How to Fix Silicon Valley -- And It's Not How You Think

By Catherine A. Fitzpatrick

There's a flurry of solutions offered for how to fix the real or perceived evils and woes of Silicon Valley's takeover of our lives, from breaking up monopolies to more training in the humanities (or not), to conservative legislation to remove reported bias in news offerings to libertarian protection of the controversial Section 230, supposedly the "26 words that gave us" this Internet. And while some or parts of all these solutions may actually be implemented, I never see one obvious one, that might seem counter-intuitive:

Make social media platforms charge for their services.

Carpet Bazaar, Cairo, 1887 by Charles Robertson

This idea flies against the core belief of technologists that you "can't" charge for social media, whether chat systems or blogs or picture sharing, because people won't pay it and you'll never make enough to sustain the platform anyway. Everyone knows that subscriptions don't support media -- investors and ads do. More and more, you find the awareness that if you are not paying for social media, you are the product -- and the customers are really the ad buyers, or even more, the VCs.

Ads Without Subscriptions, Content without Conscience

Expulsion from the Garden of Eden Artist Thomas Cole 1828 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston -Wikimedia

This partial borrowing by Silicon Valley of the news media's profit formulas -- investors (venture capitalists) and ads -- (partial because generally there are no subscriptions at all) is really at the root of its evil, though few conceive of it that way. Subscribers have kept mainstream media honest -- when they lose them, they know they are doing something wrong. This conscience was lobotomized with new media.

The Internet became more than an exchange device for scientists or a bulletin board for counterculturists when it liberated paid newspapers -- and later music files -- as the loss leader to get engagement and to disguise the costs of coders and engineers, not to mention servers and their infrastructure. But also when it sneered a subscriptions - which is public accountability, like it or not.

The scorn for privacy and one's private data is rooted in the scorn for private property involved in copyright, which more than the "26 words" is what gave us the Internet.  Craigslist could undermine the classifieds that formed a pillar of media support by ads for amateur sex and prostitutes - its founder was simply less scrupulous than newspapers of record that see themselves as pillars of society, not playing on the customers' basest culture. And the stakes grew higher for social media, requiring more and more extreme content to keep interest.

Having ceded privacy along with artists' private property and allowing non-transparent ads to undermine democracy, it's hard to turn back. Voluntary moves like "making ads more transparent" don't take into consideration that even the CEO of a major Internet sales company like Overstock can fall for Russian blandishments and a sizable chunk of people will keep claiming Butina isn't really a spy, but merely a pro-state interest group.

Diagnoses Without Solutions

I've noticed lately that certain articles that seem to promise solutions only make more sophisticated diagnoses -- like Prof. Paul Musgrave's How Not to Fix Silicon Valley - "the problem isn't whether tech entrepreneurs read the humanities, it's how they think. Or Ramesh Srinivasan's "Yes, Google is Disrupting Our Democracy But Not in the Way Trump Thinks". Musgrave is right that having tech leaders read Plato -- or I would say something like Martin Buber's "I and Thou" -- isn't going to fix their essentially nihilist thinking. He doesn't use that word -- I do -- because I think it captures that self-interested, cut-throat, bullying take on the world that has no humility before anything greater than himself -- God or beauty or country. They got that way for all sorts of reasons involving the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and decline of parenting and education but most of all, I think, they got that way because they trained themselves to become more like machines in order to communicate with them and make computers work.

This is about literalness but also about an ardent, religious belief (in non-religious people) that the Internet has no value or evil or good -- the way a hammer or a nail do not. They are just tools, "able to be used for good or bad". I'm hardly the only one who has come to see this as riotously false -- an atomic bomb that was supposed to be used "surgically" and killed hundreds of thousands of people and altered the course of history and politics and civilization forever isn't just a "tool".  If social media's propensity for falsity even undermines elections, the tool is way out in front of the wielder. Yes, people are the ones who wield such tools, but the unanticipated outcomes in part engineered heedlessly into the tools due to technologists' hubris are increasingly revealing the agency of non-agency evil. No one thought sharing pictures of your cat would create a tool which could be used to bring a lout and liar like Trump to power.

Let me get right to my solutions then.

1. Silicon Valley should charge subscription fees for social media.

These fees could be $2.99 or $29.99 and based on number of uploads or posts or special features but they need to be in place. They will still have free accounts on the freemium model, that free gives you X features but for Y more, you incrementally add them. Let's say with a free account on Facebook, you can upload photos, but not videos. Or the follower cap on Twitter (currently 2,000 until others follow you, an insidious system) can be broken not by illegally buying batches of followers, but simply paying a subscription fee that mechanically lets you follow more people.  Even likes could be capped with fees, as they have inflated beyond all bounds! There is a deep-set belief that you "can't" charge subscriptions and that it is "fatal" for media.

But look at the New York Times, and how it has literally added subscriptions by creating more and more diverse and niched content. Washington Post and New Yorker as well. Miraculously, it can be done. TechCrunch grudgingly admits that the old media dinosaurs are making money now -- much more than TC itself, which won't move to a subscription model although their core reader base -- programmers and other tech -- have some of the highest salaries in the country and could pay for their news. I should note that it is not merely compelling content that achieved this. The first thing that the Times, Post, New Yorker and others did was make it impossible to put a link into Google search, and pull up a story past a paywall by doing this. The Google trick was broken about two years ago, I think. I've never seen any reporting on this, but it was vital. I don't know whether the Snowden helpers that the Times brought in to do tech, or whether some treaty with Google achieved this, but it is now impossible to read past a paywall by using the Google cache trick. It simply doesn't work anymore. And that forced people to pay. Mechanical blocks like to force payment are as vital as fresh and compelling content, and this was achieved, despite legions of techs always saying it "can't" be done because of the Internet's copyable nature. Sure it can, when you set your mind to it.

The book by Jill Abramson Merchants of Truth also explains this phenomenon of new media like Vice or Buzzfeed failing and having to lay off journalists who formerly swaggered over the demise of old print media. To be sure, this reality still hasn't encroached on the deep-set belief against subscriptions, not only for new media but social media But it must. And it will. Something has to be done to wean these companies away from ads which they sell next to your free content by exploiting your privacy and your emotions. And undermining civil society in the process.

When you're a paying customer, the attitude changes. Newspapers change their tenor when they reflect on what subscribers' responses might be. Even razor companies trying to rely on "viral social media" can only indulge in their ideological follies for so long before the bottom line corrects them.

After all, Apple, HBO, Netflix and so on charge subscriptions for streaming content. Spotify has the free and the premium version. Why shouldn't social media, that serves us up the most content of all, daily, hourly, even by the minute?! Think of how much people look at their phones -- and what percentage of that content is free! CHARGE for some of it!

Wallets and Customer Commerce

Such a subscription system should also have "wallets" so that people can go around and award pennies or dollars to friends for posts they list or journalists for articles they like. Technologists could feasibly put in such a system, but defiantly don't, as they know it will undermine their own control and power over the ability to milk the Internet for revenue.

Once you could sell your photos on Instagram, Instagram can't make money from them in any way. If a payments system is installed by a third party like PayPal or Venmo, whereby the platform provider is bypassed and there are peer-to-peer transactions easily using the interface of the platform, money isn't flowing into the hands of those who provide the service -- UNLESS they decide to work it that way.

In fairness, platforms that enable your commerce through social media should get reasonable compensation, and they could charge a fee -- but not only due to reluctance to enable customer commerce and take on the headaches of payments systems (which include fraud and hacking and security) they don't even start such a plan. They should. BTW, the online virtual world Second Life, which is mocked by techs, is a good example of how this works. Facebook, with its 3 billion users, only enables a tiny handful of engineers who create apps related to it to make money from it directly, and of course takes payment from individuals, groups, or companies for ads. This segment of its income is likely its largest, and why it would not move to a subscription plan only reluctantly.

But Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, itself makes a profit of $75 million, and enables $60 million or more a year to be made by its users who sell various virtual goods or server space or service to a relatively tiny population. I think can't be more than 500,000 or 600,000 these days, without about 30,000-50,000 concurrency (these figures used to be released, but when SL began doing poorly after its initial boom in 2007-2008, it stopped publishing them). The point is, if you give people a service they pay for as a subscription ($11.99 a month, less than some massive online games), while allowing free accounts as well, and allow people to use the platform to make money, get tokens for their creations or services, and then cash out those tokens in a carefully-managed exchange system, you have sustained yourself and the customer. That's what we need to be thinking about as jobs become automated -- how to enable people to make money online with creation as well as service.

I think likely the content companies rather than the platform will be the one to institute wallets, so they can control the rake of fees from them. Imagine if the NYT made a way for you to pay pennies to clip one article or tip one journalist -- they benefit, we benefit. They won't want to cut into their revenue stream from full-fledged subscriptions -- but I suspect they will hit a wall eventually and will have to buckle as the only way to grow.

There could be a war over this. But wallets/micropayment systems will go in eventually and they will be a way for both platforms and content providers to make money other than ads. I don't pretend this will be easy -- Facebook or Instagram would rather let game devs make money from fees collected for addictive farm games or letting influencers with high followers take brand endorsements than let the user decide with micro-currency payments what he or she "likes".

And the game devs and top influencers themselves would constitute a block against the democratization of making and receiving payments as they would see their income undermined. As more and more people get on social media, the opportunities for making money with it seem to increase, according to the gurus who make a living teaching you how to do this. But it's only possible to make a living for a few, and it has become harder as companies like ebay and Amazon (through which you sell real goods ) are taking more and more percentages and instituting more rules; YouTube only lets those with a defined number of higher followers sell ads, and Instagram has thresholds as well.

Real Identity Curbs Abuse

There are advantages to taking this controversial and even arduous path, however. If you have a subscription system, you have to have a form of payment, which generally means a real identity, a credit card or a bank card. Real identities tend to lesson -- although not entirely remove -- bad behaviour online, people are conscious of their reputations (and sadly a part of this is job loss over social media indiscretion, which I think is wrong). But the bottom line is, if you put your real name on a Twitter account you paid even $5.00 a month for, the chemistry changes. When something is free you don't respect it, nor do you respect the anonymous. It's always possible to make a pseudonymous account on top of an account in which a real name is provided. The screaming that usually accompanies the debate about "nicks" is that we "can't" have it because all kinds of vulnerable groups from battered women to Iranian freedom fighters will not be protected, given how hacks of personal data take place all the time. Yet that's something not just dissidents under oppressive systems but ordinary bank customers in Western democracies have to worry about, and that has to be fixed on a larger scale.

Social media companies will still have to sell ads. But they will sell ads to buyers who must reach people who not only gave real names and locations but to whom they now have an obligation as paying customers. They aren't just sheeple to be fleeced with addictive "freeness". The era of free is not sustainable and will change. So better to do this in a planned and staged manner than close down in bankruptcy.

On one of the Silicon Valley episodes, there is the regurgitation of the received wisdom you can't charge money for a service -- and then the telling comment from a tech titan that the value of a company isn't in its product but in the company's stock. Literally, in the shareholders' shares, not the actual thing that gives them revenue -- which seems remarkably shortsighted and even crazy. That's why the paydays of these ephemeral companies, whether unicorns or badgers mainly come from VCs trading them around to each other. You "take money off the table" not because the public is buying a product or service -- only another VC is. Facebook users were not offered shares of stock like employees -- although they should have been, since they made Facebook successful. When there are subscriptions and real customers, there is more focus on what the product is and how to sell it, and less on dark exploitation.

I don't pretend it's a total solution, but the job here is to tame evil as it cannot be eradicated. Still, there is more to be done:

2. Government regulation. Ironically, one of the very things that may have to be forced on social media is the demand that they charge money for subscriptions. That seems hilarious and counter-intuitive, but think about it. Since when can the government force a company in a free economy to charge money? They can't. Although if you think about it, there are laws regulating contests, sweepstakes, and lotteries -- giving away things for free -- why not accounts? But by taxation and tariffs, they bring this about, as the companies need to have a reliable revenue stream. 

If ads are regulated more heavily -- first and foremost by insisting on the same transparency that radio and TV elections ads must have -- subscriptions may look more attractive. 

I think Section 230 has to be revised to make platforms responsible for specific crimes, like the incitement of imminent violence -- not protected under the First Amendment.  Companies already have Terms of Service and sometimes also additional Community Rules that are not at the level of the First Amendment but which they only passively or irregularly enforce. Only legislative demand that redacts or even removes "the 26 words" will get them to enforce their own TOS. This cannot be decided by the companies and their lawyers only, although media is tending to give only them the voice, and castigate critics as Trumpians, which is foolish.

Already the anti-trafficking legislative effort was successful, and there will be more. Admission that it "didn't end the Internet" even if some liberals dislike it as law is the first step toward awareness that virtuality has to be regulated as much as reality because it is human and therefore flawed. The Internet as a substance is not perfectability always in motion, that "Better World". The current climate has helped bring this vital change about more than anything, ending the stale arguments' stalemate, as Lawfare explains:

At first, tech companies lined up in lockstep against the bill. But then the seemingly impossible happened: The platforms’ opposition receded. Perhaps because the climate on the Hill was increasingly inhospitable to the major social media companies given their role in L’Affaire Russe and perhaps because the writing was on the wall, the Internet Association (which represents Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other big tech companies) endorsed the legislation after Senate staff changed the bill to head off some of its excesses.

If platforms are faced with the need to become responsible for removing content in violation, they have more incentive to have subscriptions -- because payment information must be supplied. I think we will see this in the future. A lot of things in Silicon Valley started out for free, then had to charge or go out of business. Social media could be the next big thing -- because it's rational for companies to charge for a service and irrational to keep relying on damaging their very customers to make money from them. To ensure your privacy, you have to have some privacy to ensure -- that means identity.

Impact Litigation and Good Corporate Governance

Traditionally, capitalism has solved the problems of companies harming their own customers through fraud or environmental pollution or health damage by litigation. So tobacco companies are forced to put labels from the Surgeon General, or Big Pharma may finally face the music for its contribution to the opiod crisis with the town and county lawsuits. Boards of companies are an even greater force for reforming abusive companies -- Overstock's Patrick Byrne had to go when he got too loony, and Elon Musk got his wings clipped.  Of course, the experts and legislators will take a look at anti-trust law and see if any of it fits with big tech, especially things like Facebook's acquisition of Instagram. But I don't think the solution to Silicon Valley is to favor Elizabeth Warren's socialistic animosity to capitalism period in this popular form. It's to treat these companies like any companies and demand from them the board control, adherence to regulations and customer care that "meatworld" companies have to exercise whether they manufacturer car-seats or fast food. 

Here I'll mention the claims that Facebook and others unfairly favour liberals. Of course they do -- just as mainstream media is dominated by liberals. One obvious cure for this is never to look at the news feed Facebook provides you, and make your own news feed by going to sites directly or using Google news or other feeds you can set up and control yourself. Google famously hides behind users as the reason certain content surfaces instead of others. Yet this is a self-fulfilling prophecy -- if users surface antisemitic content, others then lazily click on it simply because it's there. Nothing to be gained by denying this bias, even if the solution for it is not so easy.

Try to Chomsky test -- type in "Noam Chomsky" and you will not find anything critical about this leftwing extremist hugely critical of the US and capitalism on the first page. You'll find pages from Truthout, a leftwing watchdog, Chomsky's own page, and Wikipedia -- which is the chief way all searches skew left, because it really is dominated by a few lefty and libertarian techs.

So it's a thing. Yes, it isn't fixed by Google skewing its algorithms. But it has the big old blank landing page, which unlike Yahoo, has no curated news on it, either of "real" or "paid" type. Why can't it start a curated news feed on its big old blank page? The solution to the discontents of search is outside of search, in curated content which yes, this company could provide, and yes be a publisher/editor responsible for its content under revised Section 230. It can be done!

Its Soviet Knowledge Society-style object lessons of obscure scientists and techs (the Google doodle which doesn't always show up), with way more representation of women and people of colour than in the actual RL Google itself -- can't carry that load alone. Let Google hire journalists to select news and you know, make the world a better place. It could be only real news, unlike Yahoo, which has a lot of paid and sensational junk on it. Then, when there's a search box next to their modest news feed (they could still leave a lot of blank space on that big old blank page so we can admire the inspirational lesson for the day and the primary colours against that blizzard white) so providing a good news feed will help their search, as people are inspired to look up things in the stories.

Also, they need to have subscriptions, too. Search is so heavily used for the Internet's very functioning to have Google subscriptions just for search (even just to go from one page to another -- I wonder if other people don't use bookmarks but use search to bring up pages like "Yahoo" or "Facebook" if they aren't landing pages). But they could charge subscriptions for those of us who use Google Ads. Why not? The people placing the ads have to pay, obviously. Why shouldn't those who provide free content and put those ads on their blogs or corporate pages not have to pay a subscription, too? And if we could pay a subscription, we could finally demand customer service from this most outrageously abusive product of Google's. Everyone knows how arbitrarily they remove accounts and how hard it is to get them back (I've had to do that, after people used fake complaints about ads as a way to shut down my criticism they didn't like). There are other Google services like this with zero customer service. Twitter is terrible that way, too. Charge subscription fees. And do the customer service -- use some of your billions to pay for jobs for people you are automating into poverty.

3. Moral Leadership. It's funny how this is a public demand of sorts -- many people think Silicon Valley titans don't give enough to charity, don't help communities enough, ship jobs abroad and avoid taxes by taking revenue abroad and it all has a corrosive effect. But yet despite several decades of Big IT, the evolution that took place with the Vanderbilts or the Rockfellers still hasn't occurred (and we should expect it to be speeded up like everything else in our time).

I don't really care for Bill Gates, but his corporation (which mainly sells hardware, so it is more rooted in the real world than Google or Facebook) provides jobs and he gives to charity causes from AIDs treatment to clean water. Sergey Brin is mainly known for giving to the research of the disease from which he is genetically predisposed. Does Jack of Twitter give to charity? I don't even know. Craig Newmark gives to trendy progressive causes he likes -- wouldn't it be the ultimate irony if he were forced to have some kind of subscription service for classified ads, which might widen his philanthropy beyond just his lefty favourites.

Robert Scoble

I think there also need to be tech leaders who present a more caring and concerned face to the public. When I think of the better face of tech, I think of Robert Scoble, who was once the "evangelist" (a top PR outreach guy) for Microsoft, and went on to represent a variety of companies including Seagate before morphing into an independent consultant who now specializes in "spatial computing," which basically means anything 3D -- virtual reality, augmented reality, panoramic photos and such.

He went through a trial in the wilderness, first admitting his alcoholism and going on the road to recovery, then apologizing for his abuse of some women in tech, and continuing to hone his devotion to his wife and children, working at home and doing childcare while his wife takes a demanding Silicon Valley job outside the home.

I've always admired Scoble's ability to explain tech and be excited about it and draw people in without scorn -- a rare talent in the tech world. Most of the people who follow him are techs themselves and I suppose he isn't super famous, but I always found him to provide an enormous amount of information and insight. He takes the time to answer ordinary people on Facebook (like me). He is upbeat and positive without being smarmy about the tech, and calls it out when it is less than great. To be sure, his endorsement of products is often paid (as it was for Google Glass, which ultimately was a failure and which cost him some ridicule - he famously showed himself taking a shower in the Google goggles).  But there is an organic quality to this endorsement which comes from enough commentary that is unpaid. And really "eating the dogfood" -- he has valiantly taken his family, which includes a son with special needs, on trips to Yellowstone in a driverless car. I will never get into one of those vehicles and I believe they are mainly about putting truck drivers out of work, but I do recognize that they likely are the wave of the future. If you have to have such a wave, you want it to be explained and guided by someone who has faced the worst of his own personal demons as well as those of technology. We need more people like this, and far less of the types satirized in Silicon Valley, the scourge of Twitter and politics, Anil Dash, who not only got a fellow tech who was politically incorrect fired from his job at Business Insider, he threatened him with blocking his funding in the world of start-ups forever (this denizen of the White House could do that). Despicable! 

The techs cannot be taught a moral code out of Plato or even C.S. Lewis but they can be humbled by losing customers and revenue, facing regulation and lawsuits and realizing that what is good for business and and should be what is good for Americans and the world.  There isn't anything like the ABA or AMA for technologists and should be, where their "Better Worlding" is not merely outwardly directed toward their own arrogant engineering of the world by their leftist/libertarian tastes, but where they pledge to do no harm themselves. This wouldn't just be them deciding what harm is, or their former execs now with "harm reduction" consulting gigs. It would have to be done by denouncing the DDoS and ceasing to characterize hacking as "cool"; where they cooperate with government and military in a liberal democracy instead of letting tiny factions of anarchists rule; where they draw the logical conclusion that protection of privacy and private property -- personal data and copyright -- should be their hallmarks instead of scorned in their "California business model." This can be done with a move to subscriptions, some regulation, and some selfless and real moral leadership.