Terms, Conditions, and Doves
What happens when we digitize everything? How do you write a comment?
When I first used the internet, I never knew what I might come across. Websites might consist of Times New Roman text in a narrow column. Or they might be skeuomorphic versions of dungeons with pixelated skeletons strung up in the corner for the “Contact Us” page. The text might be black on white, or green on red, or orange on black. There was no accessibility.
I visited the webpage of the American pop rock band Imagine Dragons the other day. It had a horizontal navigation bar at the top, a carousel of images, and a grid of cards to purchase t-shirts and hoodies. At the bottom was a form to sign up for their email newsletter. In the footer was a link to the privacy policy and terms and conditions.
It was, to put it bluntly, utterly conventional. A template that could be used for a kitchen shop, or an art historian, or a website about flower arranging.
This isn’t to pick on Imagine Dragons. Nor, really, is it to pick on Universal Music Group, who run the website and whose privacy policy is linked to in the footer. But it is to observe what we have lost in the grand commercialisation of the web. Websites are not works of art, they are works of business.
This seems true for almost all bands. I visited the Black Sabbath website to amuse myself, and there, of course, were the terms and conditions and privacy policy notices, hiding underneath the cookie acceptance banner. These on the website of a band whose lead singer once bit the head off a live dove. The most outrageously rock and roll thing you can do now would be to not include a privacy policy on your website.
I have this half expectation, particularly with musicians or artists whose work seems to be an all-encompassing lifestyle, that their website will somehow mirror the preoccupations of their work. It will be grungy or new-agey or intentionally difficult to navigate. It will shock or appal, or at least prompt a reaction. But all band websites are the same. And the same as every other website. Cookie policy. Terms and conditions. Privacy policy. Newsletter. The website of my local tax advisor is the same as the website of Billboard Hot 100’s “biggest rock hit of the year”.
But perhaps these websites are still mirroring the preoccupations of these musicians. It’s just that their preoccupations are now business and compliance with relevant regulations.
You can blame the EU for this if you want. But I wonder, how big is the risk of not adding a cookie banner to your website? Do we honestly think that if the website of a 1960s heavy metal band doesn’t contain a link to the record label’s privacy policy on their homepage, GDPR officers are going to bust down the doors of EMI demanding action?
The problem, I think, is people who aren’t lawyers cargo-culting pretend legalese onto web pages. The cookie warnings that achieve nothing, the terms and conditions that aren’t even relevant to the content they’re linked from. When you stop and think about it, this can’t possibly be the law. It can’t be that a website is breaking the law if it doesn’t link to a list of statements drawn up years ago for a different band. And yet still the corporate links go up, along with the cookie notices and privacy policies. And I can’t help thinking that in the rush to professionalise the web we’ve left ourselves with an insipid mess.
Elsewhere
How to Comment on Social Media by Rebecca Solnit in Lithub:
Do not read the whole original post or what it links to, which will dilute the purity of your response and reduce your chances of rebuking the poster for not mentioning anything they might’ve mentioned/written a book on/devoted their life to. Listening/reading delays your reaction time, and as with other sports, speed is of the essence.
All of the O.P.’s feelings, experiences, interpretations, and values should be in the first sentence anyway. Only fascists hide those things in militarized outposts throughout the terrain of the piece. Which are basically ambushes. Which is violent and elitist.
On and off I think about “comments” on the internet. There are some sites, where the comments are often more interesting than the article itself (Hacker News, Reddit, at its best), there are others where the comments are inane, ignorant and repetitive, the same tired culture war arguments over and over again (Twitter/X, Facebook), and there are ones where the comments are thoughtful, kind and amusing (incredibly, and increasingly, YouTube). Solnit here is writing about the middle type - the thoughtless, angry, comments of social media, arguing over and over again with the same words and thoughts and ideas in a tireless, unending, exhausting debate.
In 2024, I will walk into a physical space—a restaurant, a hairdresser, an arts venue, an artisanal cheese shop—and instead of being handed a physical piece of paper with some useful information on it, or being told it in words, I will be shown a faded roundel with a QR code on it. I will hold my phone’s camera up to it wearily. Sometimes it will work, but the font on the menu or the information will be small. I’ll have to enlarge it and take my glasses off to read it, because I’ve reached that age. Sometimes it won’t work at all. Sometimes the information on it will be out of date.
Here’s today’s theme popping up again: we have used technology to make a bland, unreliable world. I wonder if I’m even starting to bore myself with the number of things I read (and write) on this topic. But through our digital money-making, I can’t help but think we’re no longer making the world better, nicer or easier to use. We’re filling it with tiny frustrations. The worst bit about this is that they are all so avoidable.
The Trouble with Friends by Weike Wang in the New Yorker
I have a vague list of authors for whom I read anything they write. I don’t really know how someone gets onto that list, something about their style or the sort of insights they offer, perhaps. Wang is one of them, ever since I read her first novel, Chemistry.
A friend who used to discuss things with you simply to work through them stops doing so, and updates you only on definitive good news, never the bad, the ugly, or the in-progress. All of that, you suspect, she saves for her partner. In other words, you’re no longer included in the problem-solving. […] Increasingly, my friends leave me out of these big conversations, and vice versa, but when an outcome is certain or a plan set, we do update one another, which reminds us that we’re still, in fact, friends, but also boils the friendship down to a PowerPoint.
In this piece, she muses on adult friendships, really summed up in this one line: “what I notice is attrition: I lose more friends than I make.” But the whole piece is filled with witticisms.
In one class, a student mentioned that their parents didn’t have any friends. Around the table, everyone nodded. It seemed that no one’s parents had friends, and my students couldn’t fathom this, couldn’t fathom it when I admitted (foolishly) to having fewer friends in my thirties than I’d had in my twenties. Horror. Pity. I tried to defend myself. More horror. More pity. How could this happen to a person? How could a person let it happen?
That’s all for today,
Simon