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I'm here to fix some ignorance, since the source of the "you are the product" idea is not these books. Metafilter user blue_beetle first put this idea online w

I'm here to fix some ignorance, since the source of the "you are the product" idea is not these books. Metafilter user blue_beetle first put this idea online when he said "If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold" in response to the Digg revolt of 2010. The idea apparently existed for a few decades prior regarding TV advertising. I prefer to think blue_beetle was the one who brought it into the zeitgeist. http://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent http://www.metafilter.com/95152/Userdriven-discontent http://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/16/product/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/07/16/product/ Edit: Alex3917 posted a similar idea on HN on 6 May 2010, beating blue_beetle by a couple months. Gotta give credit where it's due: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15030959 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15030959

guyzero 9y ago
As much as I give blue-beetle credit for having one of the earliest print references for that exact turn of phrase, I had definitely heard it before then. I don't think he really brought it into the zeitgeist, but then again I haven't talked to the entire zeitgeist about it yet.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
rditooait 9y ago
Sorry - I want to make clear that the point of sharing this article on HN is not to give credit to who came up with this concept. I simply want to start (or continue) discourse on this particular subject. To be honest, this isn't even just about Facebook, I'm sure you could have the same argument about the majority of today's tech companies who are commoditizing information about users and using that to monetize. Generally, though, this is a trend that is not slowing down, instead it's rapidly speeding up. In addition to that, the methods have become increasingly worse. I'd like to continue discourse on methods of combating this particular phenomenon.
- olympus 9y ago
  OP, I didn't mean to imply that you did. This was me shouting stuff out to the HN crowd because I think it's interesting and it's tangentially related to the article. That, plus there's sure to be a young whipper-snapper on HN that will read the article and think, "what a neat idea that nobody has ever thought of..."
  - poopoopoopoo 9y ago
    Nice use of a 400 year old idiom.
- njarboe 9y ago
  A universal system of micro-payments could help change the system or at least provide support to alternative systems. I want to pay for things I use to support the creator and to signal that it is valuable. Unfortunately, all the efforts in creating micro-payments have failed (in the US?). Seems to me this is a place where the controller of the local currency (in the US, the Fed/Federal government) should set up a system. It would only take one nation with a floating exchange rate to set up a working micro-payment system and it could become the defacto global online currency. Many nations would quickly follow. Come on Canada, do this.
  - zamber 9y ago
    It would have to be an opt-out system, like advertising is (blockers), otherwise profit from micropayments wouldn't accumulate to anything sensible. Arguably it doesn't even matter () because it's more profitable to run advertising along with donations/micropayments to diversify revenue streams. This also doesn't solve the issue of views as currency and the optimizations it drags along.
- zamber 9y ago
  In essence that's a concept worth spreading. For example see how the Google memo debacle, or how Trumps president run news were formed to fit the particular outlets readership for maximum rage-views and/or confirmation sympathy. As for combating this - there are no golden bullets. Even Google's search starts to lean towards sources that a given user visits more oft... or actually my search patterns fit to a given scheme that's abused by media outlets in their SEO. I've had an idea for aggregating time-ordered news headlines for analysis to get a broad comparison of author and company leanings. This could be then shaped to a browser extension informing the user about that. The problem is that then it would be accused of labeling stuff with broad strokes. (This mainly comes from me not remembering which news site likes which politicians and social issues.)
LMYahooTFY 9y ago
One of the main points underpinning the thesis of Manufacturing Consent's Propaganda model is news organizations selling audiences to corporations via their advertising arms. So I would say the notion goes back at least to Chomsky and Herman. Edit: Maybe it needs to be clarified that I'm in agreement with Olympus's comment and trying to expand on it.
- wuch 9y ago
  Quote from Conclusions chapter of Manufacturing Consent (from edition published in 2002, but I don't think this part changed at all since first edition published in 1988). "A propaganda model has a certain initial plausibility on guided free-market assumptions that are not particularly controversial. In essence, the private media are major corporations selling a product (readers and audiences) to other businesses (advertisers). The national media typically target and serve elite opinion, groups that, on the one hand, provide an optimal “profile” for advertising purposes, and, on the other, play a role in decision-making in the private and public spheres. The national media would be failing to meet their elite audience’s needs if they did not present a tolerably realistic portrayal of the world. But their “societal purpose” also requires that the media’s interpretation of the world reflect the interests and concerns of the sellers, the buyers, and the governmental and private institutions dominated by these groups."
- rhizome 9y ago
  This explains Chuck Lorre's career. Touch just enough segments of society and keep them just entertained enough (there have probably been focus groups on optimal laughs per minute), and you will have the widest number of advertisers wanting to buy time. This is a fact of all mainstream media, it's just that in TV you have to keep coming up with new combinations of people for the audientce to relate to, which is hard. "Everybody Loves Raymond" is essentially "I Love Lucy," but also different.
Alex3917 9y ago
Different phrasing, but I had posted basically the exact same idea on HN and gotten tons of upvotes a few weeks earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325103 I only posted it because one of my friends told me about hearing a speaker bringing up the idea at a conference, but it's an idea that's been around for decades.
- zamber 9y ago
  Few days? HN bug? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325103 > 2659 days ago
  - Splines 9y ago
    The source of that article was posted 2659 days ago. Maybe Alex3917 is a time traveler? (Welcome to 2017 Alex, sorry about everything).
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - olympus 9y ago
    He meant that he posted it prior to blue_beetle's comment in 2010. I had claimed that blue_beetle was the first person to put it on the internet, and he posted proof that he had posted a similar idea before blue_beetle did.
    - zamber 9y ago
      Alex3917 is either a time traveler or he's got superhuman memory. Speculation: 3917 is his mother year.
      - Alex3917 9y ago
        The reason I remember it is because I posted it as a HN comment, and then a few weeks later someone basically rewrote it into a blog post and got tens of millions of page views and tons of mainstream media coverage. Had that not happened, there's no way I'd remember now.
cortesoft 9y ago
I really don't like that phrase; you are NOT the product that facebook creates. Facebook creates a product which is a social media network. You PAY for that product with your data and your eyeballs. Facebook takes your payment, turns around, and sells it to advertisers and others interested in the data. That is not the same as saying you are the product.
- Miner49er 9y ago
  You are not _the_ product, but your are _a_ product of theirs.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- lloydde 9y ago
  It's a pithy saying that gets across that you as the user and the proprietor's interests may not align. We are manipulated with low doses of pleasure, nostalgia, etc. This often involves some level of deception. Sophisticated psychology is used in advertisers. When you pay with money the incentives and transactions are more clear. I'm most aware of this through my children's interactions with entertainment where YouTube and "free" mobile games frustrate me the most.
  - mseebach 9y ago
    Yeah, but it's mostly wrong, and it's a sophomoric commercephobic understanding of business (also, it's an arrogant and misanthropic view of Facebooks two billion actual users as ignorant victims of something that sounds almost like a scam). The exact same argument can be made for supermarkets: they are conduits for putting you in front of goods from suppliers (supermarkets invest a lot more in their relationship with powerful suppliers than they do with individual customers!) - your desire to buy food and go home and make dinner is entirely orthogonal to the supermarket, their interests aren't aligned with yours! Yet, despite this, in more than half a century of supermarkets being wildly popular, serving billions of people, the number of times when the supermarket failed to satisfy the customers actual desire is a rounding error next to the times they did. Adam Smith saw and understood this 250 years ago: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. And so it is with Facebook. If it does not fundamentally provide some value that you care about, you will stop using it, and in that important aspect their interests are aligned with yours.
Torgo 9y ago
"Television Delivers People" (1973) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfnm5XHsHkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfnm5XHsHkc
subnaught 9y ago
That may be the origin of this particular phrasing, but the idea is much older: In 1973, the artist Richard Serra made a film called Television Delivers People which declares "You are the product of TV" [0] Key to Noam Chomsky's _Manufacturing Consent_ (1988) is the idea that advertising-supported media caters to the desires of the advertiser, not the media consumer [1] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Delivers_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Delivers_People [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
oneoffaug16 9y ago
Adbusters 1999 "the product is you" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xtAX0HfsBtk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xtAX0HfsBtk

guyzero 9y ago

As much as I give blue-beetle credit for having one of the earliest print references for that exact turn of phrase, I had definitely heard it before then. I don't think he really brought it into the zeitgeist, but then again I haven't talked to the entire zeitgeist about it yet.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

rditooait 9y ago

Sorry - I want to make clear that the point of sharing this article on HN is not to give credit to who came up with this concept. I simply want to start (or continue) discourse on this particular subject. To be honest, this isn't even just about Facebook, I'm sure you could have the same argument about the majority of today's tech companies who are commoditizing information about users and using that to monetize. Generally, though, this is a trend that is not slowing down, instead it's rapidly speeding up. In addition to that, the methods have become increasingly worse. I'd like to continue discourse on methods of combating this particular phenomenon.

olympus 9y ago
OP, I didn't mean to imply that you did. This was me shouting stuff out to the HN crowd because I think it's interesting and it's tangentially related to the article. That, plus there's sure to be a young whipper-snapper on HN that will read the article and think, "what a neat idea that nobody has ever thought of..."
- poopoopoopoo 9y ago
  Nice use of a 400 year old idiom.
njarboe 9y ago
A universal system of micro-payments could help change the system or at least provide support to alternative systems. I want to pay for things I use to support the creator and to signal that it is valuable. Unfortunately, all the efforts in creating micro-payments have failed (in the US?). Seems to me this is a place where the controller of the local currency (in the US, the Fed/Federal government) should set up a system. It would only take one nation with a floating exchange rate to set up a working micro-payment system and it could become the defacto global online currency. Many nations would quickly follow. Come on Canada, do this.
- zamber 9y ago
  It would have to be an opt-out system, like advertising is (blockers), otherwise profit from micropayments wouldn't accumulate to anything sensible. Arguably it doesn't even matter () because it's more profitable to run advertising along with donations/micropayments to diversify revenue streams. This also doesn't solve the issue of views as currency and the optimizations it drags along.
zamber 9y ago
In essence that's a concept worth spreading. For example see how the Google memo debacle, or how Trumps president run news were formed to fit the particular outlets readership for maximum rage-views and/or confirmation sympathy. As for combating this - there are no golden bullets. Even Google's search starts to lean towards sources that a given user visits more oft... or actually my search patterns fit to a given scheme that's abused by media outlets in their SEO. I've had an idea for aggregating time-ordered news headlines for analysis to get a broad comparison of author and company leanings. This could be then shaped to a browser extension informing the user about that. The problem is that then it would be accused of labeling stuff with broad strokes. (This mainly comes from me not remembering which news site likes which politicians and social issues.)

LMYahooTFY 9y ago

One of the main points underpinning the thesis of Manufacturing Consent's Propaganda model is news organizations selling audiences to corporations via their advertising arms. So I would say the notion goes back at least to Chomsky and Herman. Edit: Maybe it needs to be clarified that I'm in agreement with Olympus's comment and trying to expand on it.

wuch 9y ago
Quote from Conclusions chapter of Manufacturing Consent (from edition published in 2002, but I don't think this part changed at all since first edition published in 1988). "A propaganda model has a certain initial plausibility on guided free-market assumptions that are not particularly controversial. In essence, the private media are major corporations selling a product (readers and audiences) to other businesses (advertisers). The national media typically target and serve elite opinion, groups that, on the one hand, provide an optimal “profile” for advertising purposes, and, on the other, play a role in decision-making in the private and public spheres. The national media would be failing to meet their elite audience’s needs if they did not present a tolerably realistic portrayal of the world. But their “societal purpose” also requires that the media’s interpretation of the world reflect the interests and concerns of the sellers, the buyers, and the governmental and private institutions dominated by these groups."
rhizome 9y ago
This explains Chuck Lorre's career. Touch just enough segments of society and keep them just entertained enough (there have probably been focus groups on optimal laughs per minute), and you will have the widest number of advertisers wanting to buy time. This is a fact of all mainstream media, it's just that in TV you have to keep coming up with new combinations of people for the audientce to relate to, which is hard. "Everybody Loves Raymond" is essentially "I Love Lucy," but also different.

Alex3917 9y ago

Different phrasing, but I had posted basically the exact same idea on HN and gotten tons of upvotes a few weeks earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325103 I only posted it because one of my friends told me about hearing a speaker bringing up the idea at a conference, but it's an idea that's been around for decades.

zamber 9y ago
Few days? HN bug? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325103 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325103 > 2659 days ago
- Splines 9y ago
  The source of that article was posted 2659 days ago. Maybe Alex3917 is a time traveler? (Welcome to 2017 Alex, sorry about everything).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- olympus 9y ago
  He meant that he posted it prior to blue_beetle's comment in 2010. I had claimed that blue_beetle was the first person to put it on the internet, and he posted proof that he had posted a similar idea before blue_beetle did.
  - zamber 9y ago
    Alex3917 is either a time traveler or he's got superhuman memory. Speculation: 3917 is his mother year.
    - Alex3917 9y ago
      The reason I remember it is because I posted it as a HN comment, and then a few weeks later someone basically rewrote it into a blog post and got tens of millions of page views and tons of mainstream media coverage. Had that not happened, there's no way I'd remember now.

cortesoft 9y ago

I really don't like that phrase; you are NOT the product that facebook creates. Facebook creates a product which is a social media network. You PAY for that product with your data and your eyeballs. Facebook takes your payment, turns around, and sells it to advertisers and others interested in the data. That is not the same as saying you are the product.

Miner49er 9y ago
You are not _the_ product, but your are _a_ product of theirs.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
lloydde 9y ago
It's a pithy saying that gets across that you as the user and the proprietor's interests may not align. We are manipulated with low doses of pleasure, nostalgia, etc. This often involves some level of deception. Sophisticated psychology is used in advertisers. When you pay with money the incentives and transactions are more clear. I'm most aware of this through my children's interactions with entertainment where YouTube and "free" mobile games frustrate me the most.
- mseebach 9y ago
  Yeah, but it's mostly wrong, and it's a sophomoric commercephobic understanding of business (also, it's an arrogant and misanthropic view of Facebooks two billion actual users as ignorant victims of something that sounds almost like a scam). The exact same argument can be made for supermarkets: they are conduits for putting you in front of goods from suppliers (supermarkets invest a lot more in their relationship with powerful suppliers than they do with individual customers!) - your desire to buy food and go home and make dinner is entirely orthogonal to the supermarket, their interests aren't aligned with yours! Yet, despite this, in more than half a century of supermarkets being wildly popular, serving billions of people, the number of times when the supermarket failed to satisfy the customers actual desire is a rounding error next to the times they did. Adam Smith saw and understood this 250 years ago: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. And so it is with Facebook. If it does not fundamentally provide some value that you care about, you will stop using it, and in that important aspect their interests are aligned with yours.

Torgo 9y ago

"Television Delivers People" (1973) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfnm5XHsHkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vfnm5XHsHkc

subnaught 9y ago

That may be the origin of this particular phrasing, but the idea is much older: In 1973, the artist Richard Serra made a film called Television Delivers People which declares "You are the product of TV" [0] Key to Noam Chomsky's _Manufacturing Consent_ (1988) is the idea that advertising-supported media caters to the desires of the advertiser, not the media consumer [1] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Delivers_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Delivers_People [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

oneoffaug16 9y ago

Adbusters 1999 "the product is you" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xtAX0HfsBtk https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xtAX0HfsBtk