The public sphere and its business models

Free speech versus market-clearing speech

December 23, 2023 — November 1, 2024

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Connecting invasive arguments, free speech, memetics, journalism, the sociology of information, technical and speech standards, and epistemic communities.

What are the relationships between business models for aiding communication, and the actual things we would (or claim we would) like communication to do? How can we fund judicious and informed debate and still sell advertising?

1 Dark Forest

Maggie Appleton’s commentary on Dark Forest theory of the Internet, initiated by Yancey Strickler sounds like it pertains.

The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.

It’s like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life—all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators.

Humans who want to engage in informal, unoptimised, personal interactions have to hide in closed spaces like invite-only Slack channels, Discord groups, email newsletters, small-scale blogs, and digital gardens. Or make themselves illegible and algorithmically incoherent in public venues.

I feel like I’m going to lose this battle, but for the record, I do not love the term “textpocalypse”.

2 Management of the discourse commons

Figure 1

A powerful idea that I want to return to.

Nadia Eghbal, An alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons points to the failure of online discourse as an issue of management of the commons:

My big takeaway from the patterns Ostrom identified is that sustainably managing the commons requires a high degree of context among participants. Most failure outcomes can be traced back to context collapse. This is true whether you’re an open source project or someone with a large Twitter following.

Ostrom paints an eerily accurate picture of the problems we see today:

…no one communicates, everyone acts independently, no attention is paid to the effects of one’s actions, and the costs of trying to change the structure of the situation are high

Whereas in the sustainable, “smaller-scale” CPRs she looked at,

…individuals repeatedly communicate and interact with one another…[When individuals] have developed shared norms and patterns of reciprocity, they possess social capital with which they can build institutional arrangements for resolving CPR dilemmas.

Ostrom’s framework is more about managing physical resources like trees and water and stuff. But we can maybe imagine casting civil discourse as a metaphorical resource and then ask ourselves: are we doing any of the things that science suggests we need to do to manage it?

I like this because it slices up the debate in a more productive way. The least thoughtful of free speech proponents often seem to be arguing for a discourse commons that is everywhere ungoverned and tragic. But we know that this is insane for normal commons resources. Sustainable commons management happens through institutions. They can be bottom-up or top-down, they can be codified laws or they can be property rights or something informal and trust-driven. But when institutions are missing, commons management does not work, and if the only way I can read my news feed is by scrolling through troll flamewars then I can’t read the news.

In this sense arguing for “free” speech is ill-defined. Instead we might need to solve for a different criterion.

On what terms am I prepared to commit the constrained resource of my attention to a community discourse? How many “die in a fire faggot” attacks am I prepared to weather to comment on a news story? What credentials am I prepared to show to earn someone else’s attention?

As with other commons management institutions, we can imagine that this is a contextual thing. We can have different norms inside communities, inside schools, inside workplaces…

Crucially there is no connection between the state (say) declaring some speech illegal, and an individual community deciding that it is not appropriate inside this community.

I’m sure I can come back and make this point more compactly somehow. TBC.

3 Incoming

Erin Kissane, Untangling Threads

The Threads federation conversations that I’ve seen so far mostly focus on:

  • Meta’s likelihood of destroying the fediverse via “embrace-extend-extinguish”
  • Meta’s ability to get hold of pre-Threads fediverse (I’ll call it Small Fedi for convenience) users’ data,
  • Threads’ likelihood of fumbling content moderation, and
  • the correct weighting of Meta being terrible vs. connecting with people who use Threads.

[…]

The risks I’ll cover in the rest of this post fall into three categories:

  1. My understanding of who and what Meta is
  2. The open and covert attack vectors that Meta services routinely host
  3. The ethics of contribution to and complicity with Meta’s wider projects

I would like to have a link on the difficulties of coordinating on justice via mob rule, public shaming and petitions, wherein we look at the coordination problems, and separate the problem of identifying injustice/inefficiency/existential threat, and the problem of calibrating a political response. Sideline in altruistic punishment and feedback loops. TBD.