I don’t have comments on my site – or at least I do have comments on my site but not on my daily ramblings because I don’t want the responsibility of maintaining them. I’m not always going to have the time to read them. I’m not always going to have the time to make sure they’re working properly… Cory Doctorow wanted to reply to my post from Monday but couldn’t find a place to do it effectively. As a result he posted his response to Matt Jones’ site. I hope he doesn’t mind, but I’m going to replicate it here so that I can respond to it properly…
“Now there are a variety of reasons why (for example) you’d want to send lots (thousands or tens of thousands) of e-mails, but the main reason will probably be advertising or spam – kinds of e-mail which are generally perceived as an abuse. In fact I would hazard a guess that it becomes increasingly likely that someone is abusing the system the more e-mails they send.”
This is why every one of these proposals that I’ve seen so far net out with a system where the very wealthy and powerful can afford mass communication, and the poor cannot. The ability to send alerts out to very large groups of people is the ability to have a functional democracy. EFF, Greenpeace, ACLU, CDR, NTK… There are thousands of good and worthy advocacy and information resources that send out tens of thousands of messages at a go, using the same tools spammers use. Popular speech never needs defending. When mass communication is given back to solely the rich and powerful, the Internet’s promise of samizdata, of Journalism 3.0, of real liberation, is eroded.
Joel’s idea was that if you spent one cent per e-mail then spamming would become uncommercial. Cory in turn suggests that this would mean that only the rich could send mass e-mail and that this would effect grass-roots democractic practice online. Straightaway one has to question whether or not anyone should be able to send mass e-mail the way that spammers do – whether it be for a noble cause or not. We already have a low-budget tool that is designed for mass publishing, and that tool is the web – ultimately democratic in that people can publish on it whenever they want and given the extra advantage of being immediately an opt-in way of viewing content…
But ideal usage and practical implications are different things – clearly it is wrong that those with money should have much more power to abuse the processes of e-mail than the poor (and I think that you could make a fairly easy argument for abuse here in that there seem to be few legitimate applications for mass e-mail that couldn’t be undertaken elsewhere). But even here we have a problem, because such an issue would only be a problem with a linear curve, while I was talking about the advantages of providing systems that scale badly – and exponential curves. With these the incremental cost would be disproportionately high at higher volumes – someone with twice as much money to spend would very definitely not have twice the power…
Moreover, and I think most importantly, I was using Joel’s proposal as a jumping off point for the concept of exponential graphs of ‘difficulty of use’ – not money. Rather than thinking of incremental cost, I was thinking of incremental effort. Think of it like juggling – two balls are relatively easy, three or four within most people’s grasp, five or six is the work of masters, while twenty would be practically impossible. In terms of web usability, think about the effort involved in maintaining multiple identities on a discussion forum… Essentially there is none. You might have to post every six months in order to stop your account being deleted, but that’s about it. As a result there are lots of empty accounts used by abusive people to post anonymously or harass people, evading all attempts to ban them. If you could strengthen the link between user and user-name (without having to make it a one-on-one solid link) then you’d be a long way towards being able to have some impact on these problems. One of the ways you could do it is to find a way to make maintaining one user-name relatively easy, two slightly harder, three much harder and four or five an unmanageable feat of inhuman endurance… In effect, the effort involved in user-name maintenance would scale exponentially…