Solving spam and (some) harrassment, with money
Let’s start out with some bad news. The set value of your attention is zero. Throughout the years, attempts have been made on the internet to monetise your attention (with ads) and pay you for it, they have seemingly all failed.
Historically, there was a trade, where a creator of content, a media entity, would pay for the content you consume, partially or fully, so what you’ve gotten in return for viewing ads has been free or cheaper content.
I have not been aware of much discussion regarding the value of our attention, in my neck of the woods at least, but I’ve seen some examples of activist measures in this field, notably the cities of Sao Paolo, Brazil and Grenoble, France banning outdoor advertising.
Many of the problems of the internet seem to stem from the original ideals of the net as free, both in liberty and cost, and the intersection of those ideals with the needs and desires of companies to make money.
These companies mostly seem to work with the same business plan, in various guises, get something for free and make money off it. Most every internet business works with user generated content, even messaging, the value of a messaging client is getting information from other users and sending information back.
Businesses online that make and sell things seem to make only a fraction of the profit that companies that mediate things or resell free things do. Such is the world.
The freest sphere of the internet is email. It was created before the establishment of the capitalist internet, so it doesn’t serve a profit motive, and more importantly it doesn’t monopolise a type of action or transaction through the popular means of closed systems.
For some reason, email is also the mode of communication that has the fewest harassment problems, or so it seems.
In the sphere of email, the user is the client, and competing parties (with google in secure lead) have to offer users the best tools to filter out noise and discomfort.
But with email, you’re also very hard to reach, and in fact targeting you via an email message for advertising, without your consent, is illegal. Buying an ad within your email client is not, however. Strange that.
My solution is not a complete one. It’s not a plan, it’s an idea that would need a plan to work. But plans start with ideas, so here we go.
We all have communication white-lists. In Gmail, the system tries to figure out who’s a stranger and put them in the spam folder. In Facebook’s messenger, you need to consent to communication via friend requests or messenger requests.
But you need to keep tabs on that. There’s still really no barrier to entry to contacting you, what you’ve taken away is simply getting a confirmation that the message has been received.
If it would cost a dollar to contact me, and I’d reimburse it if I decide to whitelist the contacting party (or not reimburse, up to the user), I’d receive a hell of a lot less spam. Probably none. But someone who needs to contact me wouldn’t think twice. So the price needs to be user-controlled. If you’re a popular target of harassment or other forms of unwanted attention, you could set a price point, a fine, really, at which you’d accept the kind of crap you get in your inbox. Horny dudes wanna send you penis pics? Fine. That’ll be a thousand dollars. If you’re not an actual creep, you’ll get it back. This may come with some uncomfortable connotations about women as products, but the current alternative is worse, where their attention isn’t for sale, it’s given freely by internet companies.
In some form this could be applied to all forms of social media. I haven’t figured out every iteration, and obviously with the current, monopoly-friendly business climate, it isn’t a perfect fit for the business model where you’re intrinsically worthless, or worth much less than the buyer of your attention in any case.
