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I just watched this last night. A lot of the content will already be well known to the HN audience. There was one big light-bulb moment for me. One of the speak

by codysc 6y ago

I just watched this last night. A lot of the content will already be well known to the HN audience. There was one big light-bulb moment for me. One of the speakers was clarifying the "If you're not paying then you are the product" idea. He refined it to, (rough quote), "Changes to your behavior and actions are the product" That distinction made the insidiousness much more clear than the former statement.

amitnme 6y ago
True I had heard many versions of this inference but this came in as a rational explanation.
gundmc 6y ago
> "Changes to your behavior and actions..." Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the statement tying it to free products and services. There are plenty of paid services that are riddled with ads as well. Movies, Cable TV, airline flights, etc. The fact is that people and organizations are _constantly_ trying to influence your behavior. It's not obvious that's only a bad thing.
- dgudkov 6y ago
  As my ex-colleague says "Any advertisement is propaganda".
  - rexpop 6y ago
    And all propaganda is political.
  - cassianoleal 6y ago
    I believe in most Latin languages there isn't a separate word. At least in Portuguese and Spanish, both advertisement and propaganda are simply "propaganda".
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      You can also use "publicidade" in Portuguese, but "propaganda" is not used exclusively for "political propaganda".
    - yesenadam 6y ago
      Not true. In spanish, "ad" is usually anuncio, or sometimes comercial or publicidad. Propaganda can also be used, but is less common than those i think, I've never heard it used. I once read an original edition of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) with its title in a jaunty typeface on the cover, before the word had a negative connotation. Pic of its cover here: https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/edward--bernays/propaganda/100407.aspx https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/edward--bernays/p...
      - cassianoleal 6y ago
        I have definitely heard "propaganda" in South American Spanish-speaking countries. Perhaps a regional quirk?
  - hapticmonkey 6y ago
    I prefer David Foster Wallace's description of advertising: "It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”
    - lozf 6y ago
      I always liked: "Advertising robs you of your dignity, and sells it back to you at the price of the product."
      - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
        With the arguable exception of therapy/counselling, you can never retrieve your dignity and self-worth by buying a product. So all it really does is sell the promise.
        adamsea 6y ago
        True. As a side point, IMHO, therapy and counseling are not products. They’re services, and, even more so, should be a service bound by a medical code of ethics, which, since the healing professions go way back, imho makes therapy and counseling distinct from many other services. :)
        rexpop 6y ago
        So advertisements deplete dignity, with no recompense or amelioration? No wonder our society's replete with indignity.
- ppod 6y ago
  Also there is an underlying class thing going on with "you are the product". Choosing to pay for a service is not just an equal alternative to a free service for most people. Most people have to work hard to afford paid services, many of them at low wages. Sneering at people who choose to use a free service rather than sell their time for $15 an hour is not a great look.
  - mattgreenrocks 6y ago
    Can’t they just not use the thing? Usually this critique is applied to social media, which is not an essential human need. Ubiquitous and handy, yes. But not essential.
    - dominotw 6y ago
      social contact is a need. I don't think i can actually survive without watsapp.
      - hervature 6y ago
        I'll be the first to tell you that humans are social beings that need social contact. I'll also be the first to tell you that social media is not necessary for that. I assume you're being hyperbolic with Whatsapp being vital for life, but do you honestly not know how humans got their fill of social interaction 12 years ago? And no, the answer isn't Facebook.
        jim_and_derrick 6y ago
        My wife pulled out dusty old binder of my sports cards. Readin thru those things was a trip. On one page with bball cards I had 90s Shaq w/ orlando, very early AI, kukoc, and pippen. Those cards (and sportscenter) were how you got stats and knew shit about sports. Now you have every possible statistic at your fingertips. In my day (90s) us kids had to memorize stats on the back of baseball cards!
        closeparen 6y ago
- swader999 6y ago
  The implications for election advertising are that votes and even revolutions are available to the highest bidder.
- shajznnckfke 6y ago
  Not just advertising, but any communication. You wrote this comment to influence me and everyone who else who read it.
  - adamsea 6y ago
    You would reduce it all to atoms.
    - shajznnckfke 6y ago
      I’m just trying to take the ideas in this thread seriously. If we are going to argue that it’s bad to try to influence people’s behavior, we ought to think through what that means when applied to entities other than Facebook. That will help us figure out if we really mean what we are saying. Is it an actual value we hold, or only a rhetorical point when we are taking about a few tech companies?
      - maigret 6y ago
        No it is fine sending a comment expressing opinion. There are so many qualitatives differences: - This is human to human communication, not an optimised algorithm. - People here are not sending you 10 comments and looking at the one which you engaged the most time, because they don't have the metrics. Social media knows how many seconds you looked at a post and classify it with AI, they can make a profile of your current sentiment. - The poster probably didn't analyse your whole past discussion history with algorithms before answering in a way that would be best calibrated for your way of thinking. Interactions, discussions between people, even conflictual (not violent), are fine. Communication is fine. Mass communication is mostly fine (traditional advertising, broadcast...). What's not fine is manipulating people by mass-communicating while adjusting the message given metadata that those people are not even aware about.
        shajznnckfke 6y ago
        In a conversation, you subconsciously build a model of the mind of person you are talking to, and your words are tuned to fill the gap between what they know and are thinking and the ideas you are trying to express. If I think back through my life, the communication that has affected me most as been from humans in face-to-face conversations, not on websites. But I could be bad at objectively evaluating this. I think for Facebook to be more effective than humans at influencing behavior, they have to implement theory of mind, which might require AGI.
- dbtc 6y ago
  The advertisers are the buyers, the platforms are the sellers whose product is your well-trained eyes.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- soneca 6y ago
  I believe the extra step of social media is that they are not satisfied by changing your behavior from not buying a product to buying a product. They also change your behavior in somewhat indirect ways with the goal that you continue to engage with their platform more and more and be subject to more advertising on the future. So they make you more fanatic or more extremist or more polarized, because it will lead you to stay more time on their site. They want you perpetually in the state of looking into a rabbit hole rather than feeling that you are satisfied with your knowledge of something and ready to move on with your life. The fact that we bring our phone everywhere, that there are push notifications, and that we interact with other people (often friends) makes it fundamentally different from a TV or a magazine.
  - amurthy1 6y ago
    > They also change your behavior in somewhat indirect ways with the goal that you continue to engage with their platform more and more How is this different than any other kind of media like TV, magazines, newspapers, etc.? All of them are trying to make their product engaging so that you consume more of their media and more of their ads. Just because those services also charge a subscription fee, doesn't change the dynamics of what they're trying to do. Social media has maybe just been more successful in doing so, partially because > The fact that we bring our phone everywhere, that there are push notifications So the dynamics have always existed in previous platforms, it's just been ratcheted up to a higher level with social media.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      In terms of behavior changes: Don't forget alcohol, tasty food, the whole sex industry, fashion, and even many aspects of the shelter industry. There isn't a seller on earth who passes up the opportunity to engender eagerness to buy.
    - soneca 6y ago
      Other platforms never leveraged opinions, pictures, life facts from people I know, like friends, family, acquaintances, coworkers, etc to induce behavior change. And things change a lot with scale. Even if the intent or the principle is the same, dynamics are different if it is in a scale orders of magnitude larger. I don’t think we should be dismissing new understandings of how social media affect our lives on the grounds that other media in the past tried to do the same.
- asta_2223 6y ago
  I am sure there would be regulation and consequences that would apply to Movies, Cable TV, airline flights if misinformation being pushed about Earth being flat to commercially engage them.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  Right, except in this case Google and Facebook are not paying the people who create the content (so-called "users")^1, however Google and Facebook are the ones getting paid by the advertisers. The so-called "users" are also paying for the internet access and bandwidth over which the ads are delivered. In sum, the "users" are the ones paying for the costs of this particular advertising vector (the internet and web). 1. In most cases. There are exceptions where original authors can get a cut of Google/Facebook's take.
  - 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
    Actually, Facebook does not share any of their ad revenue with their Facebook "users".
- joshocar 6y ago
  When we watch ads it's pretty clear that the advertiser is trying to manipulate us. With social media it's different. They are manipulating us to keep us engaged so thay we see more ads. With TV, the network is trying to create a great show that engages people so that they can get more advertising money. I get that, most people get that, it's a win win. We get entertaining shows and they get more eyeballs for afs. With social media, they are doing it in a different way. They use algorithms that create silos of information meant to keep us scrolling. This leads to all kinds of negative effects on society. I would argue that cable news and social media are more alike than different in this respect.
- api 6y ago
  None of this is new in principle. The difference we are talking about here is more between a hunting rifle and an M-16. The depth, pervasiveness, and insidiousness of persuasion is so much greater with social media. It’s a wider channel, a bidirectional, channel, and a one on one channel. Now when tech similar to GPT-3 gets out there it’s going to be like hunting rifle vs atomic weapons. Pretty soon we will have what I am calling “mechanized con artistry.” We are almost literally inventing the medieval demon whispering into everyone’s ear. Mass surveillance plus big data plus generative AI will be like the hydrogen bomb of propaganda.
  - adamsea 6y ago
    For anyone unsure like me, GPT-3 is a deep-learning based model which can be trained to produce human like written language (text). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3 Unsettling indeed.
- intended 6y ago
  This is taking the comment out of its context. Yes its benign taken out of that context. In the context of social media and tech, this is no longer the case, or it is the case that people are not comfortable with its untrammeled evolution and utilization.
- bernardlunn 6y ago
  There is a world of difference - not just one word - between between contextual & tracking advertising; contextual only knows that somebody reading/watching this content is interested in this subject. Social media tracks everything about YOU. It is totally different
- jdc 6y ago
  I was with you until the last sentence.
- ldubost 6y ago
  > > "Changes to your behavior and actions..." > Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the statement tying it to free products and services. I believe it was "the product is the 'ability' to change your behavior" So the difference here is that not only the sell it but it actually works because it can adapt to the people in realtime. This is probable what is scary.. Standard advertisement is already manipulation but it's more easy to know when it is advertisement (though it's arguable that there are also tricks to get around this for TV). In my view it is indeed the advertisement industry going too far and being allowed anything. Social Media just build a product for its client and none of them have any doubt and limits when it comes to choosing between profits and ethics. Advertisement is ok when it is honest and not manipulative. In addition the product is sold for politics which is even more scary. There are regulation in many countries about what's allowed or not in advertisement. In some cases it's not allowed to blatantly lie. Or it is not allowed to hide advertisement as content, etc... It is possible to forbid micro-targetting and manipulative AI algorithms or other methods. Users & Regulators need to understand what is being done, and how the effects are harmful to society.
  - gfxgirl 6y ago
    Well, for movies/tv it's well known they were used to get people to buy wedding rings, cigarettes, and many other things. Not the ads, the actual movie/tv show. When you see some character light up a cigarette with a cool pose IIRC that whole idea was started by the tobacco companies to the point now that most people just seem to assume you show someone smoking to make them appear cool. It's portrayed as cool either because of the way the shot is made the person acts, or because knowing their bad for you clearly this person likes take risks, live dangerously, so they're exciting. https://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/history https://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/history https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/how-an-ad-campaign-invented-the-diamond-engagement-ring/385376/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...
- nothis 6y ago
  Yea, but it's never spelled out like this.
- sriku 6y ago
  The Jaron Lanier quote (with the first part paraphrased but the rest exact) is this - "that we are the product being sold to advertisers is too simplistic. It is the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception that is the product." Yes manipulation is also the goal of all advertising, however the power to manipulate is not mostly in the hands of advertisers. The platform owners wield tremendous power and can decide what gets shown when and what gets priority over what. It means their political leanings influence people whether or not those advertise on the platform. We've never had this kind of concentration of power over the collective mind I think.
disown 6y ago
> He refined it to, (rough quote), "Changes to your behavior and actions are the product" That's true of all media. Doesn't matter if you pay for it or not. Even netflix. Even this post. What is the "documentary" trying to achieve? Change behavior. Who is behind the social media campaign? "Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24468533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24468533 > That distinction made the insidiousness much more clear than the former statement. Just as insidious are "documentaries". They are just as sneaky and agenda driven as facebook algorithms.
- burkaman 6y ago
  > What is the "documentary" trying to achieve? Change behavior. But will the filmmakers profit if they succeed? They don't make any money by successfully changing your mind.
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    Well yea they will make money if they succeed because that means they made a good documentary and will be paid to make more.
  - adnzzzzZ 6y ago
    You can profit in more ways than just with money. For instance, you can gain status in your sphere by successfully changing people's minds with your documentary, and I would assume that's partly what motivates people working on these projects.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Documentaries are made a clear statement of narrative intent. You can disagree with the positioning, but a documentary never pretends to be something other than a documentary. What is Instagram? Is it a tool for sharing photos, or is a social engineering experiment intended to increase competitive anxiety and narcissism? What is Facebook? Is it a way to stay in touch with friends and family, or is it a social engineering experiment designed to promote "engagement" through ever-increasing political and emotional extremism? If I want to make a documentary I can use the camera in my cellphone and maybe a cheap lapel microphone, buy some cheap studio lights, and edit it with cheap software. The research would be harder to buy, but still not impossible for someone with good basic journalism skills. If it's not defamatory I can post it on YouTube. If it's solid journalism with an original and interesting angle there's even a fair chance I'll be able to sell it a media network. If I want to create my own global social network - that's a slightly more challenging project.
neilk 6y ago
That was Jaron Lanier. http://www.jaronlanier.com/ http://www.jaronlanier.com/ if you're interested in more. He was an early pioneer in VR tech, and is a person with generally interesting ideas. He is more known today for his critiques of the tech industry and Silicon Valley culture.
tqi 6y ago
"Changes to your behavior and actions" Is there an industry anywhere that is not in the business of influencing behavior or actions? Why do you think that doesn't apply to news, education, healthcare, whatever?
- jhardy54 6y ago
  There's a big difference when you take informed consent into account. When I go to the doctor I understand the scope and goals of my healthcare provider. I'm not surprised when my behaviors are changed to enhance my health. When the average person uses social media to connect with friends they aren't informed on the scope or goals of the social media provider. When I RSVP to a birthday party I only expect that my response will be sent -- I don't expect that I'll have birthday gifts suggested to me or have my relationships tracked by surveillance organizations.
  - kenjackson 6y ago
    > When I go to the doctor I understand the scope and goals of my healthcare provider. Are you sure about that? The fact that I have to sometimes argue for a test, and their counter argument isn't "the test isn't useful or even worse", but rather "the test is expensive" makes me wonder what their goal is. I'm paying for the test (or my insurance is), aren't I? It seems they're trying to optimize for something, but I'm not sure if its my health.
    - jhardy54 6y ago
      You should ask your doctor! I don't have enough information to give you a confident guess, but my intuition is that theyre trying to save you money when an expensive test is unlikely to be helpful. Many people struggle to make ends meet, so it makes sense to avoid superfluous medical costs. If you tell your healthcare provider that money is no object I'd imagine that they'd be able to weigh the financial aspect more accurately.
    - nradov 6y ago
      Physicians have an ethical obligation not to order unnecessary treatments, especially those that could cause iatrogenic harm. That applies regardless of who is paying. Most tests produce some level of false positives, which can potentially lead to more unnecessary treatments. From an evidence-based medicine standpoint, how likely are those tests to actually optimize your health?
thelittleone 6y ago
This is literally what many parasites do. In the case of GI parasites they make you crave what they want.
nikki93 6y ago
This is interesting. I wonder what it's like also to kind of... Not really make it about that at all. Say you're hanging out with your friends IRL, and you're not paying them to hang out with you, or didn't pay the grass to hang out with them among it. Are you still being a "product"? I think in that case we don't dig into it because it all seems part of some natural order of things. I guess we just need to keep living till we get there. I feel like it seems worthwhile to have an angle that doesn't dichotomize your actions into product/non-product ones; maybe you just act in a space orthogonal to it and/or use your understanding of it to inform yourself but aren't driven by needing to be product or non-product. Capitalizing on that last desire is I think how the language ends up becoming too much ends and not means.
- bsanr2 6y ago
  https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical/dinner-party.html https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical... This may or may not be related, because I'm finding it difficult to parse your comment.
  - nikki93 6y ago
    Honestly, I love it! Thanks for that. :) Yeah I care about this: we have scaled bakeries that make lots of stuff, and we've industrialized it and commercialized it and ... etc. And that's great! But we also bake at home in our kitchen, for our families. We do things in between: small businesses that serve their communities. I want that we do that with software, and I want it to be as widespread as is with things we take that more for granted about like cooking. We're doing it already: when you write a blog post, you are producing a software experience for someone else. I hope that over time we spread the empowerment of creation of more kinds of software experiences across more people, and also without needing to make everyone feel like it needs to be about scaling: gardening, not necessarily agriculture.
iRomain 6y ago
I really liked the futures analogy. On top of my head: > there are pork chops futures, oil futures, and now human futures. This is so full of sense in all degrees.
- qppo 6y ago
  I feel like they edited that quote a little too far away from the final(?) statement she gave, which was along the lines of "these markets should be banned, just like we have banned markets in human organs and human slaves."
lowdose 6y ago
If you don't pay you obey!
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
That was, if I recall correctly, Jaron Lanier [0]. Well worth reading stuff he wrote, of recordings of his past speeches, if you haven't done so already. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier
pbw 6y ago
For the last 5000 years advertising has tried and succeeded at making people change their behavior and actions. It's not all that insidious, it's just how advertising works, that's its entire purpose. The doc was not awful, it's good to get people talking, but it was more one-sided than a facebook feed, which I found very ironic. Every well lit talking head had the same point of view, they presented their mic drop line and then there was no discussion, no counterpoint, no follow up.
mavsman 6y ago
It never occurred to me until now that Hacker News is free and this statement could be applied here as well, though I'm not exactly sure in what way.
- ducttapecrown 6y ago
  YCombinator companies advertise here for jobs?
  - shaklee3 6y ago
    All the time. You'll frequently see front page titles like "My company (YC19) Hiring Engineers"
- identity0 6y ago
  To change your behaviour to look more favourably on Ycombinator startups. (/s?)
- vowelless 6y ago
  Of course. Remember that Dropbox started here [0]. It inspires lots of people to apply to YC. YC founders participate in these forums. It raises everyone's value in general. HN members often are the early adopters on many YC products, giving important feedback (for free) to these companies. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
  - snypox 6y ago
    Oh, how funny is it, that the top comment would be still the top comment today.
- surround 6y ago
  > This is one of the few places where a tech outsider can be exposed to some of the topics that are on the minds of insiders. The caveat is that criticism of any of the conceptual bodies orbiting the starry notion of "tech startup" (social ramifications, diversity and discrimination, wealth and income, etc.) are heavily frowned upon. Now, are mods going through and sweeping away every comment that proclaims, "Tech bad."? (Mostly) no. But no one wants to bite the hand that feeds it, particularly when so many have usernames easily tied to their public personas. So it's disappointing but not surprising to see people hostile to or tip-toeing around said criticism. > In any case, the basic dynamic is interesting: the less you pay for things directly, the more power you give up to those who do. The abstraction is largely symbolic for ads (consumers pay advertisers in higher product costs), but apparently where and when money exchanges hands matters to who ultimately has influence. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22513699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22513699
mitchdoogle 6y ago
This kind of wording is conspiratorial mumbo jumbo. A social media's product is it's platform and software. Their revenue comes from advertising. No one ever told someone watching network TV in the 80s, "you are the product", because that would be ridiculous. It's no less ridiculous to do that with websites and phone apps. Why can't we just have a frank discussion about advertising and privacy without this kind of manipulative language?
- donny2018 6y ago
  In the 80s you weren’t individually targeted based on data collected on you personally.
- cmehdy 6y ago
  Nielsen ratings[0] have been a thing since the 1930s, so in a way people's attention has indeed been commoditized for a while now - only with an increasing granularity that has now reached some of an individual's metrics (and we're continuing to go along that path with smart devices and addition of sensors). I'm not sure why saying to people that their attention and subsequent changes in behaviours were the fundamental parts of entire markets would be conspiratorial, but I might be misunderstanding you. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings
  - 1propionyl 6y ago
    Two key differences: 1. Nielsen boxes were and are opt-in. 2. You were and are compensated for keeping one.
    - cmehdy 6y ago
      1. Social media is opt-in 2. You are compensated by accessing an incredibly complex system and network for free where otherwise you would have to maintain or pay for some kind of infrastructure. (I am playing the devil's advocate here because it is interesting to me to understand in what way other than granularity this would be any different from the way the media has been communicated to us for a long time)
wdr1 6y ago
Isn't that true of all advertising, be it TV, billboards, magazines, or digital?
- gauravkumar552 6y ago
  No
app4soft 6y ago
> "If you're not paying then you are the product" idea To be honest, "Even if you're paying you are the product too".[0,1] [0] https://time.com/5596033/lawsuit-apple-selling-itunes-listening-data/ https://time.com/5596033/lawsuit-apple-selling-itunes-listen... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/28/its-middle-night-do-you-know-who-your-iphone-is-talking/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/28/its-mid...
disambiguation 6y ago
in much the same way the documentary was designed to do!
buovjaga 6y ago
Seems to be in line with the history of PR and advertising presented in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
moksly 6y ago
I work as en external examiner for various CS students, and in my country they do a couple of internships at real companies as part of their degree. At some point around five years ago, or perhaps a little before that, there started being psychology students on some of the courses. A trend that has since grown quite a bit, especially if you happen upon a group project involving mobile gaming. It’s something I would have likely never met in my my career, but there is an amazing amount of social engineering going on a these places. 20 years ago if you got the odd group of students who did anything gaming related, it would typically be very nerdy, terribly executed and often a very socially awkward exam even for CS standards. These days it feels like I’m very likely examining a group of people out of which two or three are likely to be my executives in a decade if they chose to pursue a career in the public sector. It’s really interesting how the humanities have crept in and in some way taken over, isn’t it? And all because we didn’t want to pay a coffees worth of money to have the online yellow pages. It’ll be even more interesting to see what happens to this sale of social engineering once legislation eventually catches on.
- ASlave2Gravity 6y ago
  Blimey, that's super interesting. The ad model needs to die IMHO. We need regulation from a super-national level if you ask me. Bitcoin should pay the way for a paid-for internet. Anything to get ads off the web.
  - rauhl 6y ago
    Ads are definitely a large part of the problem, but they are not the only problem. Ads are what turn us from customers into cattle, yes, but I think that online services could be almost as bad if we paid for them. Indeed, micropayments might actually result in many of the same issues as ads do: in a world with micropayments for each page load, publishers would still want to increase engagement, because that would directly increase their bottom line. What we need is precisely the thing so many of us do not want: we need subscriptions. Subscriptions provide a buffer. They give a publisher room to breathe: he can predict what his next month will look like; he can model what his next year will look like; and he can allocate his resources appropriately. The problem is that subscriptions are high-friction, and cannot compete with ad-driven ‘free’ content and services.
samuraiV 6y ago
my light bulb moment was when they compare Wikipedia with Facebook and Google. I took a moment of pause and probably thought about for the first time in my life how this changes the whole narrative. Facebook and Google actually manipulates you to give you a different picture of the reality and basically dividing us even on the subjects of prime importance like global warming, corona virus etc where we can't afford to form different opinions. They shouldn't be allowed to do that sometimes its the question of life and death.
dwd 6y ago
So...essentially the product they sell is your metadata; which is also the data the surveillance state finds valuable.
sriku 6y ago
Agree. That was a sharp observation by Jaron Lanier (father of VR?)
gfxgirl 6y ago
not as catchy but much better than "If you're not paying then you are the product". Wikipedia free. Linux in all its flavors are free. Libre Office, Firefox, LLVM, gcc, python. Lots of things are I'm not paying and don't make me the product.
- brailsafe 6y ago
  It's an interesting counterpoint, but I'd argue that none of those are really businessman or are expected to have revenue models. The exception being Firefox, which I believe is paid by Google for search engine placement and does make you the product.
  - brailsafe 6y ago
    businesses*.
dalbasal 6y ago
In my experience, the best way to get people who have only seen the consumer side is in the third person. We tend to underestimate the influence advertising (and media, etc.) have on us, but are relatively objective in observing the effects of advertising on other people, society, and such. Being influenced by advertising reads as being duped to most people, and we resist this conclusion. This is a little different to many subjects, where we tend to empathize more with examples that have us as the object.
nickjj 6y ago
> There was one big light-bulb moment for me. Mine was seeing the AI / algorithm visualized as 3 humans trying to figure out what the best plan of action was to make you engage. That really made me think about how it's another group of humans out there trying to take time away from me for the sole purpose of making their company more money. That's a much stronger mental image than a vague algorithm that we all knew existed. That concept of the documentary alone made it worth watching.
sleepysysadmin 6y ago
The pigs on the farm don't pay rent.
HeavyStorm 6y ago
Agree, that was the biggest insight in the movie. I do question whether it's a problem. No one likes the idea of being manipulated, but... Aren't we being influenced by others all the time? What is really genuine and what is external influence?

by codysc 6y ago

amitnme 6y ago

True I had heard many versions of this inference but this came in as a rational explanation.

gundmc 6y ago

> "Changes to your behavior and actions..." Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the statement tying it to free products and services. There are plenty of paid services that are riddled with ads as well. Movies, Cable TV, airline flights, etc. The fact is that people and organizations are _constantly_ trying to influence your behavior. It's not obvious that's only a bad thing.

dgudkov 6y ago
As my ex-colleague says "Any advertisement is propaganda".
- rexpop 6y ago
  And all propaganda is political.
- cassianoleal 6y ago
  I believe in most Latin languages there isn't a separate word. At least in Portuguese and Spanish, both advertisement and propaganda are simply "propaganda".
  - rbanffy 6y ago
    You can also use "publicidade" in Portuguese, but "propaganda" is not used exclusively for "political propaganda".
  - yesenadam 6y ago
    Not true. In spanish, "ad" is usually anuncio, or sometimes comercial or publicidad. Propaganda can also be used, but is less common than those i think, I've never heard it used. I once read an original edition of Bernays' Propaganda (1928) with its title in a jaunty typeface on the cover, before the word had a negative connotation. Pic of its cover here: https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/edward--bernays/propaganda/100407.aspx https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/edward--bernays/p...
    - cassianoleal 6y ago
      I have definitely heard "propaganda" in South American Spanish-speaking countries. Perhaps a regional quirk?
- hapticmonkey 6y ago
  I prefer David Foster Wallace's description of advertising: "It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase.”
  - lozf 6y ago
    I always liked: "Advertising robs you of your dignity, and sells it back to you at the price of the product."
    - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
      With the arguable exception of therapy/counselling, you can never retrieve your dignity and self-worth by buying a product. So all it really does is sell the promise.
      - adamsea 6y ago
        True. As a side point, IMHO, therapy and counseling are not products. They’re services, and, even more so, should be a service bound by a medical code of ethics, which, since the healing professions go way back, imho makes therapy and counseling distinct from many other services. :)
      - rexpop 6y ago
        So advertisements deplete dignity, with no recompense or amelioration? No wonder our society's replete with indignity.
ppod 6y ago
Also there is an underlying class thing going on with "you are the product". Choosing to pay for a service is not just an equal alternative to a free service for most people. Most people have to work hard to afford paid services, many of them at low wages. Sneering at people who choose to use a free service rather than sell their time for $15 an hour is not a great look.
- mattgreenrocks 6y ago
  Can’t they just not use the thing? Usually this critique is applied to social media, which is not an essential human need. Ubiquitous and handy, yes. But not essential.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    social contact is a need. I don't think i can actually survive without watsapp.
    - hervature 6y ago
      I'll be the first to tell you that humans are social beings that need social contact. I'll also be the first to tell you that social media is not necessary for that. I assume you're being hyperbolic with Whatsapp being vital for life, but do you honestly not know how humans got their fill of social interaction 12 years ago? And no, the answer isn't Facebook.
      - jim_and_derrick 6y ago
        My wife pulled out dusty old binder of my sports cards. Readin thru those things was a trip. On one page with bball cards I had 90s Shaq w/ orlando, very early AI, kukoc, and pippen. Those cards (and sportscenter) were how you got stats and knew shit about sports. Now you have every possible statistic at your fingertips. In my day (90s) us kids had to memorize stats on the back of baseball cards!
      - closeparen 6y ago
swader999 6y ago
The implications for election advertising are that votes and even revolutions are available to the highest bidder.
shajznnckfke 6y ago
Not just advertising, but any communication. You wrote this comment to influence me and everyone who else who read it.
- adamsea 6y ago
  You would reduce it all to atoms.
  - shajznnckfke 6y ago
    I’m just trying to take the ideas in this thread seriously. If we are going to argue that it’s bad to try to influence people’s behavior, we ought to think through what that means when applied to entities other than Facebook. That will help us figure out if we really mean what we are saying. Is it an actual value we hold, or only a rhetorical point when we are taking about a few tech companies?
    - maigret 6y ago
      No it is fine sending a comment expressing opinion. There are so many qualitatives differences: - This is human to human communication, not an optimised algorithm. - People here are not sending you 10 comments and looking at the one which you engaged the most time, because they don't have the metrics. Social media knows how many seconds you looked at a post and classify it with AI, they can make a profile of your current sentiment. - The poster probably didn't analyse your whole past discussion history with algorithms before answering in a way that would be best calibrated for your way of thinking. Interactions, discussions between people, even conflictual (not violent), are fine. Communication is fine. Mass communication is mostly fine (traditional advertising, broadcast...). What's not fine is manipulating people by mass-communicating while adjusting the message given metadata that those people are not even aware about.
      - shajznnckfke 6y ago
        In a conversation, you subconsciously build a model of the mind of person you are talking to, and your words are tuned to fill the gap between what they know and are thinking and the ideas you are trying to express. If I think back through my life, the communication that has affected me most as been from humans in face-to-face conversations, not on websites. But I could be bad at objectively evaluating this. I think for Facebook to be more effective than humans at influencing behavior, they have to implement theory of mind, which might require AGI.
dbtc 6y ago
The advertisers are the buyers, the platforms are the sellers whose product is your well-trained eyes.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
soneca 6y ago
I believe the extra step of social media is that they are not satisfied by changing your behavior from not buying a product to buying a product. They also change your behavior in somewhat indirect ways with the goal that you continue to engage with their platform more and more and be subject to more advertising on the future. So they make you more fanatic or more extremist or more polarized, because it will lead you to stay more time on their site. They want you perpetually in the state of looking into a rabbit hole rather than feeling that you are satisfied with your knowledge of something and ready to move on with your life. The fact that we bring our phone everywhere, that there are push notifications, and that we interact with other people (often friends) makes it fundamentally different from a TV or a magazine.
- amurthy1 6y ago
  > They also change your behavior in somewhat indirect ways with the goal that you continue to engage with their platform more and more How is this different than any other kind of media like TV, magazines, newspapers, etc.? All of them are trying to make their product engaging so that you consume more of their media and more of their ads. Just because those services also charge a subscription fee, doesn't change the dynamics of what they're trying to do. Social media has maybe just been more successful in doing so, partially because > The fact that we bring our phone everywhere, that there are push notifications So the dynamics have always existed in previous platforms, it's just been ratcheted up to a higher level with social media.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    In terms of behavior changes: Don't forget alcohol, tasty food, the whole sex industry, fashion, and even many aspects of the shelter industry. There isn't a seller on earth who passes up the opportunity to engender eagerness to buy.
  - soneca 6y ago
    Other platforms never leveraged opinions, pictures, life facts from people I know, like friends, family, acquaintances, coworkers, etc to induce behavior change. And things change a lot with scale. Even if the intent or the principle is the same, dynamics are different if it is in a scale orders of magnitude larger. I don’t think we should be dismissing new understandings of how social media affect our lives on the grounds that other media in the past tried to do the same.
asta_2223 6y ago
I am sure there would be regulation and consequences that would apply to Movies, Cable TV, airline flights if misinformation being pushed about Earth being flat to commercially engage them.
1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
Right, except in this case Google and Facebook are not paying the people who create the content (so-called "users")^1, however Google and Facebook are the ones getting paid by the advertisers. The so-called "users" are also paying for the internet access and bandwidth over which the ads are delivered. In sum, the "users" are the ones paying for the costs of this particular advertising vector (the internet and web). 1. In most cases. There are exceptions where original authors can get a cut of Google/Facebook's take.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 6y ago
  Actually, Facebook does not share any of their ad revenue with their Facebook "users".
joshocar 6y ago
When we watch ads it's pretty clear that the advertiser is trying to manipulate us. With social media it's different. They are manipulating us to keep us engaged so thay we see more ads. With TV, the network is trying to create a great show that engages people so that they can get more advertising money. I get that, most people get that, it's a win win. We get entertaining shows and they get more eyeballs for afs. With social media, they are doing it in a different way. They use algorithms that create silos of information meant to keep us scrolling. This leads to all kinds of negative effects on society. I would argue that cable news and social media are more alike than different in this respect.
api 6y ago
None of this is new in principle. The difference we are talking about here is more between a hunting rifle and an M-16. The depth, pervasiveness, and insidiousness of persuasion is so much greater with social media. It’s a wider channel, a bidirectional, channel, and a one on one channel. Now when tech similar to GPT-3 gets out there it’s going to be like hunting rifle vs atomic weapons. Pretty soon we will have what I am calling “mechanized con artistry.” We are almost literally inventing the medieval demon whispering into everyone’s ear. Mass surveillance plus big data plus generative AI will be like the hydrogen bomb of propaganda.
- adamsea 6y ago
  For anyone unsure like me, GPT-3 is a deep-learning based model which can be trained to produce human like written language (text). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3 Unsettling indeed.
intended 6y ago
This is taking the comment out of its context. Yes its benign taken out of that context. In the context of social media and tech, this is no longer the case, or it is the case that people are not comfortable with its untrammeled evolution and utilization.
bernardlunn 6y ago
There is a world of difference - not just one word - between between contextual & tracking advertising; contextual only knows that somebody reading/watching this content is interested in this subject. Social media tracks everything about YOU. It is totally different
jdc 6y ago
I was with you until the last sentence.
ldubost 6y ago
> > "Changes to your behavior and actions..." > Isn't this the definition (or goal) of all advertising? I don't see the connection to the first half of the statement tying it to free products and services. I believe it was "the product is the 'ability' to change your behavior" So the difference here is that not only the sell it but it actually works because it can adapt to the people in realtime. This is probable what is scary.. Standard advertisement is already manipulation but it's more easy to know when it is advertisement (though it's arguable that there are also tricks to get around this for TV). In my view it is indeed the advertisement industry going too far and being allowed anything. Social Media just build a product for its client and none of them have any doubt and limits when it comes to choosing between profits and ethics. Advertisement is ok when it is honest and not manipulative. In addition the product is sold for politics which is even more scary. There are regulation in many countries about what's allowed or not in advertisement. In some cases it's not allowed to blatantly lie. Or it is not allowed to hide advertisement as content, etc... It is possible to forbid micro-targetting and manipulative AI algorithms or other methods. Users & Regulators need to understand what is being done, and how the effects are harmful to society.
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  Well, for movies/tv it's well known they were used to get people to buy wedding rings, cigarettes, and many other things. Not the ads, the actual movie/tv show. When you see some character light up a cigarette with a cool pose IIRC that whole idea was started by the tobacco companies to the point now that most people just seem to assume you show someone smoking to make them appear cool. It's portrayed as cool either because of the way the shot is made the person acts, or because knowing their bad for you clearly this person likes take risks, live dangerously, so they're exciting. https://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/history https://smokefreemovies.ucsf.edu/history https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/how-an-ad-campaign-invented-the-diamond-engagement-ring/385376/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/ho...
nothis 6y ago
Yea, but it's never spelled out like this.
sriku 6y ago
The Jaron Lanier quote (with the first part paraphrased but the rest exact) is this - "that we are the product being sold to advertisers is too simplistic. It is the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception that is the product." Yes manipulation is also the goal of all advertising, however the power to manipulate is not mostly in the hands of advertisers. The platform owners wield tremendous power and can decide what gets shown when and what gets priority over what. It means their political leanings influence people whether or not those advertise on the platform. We've never had this kind of concentration of power over the collective mind I think.

disown 6y ago

> He refined it to, (rough quote), "Changes to your behavior and actions are the product" That's true of all media. Doesn't matter if you pay for it or not. Even netflix. Even this post. What is the "documentary" trying to achieve? Change behavior. Who is behind the social media campaign? "Ask HN: What do you think about “The Social Dilemma”?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24468533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24468533 > That distinction made the insidiousness much more clear than the former statement. Just as insidious are "documentaries". They are just as sneaky and agenda driven as facebook algorithms.

burkaman 6y ago
> What is the "documentary" trying to achieve? Change behavior. But will the filmmakers profit if they succeed? They don't make any money by successfully changing your mind.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  Well yea they will make money if they succeed because that means they made a good documentary and will be paid to make more.
- adnzzzzZ 6y ago
  You can profit in more ways than just with money. For instance, you can gain status in your sphere by successfully changing people's minds with your documentary, and I would assume that's partly what motivates people working on these projects.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Documentaries are made a clear statement of narrative intent. You can disagree with the positioning, but a documentary never pretends to be something other than a documentary. What is Instagram? Is it a tool for sharing photos, or is a social engineering experiment intended to increase competitive anxiety and narcissism? What is Facebook? Is it a way to stay in touch with friends and family, or is it a social engineering experiment designed to promote "engagement" through ever-increasing political and emotional extremism? If I want to make a documentary I can use the camera in my cellphone and maybe a cheap lapel microphone, buy some cheap studio lights, and edit it with cheap software. The research would be harder to buy, but still not impossible for someone with good basic journalism skills. If it's not defamatory I can post it on YouTube. If it's solid journalism with an original and interesting angle there's even a fair chance I'll be able to sell it a media network. If I want to create my own global social network - that's a slightly more challenging project.

neilk 6y ago

That was Jaron Lanier. http://www.jaronlanier.com/ http://www.jaronlanier.com/ if you're interested in more. He was an early pioneer in VR tech, and is a person with generally interesting ideas. He is more known today for his critiques of the tech industry and Silicon Valley culture.

tqi 6y ago

"Changes to your behavior and actions" Is there an industry anywhere that is not in the business of influencing behavior or actions? Why do you think that doesn't apply to news, education, healthcare, whatever?

jhardy54 6y ago
There's a big difference when you take informed consent into account. When I go to the doctor I understand the scope and goals of my healthcare provider. I'm not surprised when my behaviors are changed to enhance my health. When the average person uses social media to connect with friends they aren't informed on the scope or goals of the social media provider. When I RSVP to a birthday party I only expect that my response will be sent -- I don't expect that I'll have birthday gifts suggested to me or have my relationships tracked by surveillance organizations.
- kenjackson 6y ago
  > When I go to the doctor I understand the scope and goals of my healthcare provider. Are you sure about that? The fact that I have to sometimes argue for a test, and their counter argument isn't "the test isn't useful or even worse", but rather "the test is expensive" makes me wonder what their goal is. I'm paying for the test (or my insurance is), aren't I? It seems they're trying to optimize for something, but I'm not sure if its my health.
  - jhardy54 6y ago
    You should ask your doctor! I don't have enough information to give you a confident guess, but my intuition is that theyre trying to save you money when an expensive test is unlikely to be helpful. Many people struggle to make ends meet, so it makes sense to avoid superfluous medical costs. If you tell your healthcare provider that money is no object I'd imagine that they'd be able to weigh the financial aspect more accurately.
  - nradov 6y ago
    Physicians have an ethical obligation not to order unnecessary treatments, especially those that could cause iatrogenic harm. That applies regardless of who is paying. Most tests produce some level of false positives, which can potentially lead to more unnecessary treatments. From an evidence-based medicine standpoint, how likely are those tests to actually optimize your health?

thelittleone 6y ago

This is literally what many parasites do. In the case of GI parasites they make you crave what they want.

nikki93 6y ago

This is interesting. I wonder what it's like also to kind of... Not really make it about that at all. Say you're hanging out with your friends IRL, and you're not paying them to hang out with you, or didn't pay the grass to hang out with them among it. Are you still being a "product"? I think in that case we don't dig into it because it all seems part of some natural order of things. I guess we just need to keep living till we get there. I feel like it seems worthwhile to have an angle that doesn't dichotomize your actions into product/non-product ones; maybe you just act in a space orthogonal to it and/or use your understanding of it to inform yourself but aren't driven by needing to be product or non-product. Capitalizing on that last desire is I think how the language ends up becoming too much ends and not means.

bsanr2 6y ago
https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical/dinner-party.html https://coolguy.website/writing/the-future-will-be-technical... This may or may not be related, because I'm finding it difficult to parse your comment.
- nikki93 6y ago
  Honestly, I love it! Thanks for that. :) Yeah I care about this: we have scaled bakeries that make lots of stuff, and we've industrialized it and commercialized it and ... etc. And that's great! But we also bake at home in our kitchen, for our families. We do things in between: small businesses that serve their communities. I want that we do that with software, and I want it to be as widespread as is with things we take that more for granted about like cooking. We're doing it already: when you write a blog post, you are producing a software experience for someone else. I hope that over time we spread the empowerment of creation of more kinds of software experiences across more people, and also without needing to make everyone feel like it needs to be about scaling: gardening, not necessarily agriculture.

iRomain 6y ago

I really liked the futures analogy. On top of my head: > there are pork chops futures, oil futures, and now human futures. This is so full of sense in all degrees.

qppo 6y ago
I feel like they edited that quote a little too far away from the final(?) statement she gave, which was along the lines of "these markets should be banned, just like we have banned markets in human organs and human slaves."

lowdose 6y ago

If you don't pay you obey!

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

That was, if I recall correctly, Jaron Lanier [0]. Well worth reading stuff he wrote, of recordings of his past speeches, if you haven't done so already. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

pbw 6y ago

For the last 5000 years advertising has tried and succeeded at making people change their behavior and actions. It's not all that insidious, it's just how advertising works, that's its entire purpose. The doc was not awful, it's good to get people talking, but it was more one-sided than a facebook feed, which I found very ironic. Every well lit talking head had the same point of view, they presented their mic drop line and then there was no discussion, no counterpoint, no follow up.

mavsman 6y ago

It never occurred to me until now that Hacker News is free and this statement could be applied here as well, though I'm not exactly sure in what way.

ducttapecrown 6y ago
YCombinator companies advertise here for jobs?
- shaklee3 6y ago
  All the time. You'll frequently see front page titles like "My company (YC19) Hiring Engineers"
identity0 6y ago
To change your behaviour to look more favourably on Ycombinator startups. (/s?)
vowelless 6y ago
Of course. Remember that Dropbox started here [0]. It inspires lots of people to apply to YC. YC founders participate in these forums. It raises everyone's value in general. HN members often are the early adopters on many YC products, giving important feedback (for free) to these companies. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- snypox 6y ago
  Oh, how funny is it, that the top comment would be still the top comment today.
surround 6y ago
> This is one of the few places where a tech outsider can be exposed to some of the topics that are on the minds of insiders. The caveat is that criticism of any of the conceptual bodies orbiting the starry notion of "tech startup" (social ramifications, diversity and discrimination, wealth and income, etc.) are heavily frowned upon. Now, are mods going through and sweeping away every comment that proclaims, "Tech bad."? (Mostly) no. But no one wants to bite the hand that feeds it, particularly when so many have usernames easily tied to their public personas. So it's disappointing but not surprising to see people hostile to or tip-toeing around said criticism. > In any case, the basic dynamic is interesting: the less you pay for things directly, the more power you give up to those who do. The abstraction is largely symbolic for ads (consumers pay advertisers in higher product costs), but apparently where and when money exchanges hands matters to who ultimately has influence. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22513699 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22513699

mitchdoogle 6y ago

This kind of wording is conspiratorial mumbo jumbo. A social media's product is it's platform and software. Their revenue comes from advertising. No one ever told someone watching network TV in the 80s, "you are the product", because that would be ridiculous. It's no less ridiculous to do that with websites and phone apps. Why can't we just have a frank discussion about advertising and privacy without this kind of manipulative language?

donny2018 6y ago
In the 80s you weren’t individually targeted based on data collected on you personally.
cmehdy 6y ago
Nielsen ratings[0] have been a thing since the 1930s, so in a way people's attention has indeed been commoditized for a while now - only with an increasing granularity that has now reached some of an individual's metrics (and we're continuing to go along that path with smart devices and addition of sensors). I'm not sure why saying to people that their attention and subsequent changes in behaviours were the fundamental parts of entire markets would be conspiratorial, but I might be misunderstanding you. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings
- 1propionyl 6y ago
  Two key differences: 1. Nielsen boxes were and are opt-in. 2. You were and are compensated for keeping one.
  - cmehdy 6y ago
    1. Social media is opt-in 2. You are compensated by accessing an incredibly complex system and network for free where otherwise you would have to maintain or pay for some kind of infrastructure. (I am playing the devil's advocate here because it is interesting to me to understand in what way other than granularity this would be any different from the way the media has been communicated to us for a long time)

wdr1 6y ago

Isn't that true of all advertising, be it TV, billboards, magazines, or digital?

gauravkumar552 6y ago
No

app4soft 6y ago

> "If you're not paying then you are the product" idea To be honest, "Even if you're paying you are the product too".[0,1] [0] https://time.com/5596033/lawsuit-apple-selling-itunes-listening-data/ https://time.com/5596033/lawsuit-apple-selling-itunes-listen... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/28/its-middle-night-do-you-know-who-your-iphone-is-talking/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/05/28/its-mid...

disambiguation 6y ago

in much the same way the documentary was designed to do!

buovjaga 6y ago

Seems to be in line with the history of PR and advertising presented in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

moksly 6y ago

I work as en external examiner for various CS students, and in my country they do a couple of internships at real companies as part of their degree. At some point around five years ago, or perhaps a little before that, there started being psychology students on some of the courses. A trend that has since grown quite a bit, especially if you happen upon a group project involving mobile gaming. It’s something I would have likely never met in my my career, but there is an amazing amount of social engineering going on a these places. 20 years ago if you got the odd group of students who did anything gaming related, it would typically be very nerdy, terribly executed and often a very socially awkward exam even for CS standards. These days it feels like I’m very likely examining a group of people out of which two or three are likely to be my executives in a decade if they chose to pursue a career in the public sector. It’s really interesting how the humanities have crept in and in some way taken over, isn’t it? And all because we didn’t want to pay a coffees worth of money to have the online yellow pages. It’ll be even more interesting to see what happens to this sale of social engineering once legislation eventually catches on.

ASlave2Gravity 6y ago
Blimey, that's super interesting. The ad model needs to die IMHO. We need regulation from a super-national level if you ask me. Bitcoin should pay the way for a paid-for internet. Anything to get ads off the web.
- rauhl 6y ago
  Ads are definitely a large part of the problem, but they are not the only problem. Ads are what turn us from customers into cattle, yes, but I think that online services could be almost as bad if we paid for them. Indeed, micropayments might actually result in many of the same issues as ads do: in a world with micropayments for each page load, publishers would still want to increase engagement, because that would directly increase their bottom line. What we need is precisely the thing so many of us do not want: we need subscriptions. Subscriptions provide a buffer. They give a publisher room to breathe: he can predict what his next month will look like; he can model what his next year will look like; and he can allocate his resources appropriately. The problem is that subscriptions are high-friction, and cannot compete with ad-driven ‘free’ content and services.

samuraiV 6y ago

my light bulb moment was when they compare Wikipedia with Facebook and Google. I took a moment of pause and probably thought about for the first time in my life how this changes the whole narrative. Facebook and Google actually manipulates you to give you a different picture of the reality and basically dividing us even on the subjects of prime importance like global warming, corona virus etc where we can't afford to form different opinions. They shouldn't be allowed to do that sometimes its the question of life and death.

dwd 6y ago

So...essentially the product they sell is your metadata; which is also the data the surveillance state finds valuable.

sriku 6y ago

Agree. That was a sharp observation by Jaron Lanier (father of VR?)

gfxgirl 6y ago

not as catchy but much better than "If you're not paying then you are the product". Wikipedia free. Linux in all its flavors are free. Libre Office, Firefox, LLVM, gcc, python. Lots of things are I'm not paying and don't make me the product.

brailsafe 6y ago
It's an interesting counterpoint, but I'd argue that none of those are really businessman or are expected to have revenue models. The exception being Firefox, which I believe is paid by Google for search engine placement and does make you the product.
- brailsafe 6y ago
  businesses*.

dalbasal 6y ago

In my experience, the best way to get people who have only seen the consumer side is in the third person. We tend to underestimate the influence advertising (and media, etc.) have on us, but are relatively objective in observing the effects of advertising on other people, society, and such. Being influenced by advertising reads as being duped to most people, and we resist this conclusion. This is a little different to many subjects, where we tend to empathize more with examples that have us as the object.

nickjj 6y ago

> There was one big light-bulb moment for me. Mine was seeing the AI / algorithm visualized as 3 humans trying to figure out what the best plan of action was to make you engage. That really made me think about how it's another group of humans out there trying to take time away from me for the sole purpose of making their company more money. That's a much stronger mental image than a vague algorithm that we all knew existed. That concept of the documentary alone made it worth watching.

sleepysysadmin 6y ago

The pigs on the farm don't pay rent.

HeavyStorm 6y ago

Agree, that was the biggest insight in the movie. I do question whether it's a problem. No one likes the idea of being manipulated, but... Aren't we being influenced by others all the time? What is really genuine and what is external influence?