IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2023 - 32

Commentary
business models of the hosts of private digital spaces
are such that they tolerate limited community action.
Consider that Facebook, Twitter, and other similar
platforms are commercial entities centered around
data-harvesting platforms to support advertising revenue.
In this way, the aim is to create a comfortable
environment, similar to a shopping mall, that entices
you to stay and return. And people do use shopping
malls in this way: a classic example would be teenagers
choosing to meet their friends there. Yet, we
know that even if these are places where you can go
to meet your friends and have discussions, the purpose
of the place is to sell you things, and the place
only exists because it is effective at that.
So, if these online platforms are shopping centers
and not town squares, why do they apparently tolerate
more community organizing than their physical
equivalents?
There is a key difference and interesting dynamics
to observe here. The owner of the private digital
space often not only tolerates, but wants to encourage
dissent or activity other than its primary revenue-generating
purpose, so long as this draws more
attention or retains a population within the space,
which can then be a source of greater current or
future advertising revenue or data value. Indeed,
given the " attention economy " [2], and given that
controversy attracts attention, there is in fact commercial
value in having dissent permitted or even
encouraged by the platform (not to mention that
the platform owner can then build a model that you
have an " interest " in whatever the community group
is about). This is a commodification of democracy to
sell more eyeballs.
Returning to the power differential that exists
in partially compatible private spaces, from coffee
shops to global social media platforms, we can see
that a greater dominance of the space creates a
greater power differential, indicated at the extreme
with (near-)monopoly. Consider the controversy
about the ownership and role of Twitter in 2022. A
private text message conversation between Jack
Dorsey, Twitter's founder, and Elon Musk, its eventual
purchaser and (at the time of writing) the
world's richest person,4 illustrates this. The conversation
was made public in a court filing for Twitter
versus Musk (2022)5:
4https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/
5https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-musk-text-exhibits-twitter-v-musk
Jack
Dorsey: I'm off the Twitter board mid-May and
then completely out of the company. I intend to
do this work and fix our mistakes. Twitter started
as a protocol. It should never have been a company.
That was the original sin.
Elon Musk: I'd like to help if I am able to
Jack Dorsey: I wanted to talk with you about
it after I was all clear, because you care so
much, get its importance, and could def help
in immeasurable ways. Back when we had the
activist come in, I tried my hardest to get you on
our board, and our board said no. That's about
the time I decided I needed to work to leave, as
hard as it was for me.
Elon Musk: Do you have a moment to talk?
Jack Dorsey: Bout to head out to dinner but can
for a minute
Elon Musk: What should it look like?
Jack Dorsey: I believe it must be an open-source
protocol, funded by a foundation of sorts that
doesn't own the protocol, only advances it. A bit
like what Signal has done. It can't have an advertising
model. Otherwise, you have a surface area that
governments and advertisers will try to influence
and control. If it has a centralized entity behind it,
it will be attacked. This isn't complicated work, it
just has to be done right so it's resilient to what has
happened to Twitter.
Elon Musk: Super interesting idea
What matters here is not whether you agree with
Dorsey or Musk, and Dorsey, in particular, alludes
to what we believe to be a very reasonable point
about the consequence of app-based models for
internet platforms rather than protocol-based ones.
What matters more is that our community organizing
spaces in the digital world are governed by conversations
like this one. Fundamentally, this shows
us that the health of our digital space is dependent
on the whims, ideas, and goodwill of a small
number of highly privileged people. Here, a chat
between two billionaires will influence the form of
the space in which dominant public and community
discourse occurs.
Geographers Zook and Graham [24] liken the
dominance of the corporate internet today to the
enclosure of rural England. The enclosures, a process
32
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-musk-text-exhibits-twitter-v-musk https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23112929-elon-musk-text-exhibits-twitter-v-musk
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