by Ross Schulman
Internet users have been trained over the past decade or so to believe the argument that the services we have grown to think of as “the internet” are expensive to run and that the only way to pay for those services is to let ourselves be tracked everywhere in the service of advertising. Our concepts of privacy, particularly when we talk about laws and regulations, are often presumed to take place solely within this frame. The platforms want us to be asking “how is all of this going to be paid for, if not advertising based on mining of personal information?”
Following that logic, however, leads to a thought-provoking conclusion: If this status quo value exchange is truly what the platforms are suggesting we should continue to engage in, its a horrendous deal for most of us! We are giving away all of own information–incredibly detailed portraits of ourselves, families, and friends that will be stored forever and used in ways we can’t imagine–in exchange for computing resources that can be had today for $35, and code with equivalents that are free and open source. Indeed, the argument about the value of these online services seems to be presuming the conclusion that services like these must be paid for to begin with. In reality, our future technology need not be owned by any one platform and doesn’t require anyone to pay for it. Why? Because we have all already spent the money (or other resources). We just don’t usually think of it as such.
Many, if not most, of us already own a hand-sized computer with a persistent network connection that we take pretty much everywhere and which lives in our pockets or bags. The top of the line Android and Apple personal computing devices (honestly, does anyone use their “phone” primarily as a voice communication device anymore?) run at upwards of 2 Ghz, have around 4GB of RAM, and on-board storage ranging between 64 and 512 GB. If those numbers don’t mean much to you, they are roughly equivalent to a full laptop from 2010. All these devices are also capable of receiving and transmitting across a decently wide range of frequencies.
Those frequencies are another resource that we already possess (at least, conceptually). The airwaves were long considered to be public property that Federal Communications Commission was responsible for parceling out because of the problems inherent in competing broadcasting signals. That viewpoint withered in the face of the deregulatory agenda of the Reagan years, but its recent revival can be seen in the use of explicitly unlicensed spectrum that makes technologies such as WiFi and Bluetooth possible.
