Amid the theatre of contrition and concern that characterised Mark Zuckerberg's US congressional testimony in April, one particular exchange stood out. Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, asked Zuckerberg, “How do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service?” To which Zuckerberg replied: “Senator, we run ads.”
It would be too easy to get hung up on the fact that a lawmaker charged with regulating Facebook, one of the largest advertising companies in the world, somehow missed the fact that it is an advertising company at all. (In this way he is perhaps too representative of his constituents, most of whom similarly have no idea that Facebook’s real customers are its advertisers, and the product peddled at scale is access to their attention.)
Rather, it was the studied folksiness of Zuckerberg’s response — “Senator, we run ads” — that struck me as curious. It was the sort of reply you might expect to hear from a plucky upstart newspaper editor in the 1930’s — “We run ads, Senator, and I s’pose that’ll keep us afloat for now” — but not from the billionaire CEO of a media platform whose design constraints shape the daily thoughts and actions of over two billion people.
We have not, as a society, been in the habit of requiring advertising to justify its own existence. It has been around a long time. So when the discussion begins to veer in that direction, it can be instructive to take note of the defensive tactics that advocates of advertising deploy. For example, throughout the recent wave of scrutiny in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has achieved a near-total PR victory by reframing what was originally a problem of attention management (e.g. propaganda, persuasion, deception, election meddling) as a problem of information management (e.g. privacy, data breaches). As a result, the company has largely managed to sidestep questions about the fundamental nature and appropriateness of its business model.
Partly due to the success of that reframing, those moments where questions about Facebook’s business model took center stage proved even more revealing. One such moment was Zuckerberg’s brief exchange with Senator Hatch. Another occurred in an interview that Zuckerberg gave to Ezra Klein of Vox a week before his congressional testimony. The interview contained the most direct defense of advertising I have heard Zuckerberg give in recent memory, and it employed novel talking points which I suspect may presage a more robust line of argumentation in defense of advertising in the future. As a result, it is worth our brief attention here.
In the interview, Klein references a quote by Apple CEO Tim Cook, who, when asked what he would do if he were in Zuckerberg’s situation, said he “wouldn’t be in this situation” because Apple’s business model is not based in advertising. Zuckerberg responds:
“You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth. The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people. [...] If you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford.”
“An advertising-supported model is the only rational model” – is this not a remarkable statement coming from a titan of innovation, especially one in an industry where disruption of the status quo is often viewed as inherently valuable? Imagine if an automobile magnate were to declare, “The internal combustion engine is the only rational means of locomotion”. Or if a scientist were to claim, “A p-value of 0.05 or less is the only rational standard for statistical significance”. Or if the lord of a medieval manor were to state, “Serfdom is the only rational model for enabling the masses to subsist”. It’s remarkable how quickly one can lose one’s imagination when power and money are on the line.
The obvious spin in these arguments can be easily dispensed with. No one is arguing that the advertising business model inhibits employees’ ability to care about users; rather, the argument is that it creates organizational priorities that incentivize downstream designs which run counter to users’ interests — regardless of how much individual employees might care about users. As W. Edwards Deming said, “A bad system will beat a good person every time”.
We can also sidestep several false assumptions that are doing background work here. For one, people already do pay for Facebook: not with their money, of course, but with their time and attention. Second, if Facebook were to charge its users money, Zuckerberg unnecessarily assumes that it would have to charge all its users money, and that this would need to be the only way anyone could pay for Facebook. Similarly, he assumes that whatever amount of money might be charged, only ‘rich’ people would be able to pay it. (However, note that as of Q4 2017, the average yearly value per user to Facebook was just $6.18.)
Read more: Silicon Valley's culture of breaking things is totally broken
There may be an important implication lurking in this last point: Zuckerberg seems to be implying that ‘just serving rich people’ would not merely be undesirable in a business sense, but would in some way be unfair. Elsewhere in his interview with Klein, Zuckerberg admits, to his credit, that Facebook now in many ways resembles a government more than a traditional company. Its goal, he says, is to connect everyone in the world. And yet he has resisted the suggestion that this amounts to any sort of monopoly.
However, to the extent that his argument about the inevitability of advertising does rest on an appeal to fairness, would it implicitly grant the notion that users have no meaningful alternatives to Facebook? Fairness is a principle of justice, not typically a consideration among competitors in a market setting. For example, if Coca-Cola were to stop selling its products in low- and middle-income countries, we might say that it had reduced consumer choice—but would we say that it was unfair?
In any event, in the wider injury to both choice and fairness here exists in the fact that users have no meaningful alternative to a type of advertising that is fundamentally extractive of their attention — a type of advertising which, in the era of digital technology, has transformed into something else: a form of intelligent, adversarial persuasion. The ostrich-headed reluctance of Zuckerberg and others to seriously entertain any alternatives to it serves as one more reason why we ought to seek its urgent disruption.
James Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize. His book, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy*, is on sale now.*
This article was originally published by WIRED UK