Fishbowl by Matthew Glass Page B

dictated that the site eventually would need to be able to generate money in order to keep going.
    At some level, Andrei had always known that, but somehow he just hadn’t engaged with it in his mind. He hadn’t expected the moment to arrive so soon.
    There was an obvious solution to the problem, of course.
    Andrei baulked at it. His aim was to make Fishbowll as efficient as possible – allowing advertising on the site would do the opposite. Measured against the twin technical tests that he used to assess any new functionality – improving connection and retaining simplicity – it failed on both counts. He believed it would contribute nothing towards connection, and would reduce simplicity. And even if it didn’t, the idea of advertising nauseated him. Site after site in social networking, in search, in so many other functions on the net, had started off with apparently good intentions and ended up as not much more than vehicles for intrusive advertising steered by the rape and pillage of user data. He hadn’t founded Fishbowll to join their number.
    Kevin, on the other hand, had no opposition to the prospect. He had always expected advertising to be the ultimate revenue generator for Fishbowll and had no philosophical problem with the idea. From his libertarian standpoint, he regarded advertising as a form of expression that was as legitimate as any other form of expression in a free society, and it would be up to Fishbowll’s membership to accept or reject it. Ben, who saw Fishbowll as a massive social experiment, suspected that advertising would inevitably affect the way it developed – but that would be interesting in itself.
    Sandy, like Kevin, saw no problem either. Her father was an oil company executive and had reconciled his own genuine sense of social responsibility with the dirty reality of the industry that funded his lifestyle by adopting the view that, while the world certainly needed changing, all you could do in the meantime was work with it as you found it. As she grew up, Sandy rebelled against that suspiciously convenient accommodation and had called her father a hypocrite on more than one occasion. Yet now that push came to shove in regard to her boyfriend’s nascent business, she turned out to have more of her father in her than she might have suspected. Her attitude was briskly pragmatic: ‘You have to survive,’ she said to Andrei. ‘So? You let in advertising. Aslong as you know why you’re doing it, you can still retain your integrity.’
    But Andrei wasn’t so sure. That was probably what Mike Sweetman had told himself at the beginning, he thought, and look what had happened to him. Homeplace had become a byword for the appropriation and exploitation of user data.
    As Fishbowll’s financial position worsened, the issue came to dominate conversations in the common room. Everyone who turned up had an opinion, often reflecting the fact that they had the luxury of not actually having to make a decision. But for the three founders, the need to find funding was real.
    Since Andrei was so reluctant to allow advertising, they tried to think of other ways of raising cash. Kevin came up with the idea of creating virtual goods and selling them. ‘For every School we’ve got,’ he said, ‘there’s probably some kind of virtual goods we can create and sell. Take the Saddam Hussein memorabilia group. We could create, I don’t know, avatars of Saddam or 3-D cyperspaces of his palaces and sell them.’
    â€˜Aren’t people already doing that?’ said Ben.
    â€˜It’s just an example.’
    Andrei stared. ‘We’ve got a Saddam Hussein memorabilia group?’
    Ben nodded.
    â€˜And they’re selling avatars?’
    â€˜Dude, check out the Grotto,’ said Kevin. ‘Half the place is a bazaar.’
    â€˜When did people start doing that?’ demanded Andrei
    Kevin laughed. The libertarian