Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

I’ve been thinking lately that this economic downturn might spell doom for many supposedly free Web 2.0 services. AdAge for one is predicting an end to so-called “YouTube, Twitter and Facebook Socialism”. Before the recession Web 2.0 startups had plenty of VC money to go around, most of them having no real business plan other than “we hope we’ll get bought by Google”. Now, the well has dried up and startups are dying left and right. Last.fm already implemented a 3$ per month subscription plan to stop the bleeding. Last.fm is not the only incumbent feeling the pressure to show some profit potential. Most companies are finding this extremely difficult. It goes to show that “Twitter plans to make money was Wired magazine’s April Fools joke.

But what really prompted this post was something I stumbled upon when browsing through journals:

“The rhetoric of peer-to-peer informationalism…much like the rhetoric of consciousness out of which it grew, actively obscures the material and technical infrastructures on which both the Internet and the lives of the digital generation depend. Behind the fantasy of unimpeded information flow lies the reality of millions of plastic keyboards, silicon wafers, glass-faced monitors, and endless miles of cable. All of these technologies depend on manual laborers, first to build them and later to tear them apart. This work remains extraordinarily dangerous, first to those who handle the toxic chemicals required in manufacture and later to those who live on the land, drink the water, and breathe the air into which those chemicals eventually leak. These tasks continue to be the province of those who lack social and financial resources

In the 1990s, all of this work was invisible to those who promoted the Internet and the network mode of production as evidence of a new stage in human evolution. Like the communards of the 1960s, the techno-utopians of the 1990s denied their dependence on any but themselves. At the same time, they developed a way of thinking and talking about digital technologies from within which it was almost impossible to challenge their own elite status. ”

Source: “Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism”, Book Review by Anna McCarthy

I think there’s a somewhat similar sentiment to how people feel about services like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. People take them for granted and expect them to be free, like it’s some sort of birthright. Partly this is due to people’s (I think) misguided sense of entitlement on all things web or an inability to grasp intangible value.

Mostly however, it is the service providers’ own fault for letting people believe that all and everything should and will be free services. If VC money had been more scarce, maybe we wouldn’t be in this situation now. If Facebook, for example, runs out of money and decides to charge its users, even if it’s just for 1$ per year, it’s going to be a really hard sell for the community. I’ve seen already more than one Facebook group where people pledge to leave if they have to actually pay (imagine that) for Facebook.

It’s going to be interesting to see how this plays out. Services like Flickr that had a business plan from the get go are in much better shape. Most startups now probably wish they had gone that route as well.