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< | First Principle: The Greatest Decision We Never Made | >
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No, Really, Let Me Pay--I Insist:
Can a Subscription Model for Technology Platforms Help Preserve Privacy?
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< | -- By JeremyLee - 22 Nov 2020 | | | | |
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< | I. Pale Blue Dot(s) | >
> | -- By JeremyLee - 5 Jan 2021 | | | | |
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< | On February 14, 1990, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft had traveled an estimated 3.7 billion miles from our Sun. It was, and remains, the most distant man-made object to ever leave Earth. Before departing, Voyager 1 was equipped with several cameras charged with capturing photographic data as it barreled through space. Moments before Voyager 1's cameras were permanently shut down to conserve power, the JPL team in charge of operations tasked the interstellar probe with collecting its last little bits of solar pixels. Thus, the aptly named self-portrait, "Pale Blue Dot," was born. | | | | |
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< | The perspective this image provides to humanity illuminates the greatest decision we never made: as a species, should we pursue a future that (1) accepts the inevitable death of our planet and make the most of the time that remains or (2) engineer our way to multi-planetary existence? The purpose of this essay is to explore some features of each option with the intent of persuading the reader to consider how one shared consequence of both, i.e. boredom, would impact their life, and society at-large. Some may find the magnitude of a first principle perspective such as this grandiose and prohibitively unfathomable; in such case, I respectfully disagree and ask for at least a minimum effort in considering, maybe even accepting, the truth of Earth's destiny despite the fact you will likely never have to encounter the effects in your own lifetime. | >
> | I. Terms of Service | | | | |
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> | "It's free and always will be." Hard to fathom that I once felt relief at the sight of this reassuring tagline when logging in to Facebook. Along with other early users, I signed up during Facebook's relative infancy, at a time when the website was restricted to college students with a valid ".edu" email. As a freshman undergrad attending university out-of-state I had a particularly active engagement with the social network. I missed my friends, most of whom had remained in-state for school, and Facebook gave me a fun, free, quasi-teleportation device to stay up-to-date and in-touch with them. Indeed, I felt social fulfilment from the engagement Facebook provided, but also a sense of dread. I could hardly afford my books for class--what if this fulfilment I'd come to rely on decided to charge for the service? At the time, the tagline, "It's free and always will be," helped alleviate that fear. Ironically, however, fifteen years and an eruption of exponentially dangerous privacy concerns later, the "free" use of services such as Facebook is now the source of dread. | | | | |
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< | II. Exploring Purpose | >
> | The business model employed by todays technology platforms has been exposed by works like Shoshana Zuboff's "Surveillance Capitalism" and the docudrama "The Social Dilemma," among others. These modern muckrakers have enabled a more candid public discourse regarding the contract which exists between user and platform--unmasking how these services were never "free" to begin with and actually pose an existential threat to democracy and freedom of thought. The purpose of this essay is to discuss whether users should have the right to pay for services like Facebook when the only alternative contract is the monetization of their behavioral data. This right would be rooted in federal regulation and applied to contracts where the primary business model is collecting, analyzing, and selling user data. Two larger questions, which, due to constraints of space cannot be explored here, are (i) how or where to draw the line in determining what constitutes a "primary business model," and ultimately (ii) whether such a right would actually work to reduce the existential threats of surveillance capitalism. Due to foreseeable collective action problems like financial inequality among users and the indifference some may feel about their privacy, the choice alone of a subscription model could prove fruitless against such threats. But, while it may be true that this right could be a small knife in a battle against technology platforms who roll in tanks, when the stakes are this high, resistance is never futile. | | | | |
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< | A. Earth Centric Society (ECS) | | | | |
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< | Let's begin with some assumptions about a hypothetical ECS. First, there will have been a collective global decision to accept the inevitable death or destruction of Earth (volcanic catastrophe, asteroid impact, gamma-ray burst, expanding sun). And second, the purpose of the decision is to maximize human fulfilment with the time that remains. Finally, to achieve maximum fulfilment, people should be liberated from the demands of life they do not wish to perform. To qualify the last premise, I am referring more specifically to the idea of eliminating the need to work for wages; possibly even the concept of currency at all. | >
> | II. Money or Data & The Right to Choose | | | | |
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< | To achieve such a state, technology will have developed to a level of automation in society where the contributions of some (possibly most) individuals is unnecessary to maintain a suitable standard of living for everyone (minus violent sociopaths, hungry demagogues, and wanting charlatans whose idiosyncratic suitable standard of living inherently causes harm to others). Abundant and exponential growth in sustainable automation for agriculture, energy production, and logistics will eliminate the human-driven acceleration of Earth's destruction, free up peoples' calendars, and remove the traditional barriers to leisure activities. Granted, the hypothetical has, to be generous, some gaps. But the point of the exercise here is to highlight one consequence of such a society: boredom. Boredom finds its place, here, as the logical conclusion of a population whose labor and wages are unnecessary - a scenario that will invariably produce copious free time. | >
> | A. A Sound Business Decision | | | | |
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< | B. Multi-Planetary Centric Society (MPCS) | >
> | From 2011 to 2019, Facebook's annual ARPU grew from $5 to about $29 (USD). This metric is calculated by dividing total revenue by number of users and "shows how effectively companies monetize their users."[1] Here, the relevance of understanding the ARPU of "free" technology platforms rests on the proposition that the costs of a subscription model could mirror a company's ARPU. With this configuration, users and platforms are able to realistically transition from "free" to paid because (i) the service would not be prohibitively expensive and (ii) fairly compensates the companies for their lost advertising revenue. Granted, however, when you consider the feasibility of a subscription model to a service that has seen financial growth of nearly 600% in just eight years, the future affordability of such a service is in question. But those concerns may hold little weight; technology platforms, and Facebook in-particular, are in danger of "becoming victims of their own success."[2] As more users sign-up, the "pool of potential new users" shrinks; but what's more, specifically with Facebook, the number of active users has declined recently and is predicted to "remain flat or decline" in the future.[3] These challenges faced by technology platforms suggest that ARPU has plateaued and is unlikely to continue the same exponential growth of the last eight years. Therefore, assuming a stabilized ARPU, users who choose a subscription contract can achieve some level of reliability that their costs will not mushroom. | | | | |
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< | The hypothetical MPCS will also begin with the same collective global decision to accept the ultimate fate of the planet. Though the time it will take to colonize other planets is impossibly unknown, so the sooner the better on that one. But here, the purpose of a MPCS is perpetuity - the continued existence of the human species. To be sure, the MPCS does not preclude maximizing human fulfilment as a goal, but at its core, its purpose is history and legacy - the ability to never be forgotten. | | | | |
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< | Because of the time it could take to colonize other worlds and the relatively rapid pace of Earth's deterioration from human activity, the same sustainable technologies in agriculture and energy production will work to benefit the MPCS, too. It wouldn't do much good to focus efforts on engineering the ability to colonize another world if our own Earth is destroyed before we figure out how to leave it. Again, the hypothetical is rife with gaps, but focus on the shared consequence of each society - boredom. Sustainable technologies will produce an increase in leisure for both societies, sure, but the interesting leisure activity for the MPCS is travel. The MPCS will, it's assumed, need interstellar pioneers to settle and populate new worlds. Inter - Stellar. The word itself drips with the empty saturation that is the void of space. Traversing unimaginable distances - like those summers, as a child, and the road trip that loops through the National Parks of the western United States. So, whether it be an ECS, where individual contributions are wholly unnecessary to maximize human fulfilment, or a MPCS' interstellar pioneer sailing the stars in pursuit of perpetuity, boredom is undoubtable, inevitable. | >
> | B. Data Privacy as a (fundamental) Right
The discussion above helped to illuminate the financial plausibility of a subscription model. Yet, very few actually exist on the market--but why? Given the lack of paid options, there is an inference created that perhaps technology platforms see value in user data beyond what is reflected in the ARPU. Indeed, the type of data and behavioral patterns collected by these platforms has already demonstrated the ability to influence and modify human behavior. This can, with slightly varying perspectives, be defined as the intrinsic value of privacy and patterns of behavior. Obviously a dangerous and incredibly powerful tool, but, as private companies, and completely optional services, technology platforms do not face the same privacy restrictions imposed on entities such as state actors or common carriers when handling user data. This should be reviewed and reformed through federal regulation. Behavioral user data is so fundamentally sensitive and powerful that people should, at the very least, have the legal choice about whether or not they want to pay to keep it private. | | |
III. Conclusion | |
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< | An individual's ability to cope with boredom is a difficult skill to master; but take no doubt, it is a skill. "[A]s machinery is perfected, more and more time will have to be killed by more and more people . . . [and] [d]oing nothing is a most difficult profession [that] requires elaborate vocational training."* The amount of leisure presented by these hypothetical, but foreseeable, ECS's and MPCS's is a piece of the puzzle that might not seem obvious to think about. The current pandemic, however, is a phenomenal case to study the effects and mechanisms society has endured while in lock-down. Think about your experiences over the last eight months of the pandemic; has your leisure time increased? What have you done to cope with boredom? You may not yet realize the value of those thoughts to a world that one day ponders the answer to the greatest decision we never made. Do them a favor - write it down. | >
> | This right to choose, when applied to the types of contracts that presently exist between technology platforms and their users (i.e. conveniently "free" services in exchange for behavior collection) could function as another useful tool against surveillance capitalism and help reduce the existential threats to democracy and freedom of thought. Some users may, of course, not have the means to pay for such a choice, while others simply might not care (today) about the consequences of their behavior being collected and sold. These concerns are valid, but should not preclude the adoption of such a right just because it may not be equally applicable to all users or produce systemic change on its own. Death by a thousand cuts might be slow, but can ultimately prove effective. | | | | |
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I would prefer to talk about this draft directly. Please email me.
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< | word count: 954 | >
> | word count: 999 | | |
Sources: | |
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< | *Aldous Huxley, Education, LISTENER, Dec. 21, 1932 at 889 | >
> | [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/03/facebooks-average-revenue-per-user-leads-social-media-companies.html
[2] Id. | | | | |
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> | [3] Id. | | |
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