The ethics of participation

Online sharing practices have profoundly changed culture, business, and education. "Web 2" was the most-cited Wikipedia entry of 2006. Time Magazine made "You" the person of the year. Chris Anderson's The Long Tail became received "street credibility." All this and the often stated growth statistics indicate the increasingly broad acceptance of sites that offer "user-generated" content. What would be included in a lesson on the ethics of participation?

Yochai Benkler argues in-depth for the new economical model of the networked commons. What Benkler calls "the market sector" has profited from the "harnessing of collective intelligence." There is the unpaid Amazon.com book reviewer who, for reasons yet to be determined for certain, writes thousands of reviews a year thus helping the global readership to make better picks but also massively aiding the billionaires at Amazon.

In December 2006, Nicholas Carr wrote that "putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the product of their work, provides an incredibly efficient mechanism to harvest the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrate it into the hands of the very few."

This keep-the-spate-but-the-potatoes-are-mine mentality is puzzling. Today the means of production are dirt cheap and immaterial labor is easily distributed. The imperative for companies is to attract content submissions. This attention will translate into cash. YouTube is one good example for this. Watch the quirky video clip "A Message From Chad and Steve," the co-founders of Youtube, presenting themselves shortly after their merger with Google ($1.6 billion in Google stocks). They are tumbling of joy about the money and their talk of community and better services comes across as amusingly bogus. The fact that David C. Drummond and Chad Hurley of YouTube spark youthful silliness does not mean that they are not prime examples of the Californian ideology à la Web2.

There are hundreds of video responses to this clip. Such geographically distributed, conversational video practice has not existed before in this way. What follows are some examples from the responses starting with some critical voices. "Renetto" points out that Chad and Steve "made money of the backs of the YouTube users."  Indeed, the copyright specifications on YouTube prevent people from making commercial use of the uploaded content but they don't prevent YouTube from generating profit by selling search list ranking to companies etc. 

The YouTube Terms and Conditions page states:

"Content on the Website... may not be used, copied, reproduced, distributed, ... sold, licensed, or otherwise exploited for any other purposes whatsoever without the prior written consent of the respective owners. ... For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your User Submissions. However, by submitting the User Submissions to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the User Submissions..."

At the time of the merger, YouTube had not made profits but Google perhaps realized that a site with 1 million page views and 65.000 video uploads a day, will be a perfect vehicle for the distribution of (commercial) film. Viewing scenarios for commercial films will drift away from traditional cinemas to the computer screen near you. YouTube is also an ideal platform where amateur-style and professional video ads can still reach the eye balls of consumers. There are IKEA advertisements, for example, but also politicians like John Edwards wake up to the fact that millions are watching.

Some of the following videos show the personal investment of many kids in services like YouTube. "Unsweet" says it in no uncertain terms: "I'd be completed crushed if YouTube would be taken away from us." YouTube, here, sounds very much like a toy instrument given to a child. Danah boyd showed for MySpace that social networking sites also serve as "public display of connection." Teenagers can visualize their social network on MySpace, which validates them in the eyes of their peer group.

"Namerae" asks herself what is so bad about the Google/YouTube merger because Google has provided such great customer service. "NoHoGirls" think of themselves as "bringing the community together," as making their videos for "the community." Here the motivation may be to have fun creating their goofy videos but at the same time the pretty transparent hope to become as rich as Chad and Steve. This is also reflected in Jackson's video clip. He says "Congratulations for selling out YouTube. ... We are proud of you guys for going so far with it."
"Jeffmara" joins this choir "Congrats on being acquired, what great validation of your work. You guys deserve every bit of that cash." "Thatpspguy" says "Who would have thunk it, eh? Congratulations. You are now the richest people on YouTube, way to go."

"Nuodai" is 15 year old and lives in Britain. He elaborates on his philosophy of why a merger is a bad thing. 

Contributors upload their material, a slice of their life to corporate sociable environments. It's not just teenagers who identify with it. "PhillFlash" performs the surprise he felt about the news of the merger "YouTube... oh, WE are in the news."

At any time the company can change their video player on the site (they did) or ask sites to be taken down that offer plug-ions to download YouTube videos (they did not thus far). There is also no guarantee that YouTube will not start charging for the hosting service and bandwidth. 

In the context of YouTube but also sites like CiteUlike, del.icio.us, and others, I suggest that contributors are driven by a hybrid mix of motivations. I call this "individualistic collectivism": contributors are not exclusively in it for themselves but they are also not completely driven by the idea of the greater good. Peter Kollock (1999) identifies anticipated reciprocity, increased recognition, as well as a sense of efficacy and community as motivating factors. For an in-depth look at the emotional and social motivations for participation see my essay The Participatory Challenge, first published in DataBrowser 3.

In the case of Amazon.com it is relatively easy to understand that the attention economy leads to cash. Amazon.com has become a great research tool. The many contributors have out-cooperated Amazon.com's competition. My local bookstore cannot line up 12 individuals who tell me what they think of a book. (Of course we all heard the horror stories of authors promoting themselves by impersonating reputable people in a given industry, but that's not the majority of reviews.) People come to Amazon.com to research a book and then also buy it there. However, the latter is not inevitable.

If we are aiming for "ethical consistency," then we could buy the book elsewhere. Edward Said demanded such consistency in his essay Speaking Truth to Power, but the term "ethical consistency" was coined by the French philosopher Alain Badiou. (1) In his book "Ethics" Badiou (2001) mounts a critique of contemporary ethics discourses, which he describes as "at best variations on ancient religious and moral preaching, at worst a threatening mix of conservatism and the death drive." (2) For Badiou, such discourses are installed in order to reinforce the status quo.

But what I suggest as an ethics of participation is in fact quite different. "Ethical consistency" in relation to participatory cultures means that we are standing up for our values and beliefs. You may be against centralization and radically for the open access to knowledge. What matters most is that you follow through on those beliefs. 

This discussion, however, is complicated by the fact that there is indeed hardly any outside of the capitalist managerial logic. Today you discover a useful sociable web tool and tomorrow it will be acquired by Yahoo or MTV. Good luck, finding remaining public spaces online... Even in SecondLife, consumer experiences are constructed within "user-created" contexts.

It'd be naive to completely condemn business models such as Amazon.com. They are not radical evil. However, Google corporate slogan Don't Be Evil looks different today than it did even two years ago. The future society will be full of hybrid economic schemes and hybrid identities. Today, companies learn to make money in the cracks of the day-to-day culture of sharing and exchange online. They understand the importance of a low threshold. The easier it is for the "masses" to enter their environments and contribute content, the more the company will benefit.

The act of participation is political: people offer their contribution but the rules of the context to which they contribute are often vague. Many YouTube contributors were unaware of the company's long-standing efforts to make money of the immaterial and often creative labor of this community of interest. Content producers are, in a Marxian sense, alienated from the product of their labor because they don't have control over its future on the site (other than its removal).

According to Carr the top ten sites on the World Wide Web accounted for 40% of total Internet page views in November 2006. I'd add that the user-generated content is the prime reason for this concentration. (MySpace and Facebook together accounted for 17% of all page views in November 2006.) Such centralization happened at the same time that the number of domain names increased from 2.1 million to 5.1 million.

Michael Hardt writes that "Affective labor is one face of what I will call "immaterial labor", which has assumed a dominant position with respect to the other forms of labor in the global capitalist economy.  ... [G]iven the role of affective labor as one of the strongest links in the chain of capitalist postmodernization, its potential for subversion and autonomous constitution is all the greater."

How can our immaterial labor be turned into an autonomous act? For one, we can counteract the mentioned centralization by not (exclusively) using mainstream sites. We can instead direct our "micro-volunteerism" toward not-for-profit projects like Archive.org or Wikipedia. Or, at least, create awareness of the dependence on mainstream services that centralization creates. These micro-actions are practical and can be implemented right away. This is a starting point for participatory ethics.

(1) Badiou. A. "Ethics" New York: Verso. p60

(2) Badiou. A. "Ethics" New York: Verso. p90