We’ve lived for so long in an online social universe purpose-built for advertising that it is difficult to imagine what an alternative might look like. Consider for a moment an alternative social media platform that we’ll call Super Social Media 3000 (SSM 3000), the bizarro opposite of the advertising-legible sites we use every day. It consists of a single page on which everyone interacts and where everyone sees the same thing. Rather than having structured text boxes, users manually draw shapes and words with their cursors. There are no user profiles, and you do not need to be logged in to use it.
This is an advertising nightmare! The contributions of users are all jumbled up into an unrecognizable mess. The system logs no demographic information relevant for delivering advertising. In contrast to the discrete, measurable likes on a post on Facebook, a given section of SSM 3000 provides advertisers with only a difficult-to-interpret doodle.
SSM 3000 would assuredly be a social experience. Users would interact with one another, and would likely make friends and even build communities. But light-years of difference would exist between it and what we currently understand as “social media.” The difference is a distinct lack of the features that advertising has incentivized and helped mold. By and large, we don’t have platforms like SSM 3000. This is because the broad range of expression that the internet might otherwise enable has been limited to ways of connecting that are consistent with the financial needs of advertising. The free-form scribblings of SSM 3000 are financially unsustainable compared to the shallow paradigm of likes, retweets, and short comments. In this sense, advertising is complicit in restricting the grammar of social interaction online.
Even worse, commodification is similar to other processes of standardization in that it forces new entrants to comply with the existing state of play in the market. The next Facebook or Google, to the extent that it is also driven by advertising, will need to structure attention in a way that makes its attention inventory salable in the broader marketplace. This means that securitization may be a one-way street: decisions made in the formative stage of the web limit what is possible in the future.
This is more than simply enforcing a certain kind of product design. We have been taught to interact with other people online by platforms built to buy and sell attention. One wonders if that will constrain the social possibilities of the future. At first glance, it might seem that no one would want to use SSM 3000: the anonymity and lack of clear individual spaces might degrade into a digital wall of bathroom graffiti in a few hours (or less). I don’t doubt that it would.
But that deterioration says less about fundamental human nature than it says about how we have learned to interact online. Society has only constructed online communities within the context of a web structured by online advertising, and so no norms and practices currently exist for using a space like SSM 3000. In this sense, we may be locked in. Our ingrained approach to interacting with others online assumes the features of an advertising-driven internet. This may make it hard or impossible to build alternative online social networks that do not collapse into anarchy.
These numerous arguments amount to a condemnation of the financialized infrastructure that enables much of the web to function. There is, if anything, a strong ethical imperative to allow the collapse of global surveillance capitalism rather than attempting to save it, because it might clear the deck for something better to emerge.Controlled Demolition
The companies built on digital advertising are an imposing part of the economic landscape. Google and Facebook appear to occupy an impregnable position, sucking in an ever-increasing amount of cash with no end in sight. Throughout the web, programmatic advertising remains pervasive, a dominant paradigm for making platforms financially sustainable if not extraordinarily profitable.
This makes discussions of how to structurally alter the web feel futile. It seems impossible to tear out the money machine powering the internet, and of little use to create alternatives when the existing model is so ingrained and so profitable. Programmatic advertising simply seems like the state of affairs that will govern the structure of the internet forever. The problems that come with these monetization models, too, appear to be chronic, always mitigated but never truly resolved.
Against this backdrop, the structural issues at the heart of programmatic advertising present not a threat but an opportunity. The collapse of the global digital advertising markets would produce a great opportunity for alternative business models to take shape, and a chance for the internet itself to take a different shape as well.
We could take an approach of benign neglect here. If one buys the argument that ad fraud, ad blocking, and an ever-increasing indifference toward ads will eventually break this marketplace on their own, why not just sit back and let it self-destruct?
Patiently waiting for programmatic advertising to break is an attractive position because it demands little of us, but it misses the bigger picture for a number of reasons. First, bubbles grow larger over time. The bigger the bubble, the harder the fall. From an economic management perspective, it is far better for a bubble to collapse early than for it to grow to a size where a market panic could produce massive collateral damage throughout the economy. As we have seen, the industry is well aware of the structural issues that threaten to upend the viability of the programmatic advertising markets, but is unlikely to make the radical changes necessary to address these problems. This will lead to partial, temporary fixes that only prolong the growth of the bubble and the associated problems that come with it.
Second, waiting for the bubble to burst on its own deprives us of the ability to distribute the social costs of such a downturn in a just and equitable manner. It is important to remember that it is
