DARIEN GRAHAM-SMITH
Fed up of apps going bad, Darien wants to nationalise.
Computers were supposed to save us from pointless, repetitive tasks. Lately, they’ve inflicted a new one on me – that is, regularly going through the settings on my apps and services and turning off all the changes and new features I never wanted in the first place. That’s assuming they can be disabled, of course.
No doubt you’ve had similar experiences. A trusted app or website gets an unexpected update, and suddenly things no longer work the way they should. Twitter starts to mess with the order of your timeline; YouTube becomes impossible to navigate; games start pestering you to buy in-game bonuses with real money. The Germans even have a word for it: a verschlimmbesserung is an “improvement” that makes things worse.
Sadly, the phenomenon is hard to avoid. In the olden days, once you’d installed a program, it stayed the same until you upgraded it. Now, when half our applications run in the cloud, you simply don’t know what you’re going to see when you log in. It’s similar with mobile apps: the threat of a security breach has trained us to install updates as soon as they come along, and you never know quite what you’re getting.
Unfortunately, this crapshoot is part and parcel of the business model. Capitalism pushes publishers to constantly grow their userbase and build new buzz around their product. In practice, that frequently means loading up on attention-grabbing gimmicks and unnecessary features, gradually making the experience worse until the loyal userbase is on the cusp of being driven away.
That, of course, is when you realise that loyalty is very much a one-way street. You might have invested half a decade in building relationships and sharing content on a social media platform, but when the publisher arbitrarily breaks your favourite feature, what recourse do you have?
All of this might sound depressingly inescapable, but there is another way – because the free market isn’t the only environment in which an online service can operate. To be sure, Facebook, Twitter and all those big names are the products of capitalism. We can count them as great illustrations of the power of the private sector as an incubator for innovation.
Clearly, however, it’s an environment that’s toxic to long-term stability. That’s fine if we’re talking about a search engine or a reviews service, where you can easily switch to a competitor if your preferred site goes bad. But when we’re talking about things such as email and social networks that underpin our online lives, switching is a huge inconvenience. And why should we have to do it? We’re stakeholders in the success of these platforms: we deserve better than the like-it-or-lump-it treatment we get.
There is another way. In the last century, as our privately operated roads and railways matured into indispensable social provisions, we nationalised them, turning them into engines for public benefit rather than private profit. Now it’s time to do the same for our digital infrastructure.
I realise that state ownership isn’t seen by all as a good thing. In the 1990s, some people thought that having a national rail service was such a bad idea that it would be better to break up the network back into lots of private operators. What happened next is, for me, a sufficient rebuttal – but that’s an argument for another time.
Let’s look instead at some possible challenges involved in setting up a national social network. The first issue, of course, is that Facebook isn’t a British entity that can be nationalised. Even if it were, it would have to be bought for pennies on the pound, relative to its current market value of $340 billion. Happily, there are other options. For example, Diaspora – the open-source social network platform – lets you interface with Facebook as needed, and could be freely hosted by a government agency.
The next question would be privacy. Some people hate the idea of sharing personal data with the government. Frankly, I trust a public body, regulated by statute, far more than some fly-by-night dotcom. Make social data strictly confidential, like medical records, and hopefully any squeamishness should subside in time, as people observe that posting their memes and holiday snaps doesn't hasten the rise of a dictatorship.
It’s a similar situation with quality of service. Government services have a reputation for being slow and faceless, and it’s true that dealing with them isn’t always a pleasure. But at the end of the day, with a public body you can at least pick up the phone to talk to someone, and insist on your rights. Try that with Facebook and see how far you get.
Done right, a state-supported social network could be a big step forward. It could be free from screw-tightening and feature-tinkering, and could even treat its users like human beings. Needless to say, therefore, the current government will never institute one.
But such revolutions rarely happen overnight. The bundling up of thousands of private medical practices into the NHS came about only after 13 years of campaigning. Prior to that, it had taken over 40 years for Britain’s independent electricity networks to be integrated into the National Grid.
So while the transformation might not be imminent, I’m optimistic. The next time I open an app and find that, once again, the publisher has been meddling with things, I can at least take comfort in the knowledge that a different way is possible; that one day, we might be able to sign up to something that can truly be called a social network.
Done right, a state-supported social network could be a big step forward – and could even treat its users like human beings