'Follow the money' is a good starting point for sure, though obviously we know that lots of people young and old are happy to 'pay' for 'free' products like FB

'Follow the money' is a good starting point for sure, though obviously we know that lots of people young and old are happy to 'pay' for 'free' products like FB / IG / gmail etc. by being surveilled (and I think it's fair to say that's fairly uncritical of them, or at least fatalistic). I like Cui Bono a little more, since there can be other kinds of motivations besides purely monetary ones. As for Hegel, I don't know that anyone really uses the dialectic 'out of the box' but the practice of trying to formulate the antithesis of your naive argument, and then incorporate it in an improved version is potentially very useful (and counter intuitive).