Digg's Kevin Rose = Robespierre?

Suffering from insomnia brought on by someone's 3 day packing procastination (which has now devolved into packing panick), so I've been catching up on RSS feeds.  Over at TLF, Tim Lee is using the AACS/Digg story to rehash the same tired arguments about DRM and DMCA.  We all do it, but I feel like anyone focused on that angle is completely missing the real story.

Over at Silicon Valley Watcher, Tom Foremeski is all over it.  The whole thing reminds me of a story about the French Revolution's Robespierre, who supposedly leapt from his chair as soon as he saw a mob assembling outside and said "I must see which way the crowd is headed,for I am their leader."  The real story here is about Web2.0 and its future.  As Foremski tells it:

In other words, in Digg's success is the seed of its own destruction - and it is not alone. Any truly user-driven site can careen out of control at any time. Digg realized that continuing to act within the law seriously threatened to leave the site an abandoned empty husk, that they could not have both legal protection and a business, so they opted for business over no business, albeit one with a huge, gaping chasm that will be excavated by corporate lawyers.

The real story here is about the ephemeral nature of Web2.0 companies.  When your value is based on the people you attract more than the value of any product or service you provide, your grasp on success is tenuous at best.  You will always be at the mercy of 5-10 percent of your users that are most active and usually most crazy.  Web2.0 has a lot of promise, but it also has some potential pitfalls.  We've just seen one of them.  When you're relying on "mobs," well, you're relying on MOBS.

Comments

[enigma_foundry]

The events at digg refute completely one of the stupid meme's I have been seeing from the corporate fascist crowd (e.g., IP Central, CEI) which goes something like this: that the Free Culture/Open Source movement does not respond to market forces. Digg was exactly responding to market forces, when it stopped deleting posts with the number that AACS LA keep secret..

I had expected that this would play out in much the same way that the disribution of the de CSS program did. De CSS is now available after a protracted legal battle, but only outside the USA. Of course, with the advent of the internet, that just means that you have to access a non-US site, and download the de CSS libraries from there.

But in any case, the AACS LA sent out cease and desist letters. These cease and desist letters had the very predictable effect of causing everyone who cares about the First Amendment to post as many copies of the number everywhere they possibly could, including comments on websites, tee-shirts, bumper stickers, etc. etc.

(Parenthetical thought: Couldn’t the AACS LA have seen this coming or were they really that stupid?)

One of the sites that received a C&D takedown notice was the popular web site digg. Initially, digg took down posts with the key. In any case, digg users revolted, and posted and reposted the decryption key. They also indicated they would leave digg if their stories kept being deleted. Then something interesting happened.

Digg depends on its community, and it interacts with them in way that is much more complex and iterative than the traditional “customer” buys from “manufacturer/author/producer” paradigm. The customers were therefore in a very unique position to influence diggs decision-making process, and influence it they did.

Free Culture not tied to market forces? I don't think so. I think all of the evidence points to the fact that Open Source is very tied to market forces. Just not the same forces that had propelled the large monopoly/oligopoly companies that promote their anti-freedom, crypto-fascist agenda through the PFF ACT, and CEI.

http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2007/05/02/an-interesting-development-freedom-wins/

[Tom Foremski]

I love the Robespierre quote :-)
BTW, It was my colleague Richard Koman that wrote the post on Silicon Valley Watcher.

[Mark Blafkin]

"Anti-Freedom, crypto-fascists?" Oh Enigma...you really know how to sweet-talk a fella. How YOU doin'??

Although, this anti-freedom crypto-fascist has a few things to correct for the record:

1. I have never said that FLOSS doesn't respond to market forces, nor has anyone at ACT as far as I know. If you really need a strawman to take a whack at, I suppose I could make the argument that the Free Software movement doesn't respond to narrowly defined notions of traditional market forces because it is focused on ideology above practicality. But, the uptake of that ideology is still the subject of market forces, so I would never make the argument...

2. The Free Culture/Free Software and Open Source Movements are all distinct movements with different goals and different methods. It is really surprising that someone so immersed in these issues would treat the terms as interchangeable.

3. You are right that "Digg depends on its community" and the relationship could be described as more complex. I would probably argue that isn't really more complex, just different and perhaps more perilous from a business perspective. The ONLY value that Digg has IS its customers/users. That is the traditional Web2.0 paradigm. Digg didn't really have a choice in this situation, because if its users left, the company was dead anyway. While you approve with the actions of these Free Culture activists, they wanted Digg to break the law. It's a law that you think is stupid, but what if it weren't? What if it were a group of rightwing activists advocating the murder or harrasment of a group of abortion doctors, gay couples, or Muslims whose names/addresses they were posting?