Collab: Infinite Gmail Storage Should Be A Human Right

Georgia Symons writes a blog post with me

Photo by Darrin Moore on Unsplash

This is the first in my series of co-writing blog posts with people who responded to my ‘Write a blog post with me’ post (You should respond too!). Written with Georgia Symons.

Epistemic status: Our wild spontaneous ramblings

I. It’s not as though they didn’t warn me. 

It began months ago¹. Georgia’s ‘storage used’, bar subtly changed from grey to red. 14.1 GB of 15 GB used (94%). It caught her eye, but she didn’t think much of it. How big can any given email be? And if reaching 94% has taken… She’d had this email address for how long? Wow, since 2010! (She just checked.) If it’s taken 11 years to get to 94%, surely it will take another… [infinite time] for it to get anywhere near 100%.

Then came the BANNER. At the top of the page, also red: red text on a red background (calm down Google). To make matters worse, the notification was in a language other than English (#alwaysbelearning), meaning that rather than the meaning being quickly and readily absorbed, the notification was a barbed hook on her attention, not as easily bypassed as it would have been in English.

And then, later²,  the final omen of doom: Emails. Emails  from Gmail telling her she soon wouldn’t be able to receive more emails with Gmail. Wanton cruelty: if she has precious few slots left in this inbox, why fill more of those slots, Google?? WHY DO YOU WANT HER TO SUFFER?

Of course, she had “options”. Gmail’s slick tools will hunt down your most voluminous or least important emails and delete them in one fell swoop. Another option, Gmail told her, was to “””purchase extra storage space.”””

…   …   …   purchase?

… … … with money?

…   …   …   FROM THE FREE SERVICE GMAIL?

II. Infinite Fort Knox

When the two of us (Jalen and Georgia, not Georgia and Gmail) caught up to discuss what to collaborate on, Georgia came on to the call in a mood of intense frustration. “Gmail is meant to be free!” She protested. “It’s so irresponsible of them to have established an expectation amongst users that they can have free and unlimited use of the service, only for Google to turn around and realise that they don’t have infinite storage and need to curtail people’s usage of the service by putting a price on storage.” (G: I was exactly this articulate).

As can often happen with the two of us, Jalen found the assertion laughable, and for reasons that even Georgia can admit are pretty clear. “Hang on, this company run entirely for profit gave you a certain free amount of something which they pay a cost for, informed you how much free they were giving you, and then when you used it up and wanted more they wanted you to PAY THEM?” (J: I was less articulate than this). 

We came to agree at least on that—

If we were talking about physical storage space, it would be impractical to institute a universal human right to infinite Fort Knox Self Storage units³. You cannot accrue endless piles of trash, or treasure,  and expect it to be stored free of charge. Well, you can expect whatever you like but it ain’t gonna happen. Hm but Why though? Maybe we could?

1. MONETARY COST: Storing things in space is inherently costly (infrastructure maintenance, electricity etc. etc.). 

2. OPPORTUNITY COST: Space on earth is finite. Because of this finite-ness, each unit of physical storage you use is space that can’t be used for something else, whether someone else’s storage or building a pop up Gelateria. Say you were able to attain a storage unit for free. Then let’s say you decided to dedicate the whole thing to the Dolly magazines you decided you may as well not throw out. Although the space is somehow “free” to you, your use of that space can still be said to have a cost - an “opportunity cost”. The opportunity cost of the way you’re using the space is the loss of whatever the other most valuable use of that space would have been. In this example, we take for granted - perhaps fallaciously - that the Dolly storage is not the most valuable use of the space. An economist would say that this free storage regime is very unlikely to be allocatively efficient (resources being dedicated to their most valuable uses)⁴ 

In summary:  all people need space, as well as there needing to be space for natural systems and for shared infrastructure. You can’t take up all that space with your junk. 

Apparently.

So, what of taking up digital space with e-junk? The storage of data online does also take up (a much smaller volume of) space (Even The Cloud(s) are made of water (silicon)), as well as using energy, labour in setting up and maintaining databases etc. We could try to make a case that all people should be entitled to *some* free digital storage. But this would probably mean a government paying for the storage, so would that really be better than just giving people money and letting them decide if they want to spend it on Gmail storage or something else? Jalen seems to think not. Georgia thinks so - private purchases could still be made for additional storage, but Georgia would be supportive of a government-subsidised baseline amount of digital storage extended to all citizens, for lots of reasons including how this could eliminate one of a huge number of barriers to digital inclusion. Georgia might even go as far as to describe this access to baseline online storage as a right. But is this a fair or sensible characterisation? Jalen would like to point out that he means the government giving money to people, which they could then use for this.

A sensible definition of a ‘right’ requires that each ‘right’ I have is defined by a corresponding duty that someone(s) has. e.g. I have a right not to be assaulted, as all other humans have a duty not to assault me. I have a right to legal representation, as the government/taxpayers have a duty to provide it to me. So when claiming a right, we need to ask who the corresponding duty falls on. If we had a right to infinite digital storage, who would have a duty to give it to us? Google? That sounds a bit like the very common but questionable Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics: 

“when you [in this case Google] observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it.“ 

Gmail did a little bit to help our desire for digital storage, so according to the Copenhagen Interpretation of ethics they’re now morally obligated to do more and give us fully infinite storage. Jalen at least thinks this view of ethics is misguided.

And it seems even clearer that there’s no real case to say this space and energy should be given infinitely and for free to all people. It would lead to some very strange outcomes…. Do we bulldoze people’s houses with no compensation to make more server storage space? It would not be sustainable in some sense. We’re not sure it would be an issue in terms of environmental sustainability, but in terms of the sustainability of a functioning society…..

Having said that, we will now make an airtight case that 

III. INFINITE GMAIL STORAGE SHOULD BE A UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHT.

It’s clear to see that as more and more of our public and private lives play out in digital space, emergent digital rights… emerge.

What’s an emergent right? It’s a right that emerges from new circumstances in human society and interaction, just as all rights that we take for granted now must have emerged at some point in the past, in relation to changing social contexts. Technology plays a big role here - the emergence of new technologies makes new forms of social organisation and cultural transmission possible, entraining new pairings of the rights and duties discussed above. 

But there is an intermediate step - for something to be enshrined as a right, it has to be recognised as such by society, usually in the form of a law or declaration. Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham claimed that there are

“no such things as natural rights - no such things as rights anterior to the establishment of government - no such things as natural rights opposed to, in contradistinction to, legal”⁵

Maybe a certain right would indeed be a good thing to have encoded in law, but that doesn’t mean it already exists in some cosmic sense. As Philip Schofield writes discussing Bentham,

“reasons for wishing there were such things as rights, are not rights: a reason for wishing that a certain right were established, is not that right: wants are not means: hunger is not bread.”⁶

Schofield may be correct that hunger is not bread, and that a desire for a given right is not the same as that right existing if it hasn’t in fact been encoded into law yet. Hunger is not yet bread. To complicate the issue further, it is reasonable to expect that as certain rights emerge, so too will emerge certain other desires for rights that will not, or cannot, actually become rights. For hunger to become bread, hunger must demand to become bread. The processes that have historically turned hunger into bread include:

• Protest movements

• New legislation

• Legal precedent

• Self-organised groups making less formalised, but commonly accepted, decisions about their rights (think anything from anarchist polities to off-the-grid communities)

 Therefore, we can say that an expectation of a certain right is a signal that this right could come into being. When hunger expects bread, we may anticipate that hunger will become bread.

And we⁷ expect infinite free Gmail storage. That storage limit bar is right down the bottom of the inbox page, who the hell scrolls all the way down there? What are we, a productivity blogger? Free and unlimited use of the Gmail service seemed to be the norm for such a long time, it may at the very least have been said to have created a sense of entitlement to a right to free storage. If enough people feel this entitlement, they may organise to turn their entitlement into a right.

IV. Tip:

Dots don’t make a difference in Gmail adresses. If you’re email is j.bentham@gmail.com and someone emails jbentham@gmail.com you’ll still get it, it’s fine, chill about the dots.

V.How the commercial/private internet shapes the possibility space of digital rights

As discussed above, our wishes for rights; and/or our reasons for wishing for these rights, do ultimately often become rights, in the sense that if the collective comes to feel a certain way about a perceived or wished-for right, they will often organise and fight for that right to be enshrined in law, most obvious recent example being same-sex marriage. AND FOR THIS REASON, anything that shrinks the arena for what our imagined future rights, want of rights or reasons for wanting rights might be, can also be said to be a form of preemptive harm, or a form of suppressing the possibilities for human flourishing and cultural change.

To illustrate this point, Georgia presents the case for one imagined future right: the right to autonomy or sovereignty of attention. Even as she writes, she knows that this would be a very difficult right to enshrine in law. Attention is fickle, and difficult to accurately measure. In a pre-digital world, distraction or accidental misallocation of one’s attention was still possible. But in 2021, many of us live in a digital attention economy in which intentional allocation of one’s attention feels like a constant struggle. A right to attentive sovereignty would be a right to live your life with as few interventions designed to nudge your attention off course as possible.

Let us imagine a future in which the following digital artifacts - all invented by private industry with the express purpose of nudging your attention towards their platforms, with the intention of converting your attention itself into profit - contravene the right to attentive sovereignty:

• Push notifications

• Pre-roll advertising on digital videos

• Any content that “pops up” across the content you are intending to consume

• “Gamified” rewards

• Anything at all that simulates gambling, especially if there is any possibility it will be consumed by a child

Each item on this list is already a part of daily life. Already, many would have difficulty imagining a world without these things. Further, I’m sure many would, by now, fiercely advocate to be able to keep some of these things in their lives (I don’t know how many fierce advocates for pop-ups are out there; but push notifications and gamified rewards are infrastructural to many people’s experience of life). This is one example of how the privatisation of the internet has minimised the possibility space for digital rights. Jalen sees some… issues here (He would). But:

VI. Imagined Future Rights

To conclude, we now present a list of other imagined future rights and the corresponding duties.

1. RIGHT: The right to free infinite Gmail storage.
   RIGHT HELD BY: All humans.
   DUTY: Fund infinite Gmail storage.
   DUTY HELD BY: People who send long document attachments with an email body that’s just: ‘thoughts?’

2. RIGHT: The right to view and edit any algorithms that serve you content - e.g. so that you can go into the back-end of YouTube and tell it that, despite any contradictory evidence from your viewing behaviours, you do not want to be served any videos about Scarlett Johansson tearing down male interviewers for asking sexist questions.
   RIGHT HELD BY: All humans
   DUTY: Provide a useable platform for, as well as free and easily accessible education about, algorithms and how to alter their output.
   DUTY HELD BY: TikTok, YouTube, probably Google again

3. RIGHT: The right to erase any trace of any information related to oneself from any webpage at all.
   RIGHT HELD BY: All humans, with the exception of anyone trying to hide bigoted behaviour from the past 5 years.
   DUTY: Web infrastructure that allows for more democratic editing privileges; a secure and infallible identity verification system that ensures that only the person in question is able to delete content about themselves.
   DUTY HELD BY: squarespace.com

4. Your turn, dear reader - what emergent digital rights can you imagine in the future?

1. Georgia doesn’t know how many

2.  Again, don’t know how long.

3. This isn’t an ad. In fact if you need some Fort Knox cardboard boxes hit Jalen up he’s got a couple unused ones sitting around.

4. At least Jalen is pretty sure this is what ‘allocative efficiency’ means - but he switched out of his econ degree so correct us if he’s wrong

5.  Jeremy Bentham. Nonsense Upon Stilts.

6. Philip Schofield. Jeremy Bentham's 'Nonsense upon  Stilts'

7.  “we” as in Georgia doesn’t believe she could possibly be the only one feeling an instinctual yet seemingly irrational outrage about this