Are you really Facebook’s product? The history of a dangerous idea
&gt; “Television delivers people” was not about data privacy. It was about the medium’s impact on culture and politics. Serra and Schoolman’s critique was that TV placed the interests of advertisers over those of viewers in a subtle but deeply insidious way: by purveying content and ads that perpetuated the consumerist status quo, deadening free thinking and dampening activism. The big networks would never produce a show that threatened the interests of corporate America, they reckoned, because it was corporate America that they ultimately served.<p>That&#x27;s true, but the &quot;critique ... that TV placed the interests of advertisers over those of viewers&quot; easily extends to questions about data privacy.<p>&gt; What people seem to mean when they say that you’re Facebook’s product is that Facebook treats you like a product—that it fails to respect your individualism, your humanity, or your long-term interests. And the implication is that this disrespect flows inevitably from the fact that you aren’t paying for Facebook’s service.<p>When I use it, I also mean that Facebook&#x27;s incentives aren&#x27;t to cater to me, but rather to itself and to a lesser extent, its advertiser-customers from which it gets its revenue.  I, as a non-paying user, have little leverage to demand consideration.  It loses no revenue if I leave.<p>&gt; That helps to explain why Google and Facebook really don’t think of their users as their products—at least, not their main products. Their leaders have always regarded advertising, and by extension users’ attention and data, as means to the end of building the products they really care about: Google search, Google Assistant, Facebook’s news feed.<p>I don&#x27;t buy it.  Google kills products that it has trouble monetizing.  They aren&#x27;t labors of love, begrudgingly subsidized by advertising.<p>Scandals like Facebook&#x27;s are finally exposing this excessively optimistic line of thinking as the lie that it is.  Tech companies aren&#x27;t some special kind of company, they&#x27;re companies just like Ford, Goldman Sachs, Philip Morris, Boeing, etc.<p>&gt; But it’s 2018, and it’s time for Facebook’s critics to move past what has become a tired cliché. There’s something nihilistic about telling people they’re the product of a gigantic corporation and there’s nothing they can do about it. “You are the product” paints us as powerless pawns in Facebook’s game but gives us no leverage with which to improve our predicament.<p>This is BS.  There&#x27;s plenty they can do: they can disengage, they can find alternative services better suited to them, etc.  It&#x27;s only nihilistic if you think you have no choice except to use Facebook and play its game.<p>&gt; There are at least two alternative ways of viewing our relationship to Facebook that hold more promise for making that relationship a healthier and less exploitive one. The first is to view ourselves as customers of Facebook, paying with our time, attention, and data instead of with money....The second is to view ourselves as part of Facebook’s labor force. Just as bees labor unwittingly on beekeepers’ behalf, our posts and status updates continually enrich Facebook. But we’re humans, not bees, and as such we have the capacity to collectively demand better treatment.<p>Aaaand it&#x27;s confirmed: the author thinks we have no choice except to use Facebook and play its game, so we should try recontextualize our situation to motivate us to beg for better treatment.