"Land squared"
Four years ago, when Pokémon Go was a fad, it was mostly treated as a “fun” expression of the possibilities of augmented reality. Spaces could be overwritten with a new layer that enhanced their potential, that expanded the opportunities they presented for a variety of activities. Some critics pointed out that having groups of people in the same space who were oblivious to what one another were doing there could corrode the potential sense of a public sphere, but this was dismissed as archaic thinking — no one should have to acknowledge anyone else’s intentions just because they were sharing space with them. There is no such thing as society, and if there were, it could be sustained in scalable networks, not arbitrary geographic units. In a network society, space is superseded by infinitely reconfigurable links that can efficiently bring anything into proximity with any other thing, for whatever predetermined purposes suit the re-arrangers. If that eliminates unpredictability or serendipity, those things can be reprogrammed back in as planned randomness. Or those nostalgic, outmoded ideas can be replaced by augmented-reality-style scavenger hunts.
But the larger complaint about Pokémon Go revolved around consent. Niantic, the maker of the game, authorized itself to simply add a geography-specific layer to any given space and make it into its own private property. It “augmented reality” for players, but on another level, it behaved as though there were no interrelationship between the new layer and the underlying one, as if the addition didn’t affect the underlying property at all and could be owned independently; it wasn’t parasitic on the existing space at all. Niantic’s position seemed to be that it had the right to profit from anybody else’s space, but had no responsibility for what consequences their profit-making had on those spaces. Space wasn’t to be shared or negotiated; it was to be appropriated for your own private purposes, whether you were a player or the game maker. What else are phones for if not to allow you to create your own personal context for everything as you make your way through the world?
This approach created immediate problems for some property owners and administrators of public places — this 2016 Guardian article details a few of them. The Holocaust Museum in D.C. was flooded with game players; a man’s house was inadvertently listed as a important site and he would find strangers milling about outside at all hours of the day. There were many reports of mobs committing trespassing. Niantic ostensibly prohibited the use of private spaces in the game, but in practice, Pokémon Go forced you to opt out — if you could. The overriding sentiment was, the world is someone else’s game board now, and you can either get used to the disruption or start playing too.
The hallmarks of augmented reality are often these kinds of land grabs. Yelp’s practice of listing restaurants and other business whether they want to be included or not and then holding those listings hostage is a quintessential example. Yelp is a game played on a map, and businesses are forced to play so that Yelp can make money, often at their expense. That is, Yelp inserts itself as an unwanted intermediary that directs commercial traffic and collects tolls. Augmented reality is often the layering in of intermediaries; it can easily become a form of racketeering. (Tom Slee has a good analysis of Yelp as a protection racket here.)
I started thinking about this because of this recent expose at Buzzfeed about GrubHub creating its own phone numbers for restaurants and seeding search engines with them.
Grubhub (which also owns Seamless, MenuPages, Tapingo, and LevelUp) generates a unique phone number for each restaurant on its platform; it appears on the restaurant’s Grubhub or Seamless page and redirects to the restaurant's own phone line (a restaurant cannot list its own phone number on its Grubhub or Seamless page). The redirect number can also appear higher in Google search results (including the Google panel for that business) than the restaurant’s own line. This leads some customers to call it even if they don’t intend to use Grubhub. Some restaurant owners have also raised this concern about Yelp, which lists Grubhub numbers, according to Vice.
In other words, when customers call to make an order, thinking they are reaching the restaurant directly, they are actually being routed through an augmented reality where GrubHub gets to charge a referral fee based on the deceptive traps it has set. It has a claimed a space online associated with a place and used its leverage to insert its own toll collector.
Ranjan Roy, in this newsletter, details how Doordash creates delivery options for restaurants that don’t offer them and then undermines the restaurants’ pricing structures and reputation. This sort of practice doesn’t lead to delivery apps making money, so Roy ends up wondering how they survive when they seem to disappoint everyone: “Every platform loses money. Restaurants feel like they're getting screwed. Delivery drivers are poster children for gig economy problems. Customers get annoyed about delivery fees. Isn't business supposed to solve problems?”
Well, not exactly — businesses are supposed to make money, and that is the only “problem” they care about solving, not those of consumers or society. The question is never “How come this business doesn’t help people?” It’s just “How do they survive without making profits?” In this situation, the answer has to do with wealth concentration. As Roy explains, there are too few investment opportunities to match with too much money in the hands of too few people. This incentivizes the perverse investment strategies of venture capitalists, which seek to create the conditions for monopoly.
You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It's used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and increased prices.
I find this version of how “innovation” now works much more plausible than the one that begins with entrepreneurs solving clients’ problems or meeting the pre-existing needs of sovereign consumers. Rich investors have so much money, so little immediate risk to their well-being, and so few conventionally viable investment vehicles that they now pursue this long-game approach. The rampant inequality that has created their dilemma has also created a new degree of leverage not only over a “broken workforce,” but also consumers, who are sometimes the same workers but in a different frame of mind. The strategy is to pit the induced “consumer expectations” against the workers’ expectation of humane treatment, as if to convince them that you can’t have one without the other. (Give me convenience and give me death!) If that means pitting workers against themselves, so much the better. It’s hard to organize resistance if you are at war with yourself, if your own compromises and contradictions make you feel always already defeated.
“What consumers want” is far more malleable than the declining rate of profit. Customers’ wants can be manufactured just like products; sufficient spending can produce people who want certain things in certain ways. User-experience design, another expression of “augmented reality,” is a key aspect of this. These induced wants have no particular relationship to anyone’s intrinsic wants, if there are such things, or with any vision of social good. They might even be purely random, dependent on novelty or fashion cycles; typically, though, they depend on some promise of individualistic status or convenience, some sort of replacement for the sense of personal recognition or meaning that’s no longer well anchored in community practices. Augmented reality is often modeled on this principle, that augmentation is a matter of personal convenience, a way to check out of the negotiations of what a space is for.
As the potential for making profit by selling commodities recedes, capitalists pursue new modes of extraction that depend on different forms of control — different “augmentations” of “reality,” rather than on the liberal pretense of consumers exercising free choice in fair markets. That idea is supplanted by reproducing people not as free market subjects but as permanently indebted servants. In an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jodi Dean makes this case, arguing that capitalism is giving way to “neofeudalism.”
Non-capitalist dimensions of production — expropriation, domination, and force — have become stronger to such an extent that it no longer makes sense to posit free and equal actors meeting in the labor market even as a governing fiction. It means that rent and debt feature as or more heavily in accumulation than profit, and that work increasingly exceeds the wage relation.
In part, this expands the pervasive critique that online platforms operate as feudal lords to user-serfs who have to provide their labor, and not for wages so much as for social existence. Work is no longer delineated by hours of worktime set against leisure; instead work is simply the capture of life lived within enclosed, richly surveilled (maybe call them “augmented”) spaces. The economic power elite are no longer primarily producers but rentiers, extracting fees and labor from the populations trapped on their demesnes.
Tech companies have seized the ground on which economic activity can take place: “Positioning themselves as intermediaries, platforms constitute grounds for user activities, conditions of possibility for interactions to occur,” Dean notes. This allows them to establish immiserating conditions on all parties, including datafication that reinforces the situation: “Users not only pay for the service but the platform collects the data generated by the use of the service. The cloud platform extracts rents and data, like land squared.”
“Land squared” is also a good way of understanding augmented reality: Where there was once just a space, not there is a data-producing enclosure, operating beyond the reach of the space’s legacy owners and amenable to scaling up to tech’s preferred monopolistic levels. Augment spaces with search until the search engines control them all; augment retail or delivery service with Amazon until Amazon dictates terms for them all. The “aggregators” (as business analyst Ben Thompson calls them) will eventually become feudal lords over those who have no choice but to be aggregated and have no means to mount a resistance to the layers being added over them.
Although their monopoly status allows the neofeudal lords to extract value by force, it also gives them a commanding position from which to shape how users experience their subjection — this is what the “untenable consumer expectations” and means of “customer acquisition” and “user-experience design” efforts amount to. Perhaps they could not do without these efforts to rationalize their economic order. Perhaps without such justifications, the peasants of neofeudalism would look for ways to throw off their yoke, organize resistance, find ways to refuse to serve.
This is a gross oversimplification, but the original feudal order was maintained by mandatory religious indoctrination that stressed a purportedly natural hierarchy among all creatures — the “great chain of being.” The neofeudal order justifies itself by indoctrinating segments of users in radical self-centeredness, just enough to guarantee a kind of herd-immunity effect of political impotence. The rest of the population escapes ideological conditioning but lacking agency or forms of solidarity, they have to turn to other consolations. “For those on the other side of the neofeudal divide,” Dean argues, “anxiety and insecurity are addressed less by ideology than they are by opioids, alcohol, and food, anything to dull the pain of hopeless, mindless, endless drudgery.” Presumably, DoorDash and GrubHub will be happy to deliver these as well.