A few days ago I made a post claiming (satirically, of course) that, among others, Google+ and Facebook Social were malware. I don't apologize for the satire; I could be more explicit, but, at some point, if you're not paying attention to subtext, you're not paying much attention to the text, either. That's just the way it is. But I let these social networks (and their ensuant bullshit) off the hook, somewhat.
I love the satirical perspective I took there. But there are principles left unsaid, thoughts demanding to be schematized, etc. So here's something:
Dewey's Go Hard Principle: There's no such thing as "soft" paternalism, "soft" behavior modification, "soft" anchoring, "soft" nudging, or "soft" violations of privacy. Most of all, there's no such thing as a "soft" threat to usability. There is only paternalism, behavior modification, anchoring, nudging, or violations of privacy. There are only threats to usability.The Go Hard Principle exists because companies routinely make systems that deliberately cost users, say, 3 seconds extra time (and/or a couple extra clicks) to do something, solely to punitively discourage it. I know. I've been in the meetings. It happens. While these companies rarely do a "count-down" of the arbitrary delay they've intentionally caused (unless we're talking about free versions of services), they frequently will say "Hey, if we force users to explicitly opt out of a setting using a circuitous process, we'll almost certainty get more retention, more revenue, and more data for our analytics. The harder and more punitively we encourage or discourage some behavior, the better it is for us."
Even though computers are - in some really basic sense - universal computing machines, companies have heavily favored and heavily disfavored use cases that feed their own development. There are use cases that are entirely removed because the company can't or doesn't want to support them. There are use cases that are entirely streamlined (to the point of having to find workarounds for any other use case), because the company depends on a certain percentage of its users going that route - e.g. viewing an ad.
My contention is emphatically not that any of these mechanisms is universally wrong or universally undemocratic, it's that you can't have it both ways. Either you're tilting the deck heavily against a use case or you aren't. It's not "soft", it's restrictive and the restriction is real and meaningful, and, if those restrictions are wrong or undemocratic in their "hard" cases, then they're equally wrong in the "soft" cases.
A few examples:
Excise ("Sin") Taxes: One of the most disingenuous arguments you'll ever hear is that taxing liquor or tobacco or sugar or fatty foods... is not a breach of human liberty. It's not a breach in liberty... despite the fact that you're creating an economic barrier (esp. to the poor) to pursue their own choices.
Addiction and negative externalities (second-hand smoke; health-care) certainly give one pause. But years of arguing against these laws have made me realize that the vast majority have addiction and negative externalities far below the two most common motives for excise taxes: 1. Limiting human freedom and 2. Corporate welfare (heavy taxes on roll-your-own tobacco aimed at strongly encouraging smokers - who'd been given total pharmaceutical control over an albeit-still-quite-cancerous drug - to switch back to traditional cigarettes).
I've always felt like progressives advocating for these types of excise taxes (without corresponding subsidies, at least) - even though Econ 101 and their own ideology would tell you these taxes disproportionately limit the most basic economic freedom of the poor - was repulsive to me at best and nakedly hypocritical at worst.
Abortion: Whatever your political persuasion, let's just be comically honest about something: Making it harder to see doctors and making prospective abortion patients go through hoops like "lookin at the fetus" is not about making women "consider" their difficult choice more carefully. It's about reducing the number of abortions by creating bureaucratic and economic barriers. This is the only purpose for these political maneuvers and we all know what you're doing, if you're doing that. Stop it. When you dress this type of legislation up in the supposed morality of the barrier, you lose me at Word One. Also, according to people I've known that have actually worked in these situations, no one actually reconsiders; all you're really doing is shaming them. So that's fun.
Voting Rights: After a certain basic structural/economic point, making it harder to vote, or making it harder to make votes count, is functionally indistinguishable from voter fraud. If voting is busy in a precinct and it causes a 30 minute line, that's one thing. If it's hard to find the voting booth in a precinct because of deliberate obfuscation, if the line is long because legislators in the other party wanted it that way, and if the, *ahem*, complexion of the voters in the precinct likely goes against one of the political parties? Then it's just voter fraud, legal or not.
My Phone Bill: My mobile phone carrier has switched over to a new billing system on its phone lines. By "new billing system," they mean they gutted the old (annoying but usually only 2-3 minutes long) system. Now, calling the phone line to pay your bill puts you on hold for half an hour until you speak to a representative, after which you pay 25 dollars to get your phone reconnected because you didn't have time last week to wait 30 minutes to pay your phone bill and you didn't have the account number because you were doing no-paper billing because the phone system had been working for 5 years prior. Now you have Skype solely to call your mobile phone provider because your phone works only in one single, tiny area of your apartment which is uncomfortable to remain for a half-hour and your computer is quite comfortable.
I'm not necessarily complaining or trying to shame the company in question or cost it money (okay, maybe a little), but the inconveniences here are clearly part-artificial-to-encourage-a-change, part-lazy, and part-greedy. If reducing their company (so keen on customer loyalty and "Belief" projects) to that is worth 50 dollars, then I say congratulations and thanks for letting me know. There are plenty of "soft" measures being taken here, but the end result is inconvenience-to-the-point-of-inaction and money being taken out of (countless, by the sounds of it) customers' pockets.
YouTube comments: I was on YouTube, and I've noticed that they now require Google+ accounts to post comments, and tend by default to set your log-in to the Google+ account you are logged in with Google as. I haven't experimented enough with the cookies to know (and my account history with Google is complicated enough that it would be really hard to know), but the bottom line is this:
I have never allowed Google to change my account name to my e-mail name, despite dozens of requests to do so. Every time they've asked I've politely declined and found (of course, to no avail) that there is no recourse to stop them from this. I have a pretty good reason to avoid using my real name, and it's not anything unspeakable I've done, but the reasonable amount of privacy from public eyes I'd like to keep. I'm 24 (so obviously I'm incredibly old and out-of-step), but I still like to use "handles" (i.e. identities that aren't obviously tied to a real name). I still have a couple handles that are meaningful to me and I emphatically don't want to use my real name. It's not an insane use-case. With stalkers, exes, employers, and the shill "social media" intern required at every establishment, plenty of people would rather not put themselves on enemy lists, get into flame wars where someone can find out where you live, and generally have the kind of "accountability" to their words which is far more stifling and deleterious to free expression than the actual "free speech with consequences" ideal. Put it this way: You don't need to have your ID on you to get tackled and arrested for lying about "Fire" in a crowded movie theater. And if you do have your ID on you, the whole crowd doesn't need to know until you're formally charged. It's basic decorum that prevents people's houses from getting burnt down. There are plenty of ordinary consequences (like reporting posts or accounts or making actual legal action) for actual hate speech or libel on the Internet, and so it's reasonable to go for privacy. Also, people's "handles" aren't just innocuous covers for real names; they're part of an individual or an organizaton's attempt to brand itself for relevant content.
By tying your words not just to an account but your real name and potentially your real e-mail, Google is saying that any person or organization that really wants to know who is hurting their "brand" on YouTube can be found and potentially threatened. Given the revelations about the NSA, it's no wonder companies are so willing to do this, but still... What I'm defending is a reasonable use case, and Google, by using every manner of "soft" and subtle encouragement, has made it hard and occasionally complex-to-the-point-of-functionally-impossible to uphold this use case. Google would rather fit everyone into the square hole of social-network-tied-to-real-name than use an organic and wildly successful social network that they already have in YouTube. They would rather manipulate and distort the culture at every opportunity to serve their own brand, and totally at the expense of countless millions of people that want only the most basic amounts of privacy and freedom from the uglier sides of social networking.
There's nothing "soft" about what Google is doing. I was able to create a Google+ page for one of my handles and that's good enough for me, when Google doesn't decide to switch my account without telling me or ignore my severally, explicitly stated wishes about privacy.
Of course, what inspired this post (besides this awesome essay) is infinitely less deleterious and infinitely more annoying: That whenever I try to comment by clicking the comment box now, there's a checkbox (already checked, naturally) asking if I want to also post my comment to Google+. So I unchecked the check box and thought better of commenting, clicking away from the comment box. Then, lo and behold, I decide to comment again and clicked the comment box. The checkbox was checked again, on the same page. Look, Google, I know how to code. I know Javascript and persistent states. I know you did this on purpose, Google. There's no hiding from this intrepid blogger that has 20,000 hits over 5 years, 99% of which are robots, and I don't even get those anymore.
It's a form of soft behavior encouragement that is transparently obvious, preys on the ignorant of code and behavior, and awkwardly pushes a social network ideal and welds it to what is not broken, thereby breaking this newly-welded second.
Facebook: There's nothing "soft" about making the privacy settings ridiculously convoluted and creating deleterious-to-privacy-and-usability opt-in settings until finally making them mandatory. There's nothing soft about making once-basic use cases more complicated. I was in a Facebook "Group" for 4 or 5 years, an organic community (essentially discussions) of some million people, and Facebook did everything it could to drive us away by creating usability barriers (literally taking features away every week), destroying the history of the board, taking away replies, making some replies non-functional entirely, and generally making complex multi-page navigation impossible except through dogged persistence. This organic community of persistent hundreds (and occasional thousands) and Facebook could not even get zetaboards-level functionality right. Sure, a drop in the bucket, and Facebook clearly made "Pages" (a more superficial, top-down-based, non-communal alternative to forums) its preferred mode over Groups.
But in the end usability (as well as a gradual drift of the community) drove us away. If the interface were less shitty, Facebook could have had a gigantic, stable community of well-informed intellectuals to poach content from. Instead, they ended up with the embers of a community burnt too many times.
And yet Facebook - for all its paucity of usability and design - is incredibly wealthy because it connected people to people. For all the apparent genius of the coders, for all the beautiful campuses these tech giants construct, they're built on the revenue of user-bases none of these companies has never had qualms about openly exploiting. The tragedy of our flourishing era, perhaps, in a stark microcosm.
Conclusion
Creating artificial barriers between a user and their choices in your system necessarily limits the creative and critical capabilities of that user in that system. It doesn't matter whether those barriers or soft or hard. Those barriers exist and heavily influence human choice in a condescending, paternalistic, profit-maximizing way whether than in the way that maximizes two-way user-and-maker benefit from the system.
Obviously, for some companies, dependable user-bases are the apex of profitability and make the company wealthy and institutionally revenue-generating. A dream come true. But I'd advise caution on this front, for policy-makers, companies, and end-users. For our society. If you wish for a clockwork user and set the stage for the clockwork user and their use-cases to be relentlessly selected for, and for the rest to be wildly inconvenienced to the extent that they do not fall into line? I'd advise caution.
Because you just might get it.
You just might get users that don't have enough freedom in your games to develop the mods that keep your game relevant. You just might get users that don't experiment with the medium you're pushing and so push the margins to your competitors. You just might get social networks of stagnant content, filled with a stagnant user-base. And if you're cheering at the profitability of that, well, you just might end up being remembered as the people that took a system promising infinite human freedom and ensuring that the vast majority of people did nothing with that freedom.
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