's first and foremost a relationship between myself the member and Livejournal-as-collective-noun: the community. I don't see myself as a Livejournal user. I see myself as a Livejournal citizen.
Back when brad first sold LJ to Six Apart, I posted that it signified to me the end of the era in which LJ legitimately felt like "ours." We'd gone from a benevolent socialist dictatorship to benevolent oligarchy, and despite assurances from authority figures, as users and citizens we did notice a change. At the same time, though, I remember - along with many of you - urging Six Apart not to forget to dance with the one what brung 'em. Six Apart might have bought Livejournal, the commodity comprising the code and servers and implementation and brand and employees, but they hadn't bought the one thing on which all others hinge, because they hadn't bought us. Six Apart might own LJ, but despite our not being recognized as such in law, so do we.
This issue of ownership is much bigger than Six Apart and Livejournal, because it's really about how we as a culture construct the new class of relationships between citizens and businesses that is embodied by the interactive, hyper-connected social nodes that form the new structures through which modern humans are organizing our public lives.
I'd like to propose that any business entity that is primarily driven by and dependent on an active and content-generating user base be obligated to assign some share of real and actualized decision-making power to democratically chosen representatives of that user base. Obviously I don't expect to see this spring into being in law overnight, or even perhaps at all, and I'm not sure that would even be appropriate. But I would like to see businesses encode this principle into their very structures in such a way that we the users - we the citizens of the social web - can count on a certain measure of rights and due process, beyond what we are legally owed by a corporate entity.
How could this be implemented? We'll need to explore both the implementations possible for a business to bind itself to the principle of user citizenship, and the means through which users might realistically and without undue burden to the companies be properly empowered. Voluntary codes of conduct and statements in favor of user speech are a great starting point, but don't come nearly close enough. It means a great deal that Livejournal stands behind user speech, but at the end of the day there is no way to hold it accountable to its promises apart from leaving. As citizens we have invested often years of our lives in these communities, and for most of us in fandom our LJ world is now broader than fandom alone. We've made friends and found lovers and shared our sadnesses and our joys, and we owe it to ourselves to find an alternative to simply walking away.
Businesses could take a concrete step by writing user representation into their bylaws. Mandate user representation on boards of directors - and make sure it's a voting, not an honorary, position. Create clauses to protect users from the very first seed of a new startup idea, and make sure it's in the official agreement when venture capital signs on. Bindingly set aside a percentage of stock at every IPO to be offered first to the active, long-term user community, with a maximum number of shares per real person (rather than user account). Create explicit avenues of communication from the user base to the managerial decision-making structure, and commit to honoring the concerns of the community. Create a user issues ombudsperson, if the company doesn't have one already. Commit to informing the user base of important changes in advance, and providing a reasonable period for comment whenever possible - and be prepared to justify any situation in which business needs deem it impossible.
That's just a sampling of potential ideas, but it's a start. Companies choosing to go this route could explicitly sign on to a core set of Users Rights Principles (actual hokey name TBD), providing incentives for users to enter into - or remain in - relationships with subscribing companies. By creating solid, binding loyalties from the company to the user, companies would steeply increase both user loyalty and positive brand association. Users appreciate quality services, and the opportunity to share our work and our lives with others that the structures provided by web businesses allow us. But we are no longer simply willing to give our content and our labor away for free and watch others profit, while our own communities are undermined.
The companies built and equipped the kitchens; we brought the food and cooked the meal. We deserve a seat at the table. As stakeholders, and as potential shareholders, we can pull our own weight with what we offer a company to more than compensate for the cost of accommodating us.
Yes, I'm serious about this. I think, if we work at it, we could make a serious case to Six Apart to include explicit user rights protections in its IPO filing, whenever that comes about. As a venture-capital funded company, Six Apart is bound to go public sometime (or be bought by an even bigger fish). When it does, we need to be sure that we, the users who have invested much more than mere dollars into building Livejournal into what it is, are protected and given a permanent voice. Venture capitalists invest dollars in commodities. Users invest our words, our time, our labor, our hearts, and our very souls into building communities. We have as much a right to profit from an IPO as the monetary investors and other folks with stock options. They're the monetary investors; we're the social investors. If they profit monetarily, then at minimum, we should profit socially. We need, and deserve, a structurally binding voice in the way the sites through which we build our communities are run.
If this idea intrigues you, please help flesh it out further and poke holes in all its presumably many flaws. We need to think of what kind of user protection clauses we'd like to see - what rights would be the most critical to import or modify from the government realm into our contractual relationships with online service providers? What additional responsibilities might we as a community be willing to accept in exchange for those rights? Would different methods be appropriate for different categories of online service or for differently structured companies? Can we come up with a core, simple set of principles that could be publicized and to which companies could sign on in support, even before taking more concrete actions? How would we most like to see these principles adopted and implemented?
Let's think about this more, work out the kinks on a simple starter plan, and let Six Apart be our pilot case. If anyone has reason to listen to users right now, it's 6A, and in practice they already subscribe to some of the implementations I would put forward as model best practices. We have a unique moment in the history of the social web, here, to try shifting the balance of power and still let everyone win. I think we owe it to ourselves to try.
eta: Since folks have asked: Yes, you can link this. Anywhere, on or off LJ.
eta: I posted something like a follow-up, dealing with the current second round of strikethroughs, here.