Citizendium Blog

I have long held that there is something unseemly about a for-profit company earning money by exploiting volunteer participants in an online communities.

The plan with the Nupedia project, for which I was hired in 2000, was to sell ads once we had enough traffic to justify doing so.  This always struck me as, at least, somewhat morally questionable, but the argument we passed around was that for-profit businesses provide a very useful service for which it makes sense that they be compensated.  So I personally had to come to terms with this issue.  One might argue that businesses are justly compensated for the content and software hosting service they provide to the community of volunteers.  But that now sounds ridiculous to me: it is now obvious that it is possible to produce excellent hosting services for a relatively small amount of money, far less than the profit that a successful content community can bring in.  When the idea of selling ads was bruited in early 2002 – to pay my salary — the Spanish Wikipedians forked, and then Wikipedia finally announced that it would never have any ads.  In fairness, however, I should mention that we had long since decided by then to make Wikipedia into a non-profit; the Wikimedia Foundation eventually resulted from those early conversations, though I had nothing to do with its birth.  This is also why Jimmy Wales went on to found Wikia (originally Wikicities) in 2004: so that he could profit from ads placed on community-generated content.

I have finally decided to start arguing that online content-creation communities should be self-governing non-profits, like Wikipedia and the Citizendium, and probably membership organizations at that.  (By the way, I raised this as a topic in my first post to the SharedKnowing mailing list.  The second post is by Ben Kovitz — Ben’s the guy who originally told me about wikis in Pacific Beach over enchiladas back on January 2, 2001.  Ben is great.)

I am finally throwing down the gauntlet.  The business models of YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, craigslist, Yahoo Groups, and up-and-comers like Mahalo and Wikia – to name just a few — are all resting on morally questionable grounds.  Perhaps it is time to stop contributing to them, on moral grounds.

The originals of these sorts of websites, back in the mid-1990s, were merely Web versions of the sort of free, and unprofitable, online communities that had thrived since the 80s and 90s (especially Usenet newsgroups and Listservs).  Then, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and especially around 2004, these websites started actually making serious money from ads, and the “Web 2.0″ cash cow was born.

The hype was that Web 2.0 was a “digital democratic revolution,” and while it is that to a certain extent, in one important respect Web 2.0 is profoundly anti-democratic.  Sure, participants are able to contribute as freely as they liked, largely without any interference from top-down expert managers.  But that is mainly because the website owners didn’t want to pay expert managers, and they were happier with giant communities of unpaid volunteers.  Besides, placing any community members, who were not paid employees, quite visibly in charge might place the company’s grip on its own authority at risk.  So, sure: you have just as much right as anyone to rate a YouTube post, vote a story up on Digg, gain and use karma on Slashdot, and so forth.  But you don’t have a very robust right to determine the website’s important policies, even though — indeed, because – your work is their path to wealth.  And you don’t, of course, have any right to determine how the money your content has earned is spent.

I do not dispute in the slightest that Web 2.0 entrepreneurs are acting legally; legally, they are in the clear on this point.  I strongly defend free markets, but the fact that exploitation happens in the context of a free market does not, of course, morally justify the exploitation.  Prostitution would be permitted in a fully free market, but that doesn’t mean I can’t justly call it exploitation.  I will continue to defend those corporations’ right to contract, which is what legally justifies their “filthy lucre.”  But it’s entirely consistent with that, that I advise the millions of global volunteers out their to pool their resources instead into projects over which they enjoy ownership and control.

Explain to me, if you can, why YouTube’s founders deserved $1.5 billion.  They set up some software on some servers and then managed the database as volunteers fed content onto the servers.  The vast bulk of the value of their business is owing to those volunteers.  For that reason and that reason alone, I submit that YouTube’s founders didn’t deserve their personal windfall.  If you are surprised at how Web 2.0 entrepreneurs seem to be able to create money out of thin air, don’t be: their contributors are the ones who created that wealth.

Frankly, this is why I never got seriously involved in Web 2.0 entrepreneur — why I never cashed in — though I surely could have done so.  I think I could even now be pulling down a very nice salary, or working on a start-up that exploits new online communities.  But I don’t.  Do my scruples make me a chump?  I don’t think so.  I have directly organized Web communities off and on since 1994.  I’ve gotten to know these people, and I know that they act out of a desire to teach and help, a desire for fellowship — in short, largely for the most excellent of motives.  I couldn’t imagine asking those good people to contribute content so that I could personally benefit.  Growing personally wealthy on the backs of volunteers has always struck me as being morally questionable.  And I suppose I’m now to the point where I think it is beyond the pale, and it is time that I use what little influence I have to speak out against it.

Citizens of the world, we can do better than our Silicon Valley exploiters.

I support a participation boycott of for-profit companies that gain their own filthy lucre on the backs of volunteers, and a popular digital revolt: a transfer to democratic, constitutional self-rule.  As credible non-profit replacements come into existence, I would urge us all to transfer to them.

The American revolutionaries had “No taxation without representation!”  What’s a catchy call to arms to taunt our corporate overloads with?  How about:

No membership without ownership!

No contribution without possession!

No collaboration without administration!

Honestly, I am not as upset about for-profit companies profiting on the backs of volunteers as the above might sound.  I merely think that we are coming to a point in our societal development where we can support large non-profit content projects, which could largely replace corporate projects.  If we can, we should.  Corporate exploiters of volunteers are actually to be thanked for popularizing large communities and showing how to scale them; but, increasingly, it is looking like it’s time for us to take back what is ours, namely, the ownership and control of our collective products.

If Google really wishes not to “be evil,” it will make the Knol project into a self-managing non-profit.  Of course, I don’t expect them to do that.  (If they did, the Citizendium might have more to worry about.)  But I do expect that this sort of argument for a digital revolt will gain some traction in the coming months and years, and if I am successful, Knol will look increasingly dodgy.

I mean, really, why should we (Internet volunteers) let the owners of for-profit corporations, which are not directly answerable to us, get rich from our contributions, and without compensating us?  Does that make the slightest bit of sense?

I would be happy if, in a few years, these were some of the main points of controversy when people debate about net politics:

• Should the contributors to online social communities generally have the right to determine community policy?
• Should anyone contribute, without compensation or an ownership stake, to profitmaking Internet companies?
• Are such companies moral, and should they be legal?  (I think they should be legal, of course.)

Please reply below or else on SharedKnowing, where I’ve posted this.