Is Open Dead? No, But This Metaphor Is.

Virginia Heffernan conflates a number of trends into some sort of funeral march to the ‘open web’. This is confused by the fact that she doesn’t start with any sort of definition of the open web, but instead launches into a tumbling metaphor:

Virginia Heffernan, The Death of the Open Web

The Web is a teeming commercial city. It’s haphazardly planned. Its public spaces are mobbed, and signs of urban decay abound in broken links and abandoned projects. Malware and spam have turned living conditions in many quarters unsafe and unsanitary. Bullies and hucksters roam the streets. An entrenched population of rowdy, polyglot rabble seems to dominate major sites.

People who find the Web distasteful — ugly, uncivilized — have nonetheless been forced to live there: it’s the place to go for jobs, resources, services, social life, the future. But now, with the purchase of an iPhone or an iPad, there’s a way out, an orderly suburb that lets you sample the Web’s opportunities without having to mix with the riffraff. This suburb is defined by apps from the glittering App Store: neat, cute homes far from the Web city center, out in pristine Applecrest Estates. In the migration of dissenters from the “open” Web to pricey and secluded apps, we’re witnessing urban decentralization, suburbanization and the online equivalent of white flight.

The metaphor of the web as a city may be occasionally insightful, but not in this case, I fear. There are no ‘districts’ on the web, since the web is not distributed in physical space. The ‘rabble’ that seem to inhabit the web actually live in the real world, and communicate through the web: in part by creating web pages that are connected to each other by links, but increasingly communicating through web or mobile applications — like Facebook and Twitter — that are not ‘open’ in a municipal sense like city streets. To the extent that these apps are ‘open’ they are more like sports stadiums, or bars, which are privately owned but must accord with laws laid down by governments about the management of public spaces.

It may be the case that some segment of the web population visits only under duress, but I bet that it is fairly small, and those that are in that situation spend as little time online as possible. So Heffernan’s characterization of iPad and iPhone users as suburbanites fleeing the inner city is just dumb.

Yes, Apple is controlling the apps that can get into the app stores, but among all the others — like Twitter and Facebook — there is the browser, which opens the door to all the immensity of the web, again.

Heffernan continues to fall down the stairs, tripped up by her metaphor:

But a kind of virtual redlining is now under way. The Webtropolis is being stratified. Even if, like most people, you still surf the Web on a desktop or laptop, you will have noticed pay walls, invitation-only clubs, subscription programs, privacy settings and other ways of creating tiers of access. All these things make spaces feel “safe” — not only from viruses, instability, unwanted light and sound, unrequested porn, sponsored links and pop-up ads, but also from crude design, wayward and unregistered commenters and the eccentric ­voices and images that make the Web constantly surprising, challenging and enlightening.

When a wall goes up, the space you have to pay to visit must, to justify the price, be nicer than the free ones. The catchphrase for software developers is “a better experience.” Behind pay walls like the ones on Honolulu Civil Beat, the new venture by the eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and Rupert Murdoch’s Times of London, production values surge. Cool software greets the paying lady and gentleman; they get concierge service, perks. Web stations with entrance fees are more like boutiques than bazaars.

The far more significant development, however, is that many people are on their way to quitting the open Web entirely. That’s what the 50 million or so users of the iPhone and iPad are in position to do. By choosing machines that come to life only when tricked out with apps from the App Store, users of Apple’s radical mobile devices increasingly commit themselves to a more remote and inevitably antagonistic relationship with the Web. Apple rigorously vets every app and takes 30 percent of all sales; the free content and energy of the Web does not meet the refined standards set by the App Store.

Heffernan twists privacy and pay-walls together, and considers the result some sort of exclusionary and immoral policy, like redlining Blacks or Asians out of all-White neighborhoods. Is she cracked? Privacy is about keeping personal information concealed when free access to that information might be damaging to those involved. It is nothing like a Whites-only country club.

And pay-walls are erected as a means of making money: they are not an attempt to exclude some stratum of society, or religious or ethinic groups. Generally those creating pay-walls are not trying to block access: they hope everyone pays. So her suggestion that these are like redlining is off base.

The sole element of her argument that makes any sense is her sniping at Apple, but she should have gone after Jobs for blocking porn, which is a hallmark of the rough-and-tumble web that he is (partly) excluding from iPad and iPhone app stores. But again, the browser is still there, so it is a paper barrier at best.

In the final analysis, this is just Sunday supplement mumbo-jumbo and a waste of ink: an evocative metaphor that ultimately goes nowhere, but seeming to say a lot.