Six Apart, Livejournal, and FanLib

by Yonmei

The Internet was never free.

Once upon a time, most of the Internet users didn’t need to think about what it cost, though: because the servers on which the Internet was based were owned by universities and the military, and were paid for by academic/military funding, which left the people who played on the Internet free to do whatever they virtually could without worrying about the cost.

Computers cost money. Broadband access to the Internet costs money. Anyone can set up an Internet server, but they need to have a computer of a certain degree of complexity: they need to have sufficient knowledge to be able to set it up as a server: and they need to pay for a broadband Internet connection to their server. Most people don’t do this: they rent space on servers that belong to companies who do it for a living.

How do you make money out of the Internet?

One way is to provide a service, or to sell something that people are willing to buy. The provision of servers to people who rent space on them is the most direct kind of service.

But a more common way is to provide advertising. You set up a site: companies who want to advertise buy space on your site. To convince the advertisers that they should pay you, you need to convince them that enough people visit your site each day that it will be worth their while. How do you do that? You need to make people want to visit your site. You need to provide a service they’ll make use of, or constantly-changing and interesting content that they’ll want to look at. You may even get to have your site visitors paying you to visit your site: not enough to make you a profit, but enough to make them feel invested in your site rather than any one of your competitors, so they keep coming back.

Fandom is a gift economy. We don’t do fannish activities to make money, but because we get pleasure/satisfaction out of doing them well, and we enjoy the status and kudos we get from other fans. Fans give to other fans and the giving is part of the network that is fandom.

When Brad founded LiveJournal, he was planning to let his high school friends keep up with each other’s daily lives. He wasn’t – as far as I know – ever planning to make a profit out of it: LiveJournal just took off and got bigger than anyone ever expected. It’s a website with nearly 1.5 million active users, who come back, who helpfully list their interests, age, and location (perfect for targeted advertising) who provide for free the services and constantly-changing interesting content that have people coming back and back. When Six Apart bought LiveJournal, the first change they made to the TOS was that no user of livejournal was allowed to block adverts. (They also promised that paid account holders would never have to see adverts: but that’s not in the TOS. Not that it would make any difference if it was: the TOS can be changed at any time.) Six Apart had found a site which advertisers ought to want to pay big money to appear on.

FanLib is objectionable to fans because FanLib explicitly wants to take an activity that fans do for free, to give away to other fans, and make money out of it. (See Fanlib: our wannabe corporate overlords.)

But 6A is no different, except that the moneymaking is at one remove, and is not wholly confined to fanfic (or indeed to any fannish activity: via a community called fandomcounts, there are about 34 000 fannish journals on livejournal, or about 2.4% of the active journals. A vocal minority, but still a minority): for Six Apart, the point of livejournal is not to create communities, except insofar as those communities will bring in revenue. While Brad was running LiveJournal on the money that paid accounts brought in, the paid accountholders were customers. As soon as Six Apart bought Livejournal, all accountholders became, not customers, but product: valuable en masse, and worth giving some consideration in large coherent groups, but individually, not important at all.

The question is, what can fans do about it?

Congregating together, we appear to people outside fandom – FanLib, SixApart, and many other examples – as useful product. A herd, to be exploited.

I think our best defense against this is not to be a herd.

Not just not to allow ourselves to be directly exploited: fans are extremely good at that. There is in fandom a strong understanding of the difference between the gift economy in which fannish activities operate, and the capitalist economy of employees, employers, shareholders, profit. One of the key mistakes non-fans often make when they look at fans giving away their labour for free is to think “If they are willing to work for free, why shouldn’t I get them to redirect what they’re doing anyway so that I make money out of it?” This sees fans as basically a naive, exploitable resource: a kind of perpetual motion machine in which fannish enthusiasm exists as an ever-renewable resource that can be utilised by wiser heads who have spotted an opportunity for profit that clearly, none of these naive enthusiasts have seen because if they had (an outsider thinks) obviously they would be making use of it themselves. FanLib is just the most recent example of outsiders thinking like naive predators “Oh, we can make use of this herd” without realising that while the gift economy may look simple and ripe for exploitation to outsiders, a person accustomed to both the gift economy and the capitalist economy – as all fans are – is someone who can’t be readily exploited by a capitalist outsider trying to take gifts for profit.

But more than this: not to allow fandom to put itself in the power of any one corporation.

Livejournal, as originally set up and as owned by Brad, might have been made for fandom: people could give without needing to think about exchange, and it seemed that we could join and join Livejournal, expanding outwards infinitely. But we couldn’t: the Internet isn’t free. Someone owns the servers. Someone owns the right to profit by what we do.

We can’t avoid this. (Short of a global revolution, which would be a good thing, but is somewhat outside the scope of fandom.) Even if fans set up more and more of our own servers, this isn’t a lifetime solution: who maintains? Who inherits? Where are the backups kept? Who mirrors? We might want to look into solutions made use of by the free software movement: people who write and maintain and debug useful software for free look, to major corporations, like even more of a useful resource to be exploited than fans do, and the free software movement has developed strategies to avoid being exploited that we might want to look at. Fans need to own servers, but with ownership of servers can come responsibility for content. Corporations do not find it worthwhile to sue individual fans for writing fanfic or making vids: but a fan who sets up a server to maintain an archive of stories, all of which fall into the large grey area of copyright law, some of which may be actually illegal within the US, may be putting herself in a position where she can be sued.

Can we keep our gift economy going on the Internet? Can we continue to give to each other without doubt or fear? I don’t need to ask, can we continue to defend ourselves against the naive predation of people who think that because we give to each other we can be readily exploited: we know we can do that. But on the Internet, the act of giving is not in itself free. Someone owns our means of giving. More and more, the owner will be trying to make a profit out of having a conglomeration of fans giving to each other on the owned-for-profit Internet. We need to be aware of who owns the virtual ground we stand on: we need to make sure that we are not all standing on the same owner’s ground. This problem is not resolved by fan-owned archives or servers: we need a multiplicity of ownership to keep fandom free.

(I’ve had this post lurking in draft form for quite a while; I think it’s fair to say I was finally inspired to finish and post it by Anna the Pirate King’s comments on the slash fandom and male privilege thread. Thanks, Anna: do you want to bring your specifically economic arguments over to this thread?)

- More blogging by Yonmei at http://yonmei.insanejournal.com

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