In their first decade, Internet services, from Google to Facebook to X, insisted that they were humble platforms designed to serve users. The users, not the platforms, would choose what to post or read online; the users, not the platforms, would retain ultimate control over what they decided to say or do. That Internet ceased to exist on January 8, 2021, when these tech companies banished former president Donald Trump and many of his supporters from their platforms. The platforms may have tightened control over users to avoid stricter regulation, but in showcasing their power over public discourse, they amplified public demands for governments to rein them in.
In their second decade, digital platforms moved from content neutrality to managing users’ behavior. Deciding to censor their users at scale, they struck an unusual alliance with state agencies, academic centers, and anti-“misinformation” nonprofits—an alliance that the investigative journalists who published the “Twitter Files” have aptly labeled the “censorship-industrial complex” (which now faces legal scrutiny).
But lurking behind the digital free-speech debate are fundamental questions of digital rights. Who should own your content, your account, the digital persona that you cultivate? Who should protect your digital rights, civic and consumer, against platforms that expropriate everything you create on them? We have entered a new political-economic situation in which digital civic rights and the rights of digital property are not yet fully established, while traditional concepts of political freedoms and property rights increasingly fail online. To establish a coherent framework of digital rights, we need to understand the nature of the modern platform economy. What, exactly, do platforms produce that gives them such power?
Imagine that you have some Nothing—pure, unalloyed Nothing—that you have decided to sell for $5 per unit on Amazon. Imagine further that, because of some glitch, Amazon shows your offer to 10 million users. Some people would buy that Nothing by mistake or out of curiosity. With sufficient reach, you’ve got a good business.
This scenario is no fantasy. In 2014, the Ann Arbor, Michigan, funk band Vulfpeck posted on Spotify a new album, Sleepify, that contained ten tracks of silence. They asked fans to stream the songs on a loop, allowing the band to collect royalties of one-half of a cent for each stream. Their fans obliged. In a month, the blank tracks were played more than 5 million times, earning the band about $25,000. Spotify tolerated the gambit for a while, but then took the album down. Meantime, two Canadians from Alberta launched a similar ploy, putting a Ziploc bag of local air on eBay. When somebody bought it for $0.99, the sellers lost money on shipping. But when they started compressing crisp Albertan air into cans and selling it abroad, they reached $300,000 in annual sales in 2018 through online purchases and retail stores, mostly in South Korea.
These whimsical stories suggest a heavier lesson. Despite Bill Gates’s proclamation in 1996, content is no longer king. Instead, on today’s Internet, reach is king. With enough reach, you can sell nothing, something, anything—even air.
A new form of value has emerged in the platform economy. It has little to do with exchange-value, use-value, or the concept of a commodity. The most valuable asset of a platform is connectivity: its ability to reach a sufficient number of users.
This platform effect holds true only past a certain threshold. Consider the digital strategy of the New York Times, which, in essence, seeks to transform the news business into a platform business. Only about 700,000 people subscribe to the print newspaper itself, a number that is steadily going down. Digital-news-only subscribers sit at 3 million and falling, less than one-third of total subscribers. Yet the Times is successfully adding overall subscribers to its ever-expanding range of products—offering significant entry discounts, crosswords, addictive word games, culinary recipes, and sports coverage. The company initially set out to achieve 10 million subscribers by 2025, hit this target in 2023, and is now pursuing a “meaningfully larger number.” After building a sufficiently huge platform, the Times will be able to sell anything it wants. Reach is what matters: the commodity for sale—whether compressed air or newsroom output, or even the compressed air of the newsroom—is of secondary importance. Platform reach constitutes a new product, whose value can render irrelevant the underlying content.
Engineer and early digital pioneer Robert Metcalfe anticipated this reality decades ago with Metcalfe’s law, a principle that seeks to quantify the value of network effects. The value of a network, he maintained, rests on a straightforward concept. The more that users participate, the more potential connections they can form, and the more benefits that each can attain.
The writer Clay Shirky helpfully summarized the meaning of these “network effects” in his 2010 book Cognitive Surplus. Suppose you want a ride to New Jersey at a certain time and post a request on a car-sharing service. If, after making 20 such requests, you find only a few takers, you’ll probably decide not to use the service again. The network effect was not activated. But if the service generally helps you hitch a ride, then the effect was activated. To be valuable, such a service must attract a high enough share of possible riders in the area, making it likely that somebody will emerge to meet the demand.
It follows that the platform best serving modern users’ interests is monopolistic. If all users gather on a single platform, then all possible matches will happen. Users will benefit the most from only one Facebook, only one Google, only one Amazon, only one X, only one Tinder, and only one car-sharing service. No doubt the market will fracture to serve specialized needs. But too much segmentation will diminish the network effect, and therefore the platform’s value, for users. Network effects naturally drive platforms toward monopolization, not due to the evil will of the platform overlords (though they surely don’t object) but through the activity of users themselves.
Platform monopolization has downsides, of course, such as the abuse of monopolistic power over users or global system glitches that could disrupt the lives of all who depend on a particular platform. Regulation could theoretically rectify such abuses or critical dependencies. But the political system often struggles to adapt to fast-moving technology, and the introduction of state power into the digital world invites the risk of regulatory capture, as in the Twitter Files. (See “The New Censorship,” Summer 2023.)
Market segmentation shows that the platform appetite for monopolization has natural limits. New digital features or new generations of users arrive and undermine old monopolies. For example, Myspace was the first social-media platform to reach a global audience; Facebook’s offer of more advanced features made Myspace obsolete. Social-media services X, Instagram, and TikTok each offer specific features that allow them to approach monopoly power in their own niches.
“With more connections on a certain platform, users grow a larger social capital. More connections empower but also enslave us.”
But the digital economy may still be in an intermediate stage of development. The experiences of other countries suggest that a universal, ultimate social-media platform could eventually emerge, embodying all possible features of social networking—from chatting and dating to video reporting and digital shopping. The popular Chinese app WeChat might best resemble this universal platform, but similar examples have sprung up elsewhere.
This leads to another corollary of the network effect: in the ideal network, any possible matches become inevitable. Say you want to have a cup of coffee with someone near Times Square after work and post an open invitation on Facebook. If you have 200 Facebook friends, the offer probably won’t be taken up. But if you’re a celebrity with 200,000 followers, a line will form for the privilege of your company.
Social networks tend to snowball because humans are social creatures. As he helped chart a path forward for the modern Internet, Metcalfe described a network of devices, such as fax machines or telephones, that were put into contact. But when the networked nodes are humans, who naturally seek mutual affirmation, the statistical network becomes a social network: the nodes proactively “want” to resonate and coincide.
In digital, your social graph—your connections—is also your social capital. When your online presence is desirable by enough people, you can monetize it. Influencers endorse products, share recipes, unbox promoted goods, and sell air. Increasingly algorithmic, our platforms facilitate social capitalism by calculating who might like whom or what, as well as deciding what you might want to see on your screen.
With more connections on a certain platform, users grow their social capital. More connections empower but also enslave us. Several factors keep users on a given platform: from habit-forming designs and large networks to the fact that users can earn a return on their investment only on the platform they’re invested in. Just as a resident of a one-bedroom apartment can relocate much easier than a family living in a three-bedroom house, the more digital belongings you have on the platform, the harder it is to move.
Like a genie enslaved by his lamp, users cannot escape the magical phones that enable them to enter a new domain. The more stories, thoughts, photos, shares, and memes you store, the more the network effect rewards you. Using your account is like settling into a new house in a new neighborhood: it’s an investment, forming ties that bind.
As digital platforms replace the essentially personal act of socializing, they increasingly take possession of our personae. But does that mean that we are helpless against the platforms’ growing might? An example of resistance from institutional users—namely, the news media, which has suffered its own problems from digital networking—offers lessons about efforts to reclaim control over the digital realm.
Two Anglosphere governments have sought to apply the print-era idea of intellectual property to digital platforms, demanding that the platforms pay news producers for the right to host news content. Australia introduced legislation that entitles the regulator to “designate” the platforms that must pay news producers for hosting their links. Yet the regulation was flexible; the regulator gave the platforms time to make individual deals with key publishers and did not enforce the “link tax” immediately. This lenient approach succeeded, and approximately 200 million Australian dollars flowed to the local news industry from the digital behemoths in the first year.
Canada’s approach was less flexible. The platforms were concerned that the legislation in Canada risked forcing them to pay “news producers” under the law, not under bilateral deals, creating the link tax. Worried about setting an unfavorable precedent in a market so close to the U.S., the platforms simply removed all news. Facebook users in Canada can no longer share a news link, nor can they see news content from abroad in their feed.
This fallout of governmental protectionism hardly serves the news media’s interests, however. Convinced that their product carries more social value than the platforms understand, they now keep it to themselves. In other words, the news media have “protected” their content value—at the cost of losing the surplus value that platforms provide. No surprise that audience engagement with the news websites has plummeted. The Canadian government promises other measures to support the news industry, which now sits in a much worse position and might require public support to survive. The government, however, can benefit from it, as the situation makes the “independent” media even more dependent on budget subsidies and other protective measures.
At the institutional level, then, protecting digital property rights is a double-edged sword. With support from governments, the media have managed to affirm their right to digital property in both cases. Yet the outcomes varied, based on implementation. The news industry wanted property rights on social media; vindicating their claim appeared to require enforcement by state protectionism. Without governmental pressure, the rights of digital property are unilaterally defined by the platform.
But was your content ever really yours after you used a platform to host and distribute it? If you bring something onto a platform, you likely brought it for your own networking purposes; that’s the platform’s business. As soon as you share something on that platform, you also share the property rights over that thing in exchange for the benefit of reaching other users. Exposing yourself and your content for both the network effect and the platform’s own business is, in a sense, your platform fee. As media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said, humans are the sex facilitators to the machine world, the same as bees are to plants. The metaphor might also imply that, yes, humans make the honey for themselves, but the fruits of their labor ultimately belong to the beekeeper.
The modern criticism of platform capitalism posits that capital has become so all-permeating that it has learned to exploit even our leisure activity, such as chatting and liking on social media or listening to something on Spotify. As this activity produces some product for the platforms, it should, the critique goes, be deemed “unwaged digital labor.” Exposing such hidden “exploitation” has become a new creed of “platform” Marxism since the 1970s, when Dallas Smythe revealed the phenomenon of the “audience commodity”: the ability of modern capital to commodify the mass audience’s leisure time.
Such criticism is wrong. It not only neglects the voluntary and proactive entry of users into relationships but also overlooks the fact that users receive a product, too. Moreover, the value that platforms provide in exchange for our “unwaged digital labor” corresponds with the highest value in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: self-actualization. Indeed, the relations of production here can be described in a different way. Platform capitalism evolved to the degree that it can capitalize, both for itself and for you, your leisure time. All efforts you put into your social-media activity are, to some extent, work on behalf of yourself: the more effort, the greater your personal network capitalization. The more actively bees pollinate flowers, the more nectar they gather for themselves.
The result is a paradox. The elements of our digital personality should belong to us, but the digital account itself is an unalienated part of the platform. The paradox is visible if we look at our digital personae on different platforms. They are different, despite being created by one person. They slightly (or not so slightly) differ in their areas of interest, manner of speech, and even appearance.
Each user is a digital multi-person who actually does not exist in an assembled form but only in his or her platform variations. Digital multi-personality illustrates the power of the platform design that lures us into creating platform-specific versions of ourselves. For example, Instagram favors visual bragging, X favors political commenting, Facebook favors family and community connections, TikTok favors visual-motor self-representation, and Tinder favors mating show-offs. We plant and grow our digital clones to live our better lives, but our platform-specific personae live within the environment of a concrete platform: they are grown in, by, and for those specific conditions. Digital suicide, or deleting one’s digital presence altogether (as happened on Facebook to the Canadian media, assisted by the government), appears to be the only way to exercise one’s alleged property rights over one’s digital account.
The concept of “biopolitics”—referring to political control over the human body—requires an update. Platforms have ushered in the era of digital biopolitics, allowing us to grow our digital bodies but not to own them. Offering social rewards, the platforms own us without exercising real coercion. So far, the most disturbing social consequence has been the unfreedom of digital speech. But this is just the beginning. The environmental power of the platforms over our digital personalities is limitless. Shadow-banning (the canceling of one’s digital presence on behalf of the regnant ideology) and un-personing (disabling one’s ability to participate in, say, digital banking) have already shown us the contours of the future. The next stage of digital biopolitics will involve social scoring: we will be obliged to live an approved digital life—or pay the price.
Top Photo by Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images
