Blogless

In October, William Shields wrote a blog post that I think we need to take seriously.

His view, in a nutshell, is this: Many popular websites that provide free services (such as Stackoverflow) are supported by advertising. These sites cost money to run and administer, and so if users value these sites, they are morally obligated to defray these costs by subjecting themselves to the advertising that the site administrators use to pay for operations (i.e. not to use ad-blocking software).

This is the case, according to Shields, because the advertising is the only form of revenue production for a website that is known to work. So, if sites need money to survive, advertising is the only known way of getting this money, then if you value the site, you should subject yourself to the advertising.

As you can see if you browse the comments, this does not sit well with many people’s intuitions about what they are entitled to in using websites.

I am sympathetic to both Shields and to those who decry his argument.

On the one hand, it is clear that popular sites can and do cost money to run. On the other hand, it is wholly offensive – even if you don’t anticipate ever clicking through an ad – to be constantly subjected to advertising-style attempts to disrupt and/or penetrate your cognitive goings-on. Frankly, the current practice of advertising in general is intrusive and disrespectful, if not downright offensive on a moral level.

Ramsay’s Maxim. Regarding cases where two opposed arguments seem internally sound but where their conclusions are incompatible, the great Cambridge mathematician Frank P. Ramsay wrote: “It is a heuristic maxim that the truth lies not in one of the two disputed views but in some third possibility which has not yet been thought of, which we can only discover by rejecting something assumed as obvious by both the disputants.” That is, given two incompatible arguments (e.g. it is morally good to subject yourself to advertising on behalf of an organization that needs it to survive, and it is morally offensive to subject oneself to incessant cognitively-invasive messaging), we may only reconcile the two or refute both by finding that they have a common false element.

What exactly the common false element is here is unclear, but there’s good reason to think that it has something to do with the state of affairs in advertising. On Shields’ view, we learn that (a) advertising is the only tenable way of supporting websites, and we know, given most of our common-sense views, that (b) advertising is cognitively disruptive and generally unpleasant.

We are clearly in a situation that needs solving. And this, of course, is a design problem. Something underwriting both of these propositions has got to be wrong, and it is the job of designers to figure out what this is.

In the meantime, of course, there’s a more practical concern. It seems unclear what we should do, given the current state of affairs. But dilemmas are characteristic of ethics. Finding a view that clarifies a dilemma is no small matter, but this is just more evidence in favor of continuing to work toward a tenable theory of design ethics.