The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Value Versus Effort (2025-01-26)

Hablot Knight Browne illustration for an 1872 edition of the novel Barrington. Image courtesy of oldbookillustrations.com.

With the ongoing controversies over so-called social media, the question of "accessibility" keeps coming up, alongside the more important issue of "transferability." Now, to be clear, the "accessibility" I have observed being discussed most is not about whether people who live with various sorts of physical and mental disabilities are able to participate in "social media," but whether the barriers to participation should be high or low. Transferability or whatever we ultimately all end up calling it refers to the ability to pick up your profile, messages, posts and such, and go somewhere else. It is roughly analogous to the ability to port a cell phone number between cellular service providers, which originally wasn't possible, then was but was expensive, and now is provided as an option as a matter of course. So far nobody is suggesting that sort of sequence for "social media" because it is presented as "free" in order to facilitate massive data mining and forcefeeding people with various types of propaganda, starting with the advertising that is meant to lower resistance to other forms. The same people are inclined to argue that nobody will pay for "social media" or other services or products provided via the internet, even though we have ready evidence that this claim is bullshit every day. Substack is the current poster child, but before that was kickstarter, and before that the earliest online small-scale storefronts. People are willing to pay for what they deem is not garbage or offensive to them in other ways if they have means to do so. But the people who piously declaim about how "free" services are eschewing an inappropriate barrier don't talk too much about how they make deals with computer and cellphone manufacturers to preload their pisspoor applications, and prevent the people who wind up with those computers and cellphones from deleting those applications. It seems the main "social media" moguls especially love "free" so long as we have no choice about whether to use their dubious products or not. Of course, this is completely consistent with the "you can choose anything you want as long as you choose what we tell you to" attitude so typical of the various people who deem themselves "elite" and smarter than the rest of us based on how much money they have been able to steal or pretend to have on paper.

But let's go back to the particular version of "accessibility" at work here. I have written before about how the rapidly expanded access to the web, especially it's widely hyped version as "web 2.0," does correlate with a serious drop in quality of website and general participation, whether that participation is via some form of "social media," blogging, or website creation and maintenance. I suspect it is more fair to call it a correlate than a cause, or at the strongest a contributing cause. After all, the eternal september phenomenon is one that any longterm online community needs to deal with. A burst of unsocialized newcomers whose lack of knowledge can be taken advantage of by maliciously-inclined resident trolls is an unfortunate fact of life when the online community is not predominantly composed of people who know each other in real life. To be clear, in my view this is not because people can be anonymous on the internet in a way they cannot necessarily be in person. No, the issue is that it is much harder to provide the same type of body language information that enables us to understand when someone is joking, being sarcastic, genuinely so bewildered they are asking what seems like an astonishingly simple question and so on. This is the original, practical impetus behind the early emoji phenomenon, the impromptu development of additions to text messages like *cough, cough* and widespread agreement that TYPING IN ALL CAPS IS EQUIVALENT TO SHOUTING. Before the wretched effort to place a whole morass of emojis into unicode succeeded, this was far more effective than might be expected.

Now, I do not think that people only value what they literally pay for online. There is plenty of evidence against that, from people who undertake volunteer moderation duties to those who give back by helping build and maintain projects like the internet archive or wikipedia. However, I do think that when people are discouraged or even blocked from actively contributing to the web or other internet-hosted activities they may take part in, that this is generally destructive. It is true that to begin with, much of the time people had to take active steps to access the web and join the progenitors of today's "social media" such as usenet and other bulletin board and messaging services. The steps could be a bit fiddly or confusing, but completing them reflected a moment of proactive engagement, which we humans are generally quite fond of, and it indicated there were more possibilities for participating and even creating something to share. It wasn't necessarily competitive, although it could be. The internet in general allowed for artistic, hobbyist, and professional uses, and yes, when nobody corporate quite knew what to do on the web or took it seriously, it was better. By which I mean, the genuinely useful concept of the search engine had not been suborned and then subsumed into an advertising and spying vector. Nobody had yet been totally fooled into the belief that building websites with just a text editor was hard, and later the early blogging software properly supported rss feeds as a matter of course and was far more interlinked. I have the impression that earlier on blogging software was not as rigidified by templates either, at least in terms of their appearance and layout. Unfortunately, blogging software became part of the problem, as various "platforms" became centralizing behemoths via their "free" tiers, many of which are now either dead and gone, moribund, or suffering various levels of political censorship and manipulation.

The role of centralization in the transformation of the web specifically and the internet more generally into an all too often actively hostile virtual space is key here. Many writers, podcasters, and computer technicians of all sorts have discussed the role of advertising and surveillance corporations in this. However, the critical role of the sometimes humble, sometimes emphatically not so humble internet service provider (ISP) is not examined or acknowledged nearly enough. Like many people of my age, my first regular access to the internet came via my post-secondary institution, and second via the public library. My first home internet access was via dial-up modem, without real limits since even if it had been feasible for me to stay online for hours at a time, I was not involved in moving major amounts of data or early online gaming. This used to be pretty common outside of the computer science circles that included serious programmers, engineers and the like. But there was one more thing ISPs used to do that they don't anymore, and that is provide a modest amount of webhosting space with every subscription. For many people, this was their means of joining the web as a more active participant via a small personal website. This is something that ISPs should be required to do, but they are not, which helped channel people into the tar pits of such dubious early free web hosting services as the original "Xoom" and "angelfire." The challenge now is that even smaller ISPs with fewer by way of perverse incentives to not provide modest webhosting to their subscribers are likely to do so via so-called "cloudhosting" with the likes of aws or worse.

So in the end, I mistrust the usual claims about how people shouldn't be expected to learn something to contribute to the web or participate in online forums and the like. Those original "barriers" had become as simple to overcome as teaming up with friends who had already worked out how to get on the web or build websites or yes, join "social media." The real source of barriers to entry and participation are in fact the very corporate and "security" shills who pretend that there is no safe way for ordinary people to do so except through centralized pseudo-services like what we used to rightly call "aohell."

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