Digg: The Bastille Of The Digital World?
May 1st saw one of the best-known “Web 2.0″ institutions being had by the mob. As a Mashable story of said date purports, Digg’s millions of users effectively wrestled control over the site’s content out of the site-management’s hands. Why? Because an editor tried to abide by the law, do the right thing and remove the posting of a story that conveyed information on how to bypass the protection of a physical content-carrier. The Crowd picked up on the deletion and almost immediately spun into irate action, which quickly had Digg drowning in replications of the offensive post, even rendering the service unavailable for periods of time. Eventually, Founder Kevin Rose stated on Digg’s own blog that he’d gotten the message sent to him by his user base and called off all further counter-action. As a consequence, one of The New Web’s flagships may just face termination.
This certainly qualifies as an upheaval. What totally throws me is the relative smallness of the event instigating such an outbreak of rebellion. Like the literal match lit in a dehydrated forest. I mean, really; this wasn’t the first crack ever published on The Net and it wasn’t the first bit of user-contributed content that has been taken off a service for exactly the same reason: containing information in conflict with applicable law. I have no way of telling what made this one occurrence different enough from all the myriads of violations that (must have) happened since the dawn of DarpaNet to flare up like this; but I do think the hint is very much worth taking. Apart from examining whether or not such behaviour - as put on display by The Digg Users - is irresponsible or rather irreverent towards the legitimate interest of content creators and owners, one could ask what it is that makes people react in such fashion.
Reading the banners flying over the turmoil one might feel tempted to believe the masses jumped to the defence of liberty in general and the free exchange of information in particular. Wonderful merits to have, and certainly worth fighting for with all fierceness; but are they really at the bottom of May Day’s riots? Hardly, as iconic German blogger Johnny Häusler of Spreeblick surmises, if I read him right: His dedicated post sees revolutionary tendencies sprout in distinctive abundance wherever something available at low or no cost is about to become less so.
Profit-maximizing thinking he detects, hardly any different from what drives the actions of the ailing economy so often demonised for just that. And yet, while Häusler muses at what future the Internet might face with a new level of confrontation forcing the content lobby to bring in the legal and financial equivalent of heavy motorized artillery in order to pacify that freshly frenzied multi-headed beast, I have difficulties accepting that mere avarice should be enough to kindle something like The Digg Incident.
Then what? The one thing sure to get people rebellious sooner or later is dissatisfaction. The strongest cause psychology knows for dissatisfaction is lack of control. Take away control over material circumstances from any individual to create a dis satisfactory situation of real or perceived penury. Limit access to information - licit or illicit - and you’re likely to create a dis satisfactory situation of real or perceived lack of liberty looming. Create dis satisfactory experiences with products to frustrate paying customers. Frustrate customers to dissolve loyalty. And so on.
Rumour (well, Wikipedia) has it that it was such a dis satisfactory experience which got a customer annoyed enough to whip up the criminal energy and engineer the bit of code that started the chain of events ultimately leading to what happened at Digg recently.
So, to me, the May Day Riots aren’t really about censorship. To me they illustrate how much of a tidal wave of excrement can come leaping at you out of the blue if you manage to peeve off just ONE customer (bad enough). One is sufficient to cause a catastrophe in this day and age. Enough to break any protection, enough to initiate the propagation of related information, enough to effectively foil any attempt at copyright control. Just one. A scenario fit to frighten even the most seasoned marketeers. Or one to inspire thinking. If you can’t hope to contain a movement, what can you do? Looking for ways to re-establish a mode of satisfaction in all honesty might be a good start. That may require dropping a lot of what’s thought to be common knowledge about selling entertainment. It may require another Digital Revolution. In the heads. To prevent Digg from becoming some sort of digital Bastille. You know; the kind of place that future generations will relate to as where the obliteration of the obsolete began.
Alexander Maiwald 7digital.de Marketing
Contact me: alexander.maiwald (at) 7digital (dot) com
