bombs in bottles
"If you're not the customer, you're the product" is an adage as old as Web 2.0, probably older. It's something I see a lot of people online say when they want to sound smart, and/or when they want to justify the fact that they purchased the "premium" tier of a "freemium" service.
"Even if you are the customer, you're still the product" is something else I see a lot of people online say when they want to sound smarter, and/or when they're resigned to the strip mining of their very identities for oligarchical profit.
Both stances have come to a partial realization of how online advertising and data mining work. Both have some piece of the truth. If you don't pay to remove ads, your attention (however fleeting) to advertising is being mined; it's a "product." Even if you do pay to remove ads, your interaction with a product or service is being mined; it's also a "product."
Both are right; neither is complete. Here's a more complete view:
You are always, irrevocably, the product. You can never not be the product.
For the long explanation, please read "Technofeudalism" by Yanis Varoufakis. I really cannot recommend this book enough.
Meanwhile, here's a short version based on a single example:
You are always the product because when was the last time the terms of service let you pay to *not* have your data collected?
If there was a way for you to pay to stop being "the product," then there would be a subscription tier at which you could purchase data privacy. "Pay us $X per month for zero data collection" would be a standard offering in every app, every software program, every smart device.
I haven't read every ToS on every app, but I'd confidently wager that none of them - not one - offers these terms. They don't exist.
You cannot purchase the right to keep your online activities free from others' prying eyes or algorithms. Not because you're too poor, but because the offer is not on the table.
You are always the product.
"Well, yeah," you may be thinking. "This is why I stick to the small web, where things like smol.pub and Gemini get built for people to use, not for their creators to make profits!"
...Okay. Except. When was the last time someone told you that robots.txt works great? Or that there's a foolproof way to stop generative AI bots from crawling your Web site or blog and sucking all that into an LLM? Did you buy the bridge this person was selling, too?
You. Are. Always. The. Product. This is the nature of the Web we all currently use. And if the bots haven't come for Gemini or Gopher or Finger or Spartan yet, it's only because those protocols don't host enough content to be worth crawling.
"So what am I supposed to do?" you may ask. "Stop using the Internet?"
If I thought that would solve the problem, I might suggest it. But it won't. Every financial transaction you put on a card can be - and is - collected and tracked for analysis, too. Every time your cell phone pings a nearby tower so it can maintain a signal and get your calls and texts to you. Every time you pass by a security camera, an increasing number of which are now linked to massive facial recognition databases.
This data is collected for far more than mere advertising. It has to be; a population whose wages shrink by the year has ever-fewer means at its disposal to buy things. This data tracks you at a level previously unforeseen in all of human history - at a level at once so broad and so deep that it's difficult to comprehend. It's too valuable to use for nothing more than advertising.
It's already being used for more than advertising. You may not remember the "Facebook contagion study," in which Facebook showed certain users more sad posts to see if doing so would make those users start posting more sad things, but Facebook definitely does:
The Facebook contagion study and its ethical issues
The most innocuous details of our daily lives are now the raw material tech uses to extract money from nothing (because "from nothing" is exactly how US dollars are created), while we get nothing.
You are always the product. You're the raw material - the ore, the lumber, the sand. You can never not be the product.
--
an HTML-ified version of this post is available at https://bellriotswhen.neocities.org/product
--