I choose the third value, “ridiculous premise”. People love to craw about how “you are the product” because they don’t pay for some service. Well, physical ne

I choose the third value, “ridiculous premise”. People love to craw about how “you are the product” because they don’t pay for some service. Well, physical newspapers have been advertiser-funded for a long time now, even though people still pay for them. Chomsky writes in Necessary Illusions that newspapers sell the eyeballs of the readers to advertisers and that that in turn deeply affects what is printed. That book was published in 1989. As far as the media is concerned, everyone here under the age of sixty have always been the product. And it’s deeply naïve and idealistic to think that “paying for their services”—how will they do that? Oh well—will change something which is now completely fundamental to media as we know it.