Is it time for users to unionize?
I was talking with my friend Fabian shortly after the recent social revolt at FaceBook and we hit upon an amazing parallel. Consider this:
In the early days of the money economy, workers were horribly exploited. During the industrial revolution conditions got bad enough that users began to form unions and fight back for their rights.
Goldhaber now suggests that we are leaving the money economy and entering the attention economy. So are we, the content-creating workers, also being exploited? What else do you call it when web companies are built entirely on user-generated content, but we users are stripped of our rights to that content by onerous EULAs and forced to endure increasingly annoying advertisements? All the while trapped in walled gardens which we’ve been locked into, and the gardeners only listen when we scream.
Every MySpace user I know is absolutely sick of the advertising onslaught and would leave if they could. But they feel trapped because they have so much content invested there, not to mention all their friends.
Could the same techniques that brought down the robber barons also break down the walled gardens of today’s social media sites? Is it time for unions of users?
In the last weeks I’ve run the idea by many folks from Boulder to San Francisco to New York to Frankfurt. Everyone gets it immediately. Several people are already moving forward with this idea and I look forward to seeing how things play out. I’ll keep you posted.