Are You the Customer...Or the Product?

 If you're currently alive you should be reading Cory Doctorow.  If you're not – reading his stuff that is like his blog at Pluralistic.net, you should start right now. Seriously, I’ll wait.  Doctorow is a prolific writer and critic of our big-tech-dominated corporatocracy.  Last week, he wrote a piece about how bullies all want us to think they're on our side. So, for example, when Apple says they're on your side by preventing Facebook from spying on you through your iPhone they neglect to mention that when they spy on you through your iPhone, harvest your data and sell it off, there's nobody there to protect you.  

Or bosses telling us that wage stagnation was due to “illegals, stealing our jobs”, not because they smashed unions.  And of course, many of them illegally hired undocumented workers and underpaid them, pocketing the difference for themselves.  

He's also got some great fiction that explores the specific weirdnesses and worries of our modern times, from alternative currencies to climate change.  But one of Doctorow’s most biting insights is this concept of “enshitification” of internet platforms, as he calls it. See if this sounds familiar:  A new platform launches and it's great for its users. Then it screws over its users and transfers all its value to its customers. Then it screws over its customers and captures all of its value for its shareholders.  

The concept of enshitification is clearly true to anyone who has spent any time over the years on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Uber, whatever.  But thinking about those levels got me thinking about one particular misunderstanding that many of us make all the time, mostly due to being conned into making the mistake for somebody else's benefit.  Namely, we misunderstand what role we play in a particular ecosystem.  The biggest misunderstanding we make online is believing that we're the customer when in fact we're the product. Or more specifically, our attention is the product that's harvested, commodified, and sold off for the benefit of big tech shareholders.  

Remember when you used to search for something on Amazon and what you wanted popped up in the results. Well, now what you want is way down the list because Amazon has sold your attention to its sellers so their products, not what you want, appear first.  

Basically Bezos's is mega yacht was paid for by the collected attention of billions of Amazon shoppers. It's pretty creepy. When you think about it, right?  So this week, I want to talk about a few ways that we misunderstand our place in the world, usually due to someone else convincing us of our place and what we can do about it.  Stay tuned. 

I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting,  a podcast about how we've been conned into accepting a human culture that's out of sync with human nature, and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind.  

I do this stair workout a few times a week and I have a couple of pet peeves about my fellow exercisers.  One is people who sit in their cars with the engines running for like 20 minutes while they do god knows what, and we all breathe in their exhaust fumes.  Another is people who stop halfway down the flight of stairs to check their phones.  The stairs can get kind of crowded, so people have to wait for a path to clear among the folks coming up the other way so they can go around.  Regardless of whether it's people texting or scrolling or whatever. I just want to tell them,  “Look around you. It's a beautiful day. You're outside. There are trees. There are birds. There's other people be where you are.”  

Attention is pretty damn important.  Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus said “you become what you pay attention to”.  And British writer, Oliver Berkman, who recently published a book called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals,  I think said it best.  He said: 

Most other resources on which we rely as individuals such as food, money and electricity are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it's possible to live without them, at least for a while.  Attention on the other hand just is life. Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything, to which you pay attention.  At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment. Is simply what your life will have been.  

So what I want to tell those distracted folks working out on the stairs and everyone listening out there is this, your attention is priceless. Don't give it away. So cheaply. If you were doing anything mindlessly, especially something where your attention is a product, someone else is profiting from, you are undervaluing your attention. You are undervaluing your life.  Demand more for your attention. Find things that capture your attention and give you something in return: Useful knowledge, genuine emotion, deep enjoyment.  Demand more.  

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Another way. I've noticed that people actually occupy a place in an ecosystem that's different from the one they think they occupy is this: The vast majority of people who think they're capitalists are not really capitalists, they're capitalists sympathizers. Now don't get me wrong, people can live quite satisfying lives under that incorrect assumption, but I'd argue they're leaving quality of life value on the table by doing so.  

First of all, what do I mean by a capitalist? 

There are lots of definitions out there about owning the means of production and so on, but it gets fuzzy. When you realize that about 60% of Americans own stock.  So could they be classified as capitalists?  I would argue that a true capitalist. Is someone who earns enough passive income, basically money that's earned off of their money, that they don't need to do any other work. So what proportion of that 60% do you think would qualify as actual capitalists? Not much.  

But because they hold some stock, their fortunes are tied to the interests of actual capitalists, even though their lifestyles, vis-a-vis their wealth, let's call them their wealthstyles, are very different.  Actually, I think that's where some gaslighting comes in.  

In the early eighties, 60% of the American population had defined benefit pension plans, which means that their employers guaranteed a level of retirement benefit based on income, tenure, et cetera.  Over the decades, workers have been convinced that they should have more control over their retirement planning, so the shift of risk and responsibility was transferred from the company to the employee.  

Now, lots of people will say that that's been great for them. It's their money. They should be able to control it and do what they want with it.  But how has that worked out as far as preparing people for retirement, which is what these things are supposed to do?  

Well, according to the National Institute on Retirement Security. 92% of working households do not meet their targets for retirement savings.  It's not really surprising when you realize that the 401(k) defined contribution plans were initially meant just to be supplemental plans for high-paid workers on top of the pensions offered to everyone.  

But remember that smashing of the unions I mentioned before, well, once the unions lose bargaining power, you can get rid of the defined benefit pensions that cost companies quite a bit and leave everyone to fend for themselves with their 401ks.  So as you can see, when many of us imagine we're something that we're not.  There can be consequences we don't even think about because we don't even realize that there's any kind of disconnect. 

By the way, just as an aside for anyone who is convinced they're a capitalist, and also that socialism is pure evil, I have one little thought experiment that might change your mind. 

In 1986, Congress enacted and President Reagan of all people signed into law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act. Which guaranteed public access to emergency services, regardless of ability to pay.  So let's imagine there's a man standing at the doors of your local hospital. And he has a heart attack. And this man has nothing, no money, no driver's license, no wallet, nothing.  Do you take that person into the hospital and treat them. Or do you let them die on the hospital's doorstep?  If you said, treat him. Then you are a socialist.  You might not be a, the public-should-own-the-means-of-production, capital S Socialist,  but you believe that the public has an obligation to all of its citizens. And that's socialism. 

And by the way, that 1986 law was more instrumental in creating real socialized medicine in the United States than the Affordable Care Act ever was. So the actual father of socialized medicine in America is not Obama, but Reagan. 

So really all we're arguing about is just the degree to which we should have socialism because most decent people agree we should have it to some extent.  This is all just something to keep in mind, especially as we get into the putrid depths of campaign season this year.  

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There are a couple other ways that we misunderstand what we are that I wanted to explore this week. One has to do with a way in which we think we're just like everybody else when we're actually unique. And another with how we think we're unique when in fact we're just like everybody else.  

When I was in college, I took this introductory Sociology class called Deviance and Social Control with Professor Elijah Anderson.  He was this super cool soft-spoken guy who happened to be an ex-Black Panther. And he would go off on these amazing personal tangents. Like about how after doing field research among the gangs of Chicago, he'd return to his university seminars and would forget to change his language from what he was using with the gang members, much to his professors’ shock and dismay.  

When he talked about deviance, he would talk about it as a continuum, extending off to infinity in each direction. So I think of myself as normal, as most of us do. And off in the distance there's someone I think of as deviant for whatever reason. But it's important to keep in mind that there's someone out there in either direction on the deviance continuum to whom I am deviant in some way.  

Applying this idea of continuum is useful in examining many facets of humanity, like sexuality, for example. Whereas lots of people like to think that there are simply two sexes, male, and female,  just by looking around you can see that there's a lot of variability.  We can see the physical manifestations of this variability all around us. 

And it's a result of genetic variability that objectively invalidates that simple dichotomy that many would prefer.  

The other type of misunderstanding our place has to do with thinking we're unique, when we are simply the same as we've ever been.  And to illustrate it, I want to talk about the ridiculous notion of generations, not the general idea of generations, or even that particular generations share a sensibility through the culture or technology they're exposed to, but the idea of an inherent character flaw that's held by an entire generation, or a positive character trait that's held by an entire generation. I'm sure you can think of which generations I'm referring to. 

And there are two generalizations about Gen Z that I'd like to dispel.  The first is that their addiction to smartphones is somehow a character weakness specific to these kids and it's their fault.  The fact is, social media algorithms are designed to exploit weaknesses in all human beings, to which young people have always been particularly vulnerable.  It's because these young people are predictably the same as young people have always been that social media companies can successfully exploit them.  

The other point to keep in mind is we're are the adults; we were supposed to protect these kids. If they're addicted to social media, it's not their fault. It's ours. We stood by and let it happen. And many of us happily profited from it. 

The other absurd generalization about Gen Z kids is that they don't want to work. The truth is every older generation has disparaged every younger generation throughout history. There was a great Twitter thread called “A Brief History of Nobody Wants to Work Anymore” from Canadian researcher Paul Faerie.  In it, he cites a 2022 poll where executive leaders said that nobody wants to work anymore.  Then he starts going back in time to find the exact same statements in 2014, 2006, 1999, 1981, 1979, 1969, 1952, 1940, 1937, 1922, 1916, 1905, and 1894.  When I shared this with my friend Jonathan Blank, he sent back a few comments from slightly earlier times including this from Peter the Hermit in 1274AD: “The world is passing through troublest times, the young people of today think of nothing but themselves. They have no reverence for parents or old age. They are impatient of all restraint”.  Or from Hesiod in 700 BC: “I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today. For certainly all youth are reckless beyond words.”  

Of course. It might be possible that the youth of today are unique in the sense that they might be the first generation who are right to reject participation in the world that we've created for them. 

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So, what's the takeaway from all of this. Well, I hope that it's a motivator to really interrogate the things you automatically believe to be true, particularly about yourself.  To trust your gut so that when something doesn't feel quite right you can dig a little deeper and find out if your assumptions are correct, and if your behavior is serving the purpose that you want it to serve.  And in general, I encourage everyone to heed Lydia Polgreen’s suggestion from her wonderful piece in the New York Times last December titled “There Is No Way to Live a Life Without Regret” that “we should all learn to wear…all of our identities a bit more lightly”. 

So that while we may believe right now, deep down inside that we are one particular thing or one particular way, realize that we don't have to be, we can change. Those definitions may have been imposed by outside forces, outside self-interested forces,  and upon collecting contradictory data it's okay to change what you think you are or who you think you are based on your best understanding of reality.   

Well, that's it for this week. Until next time. Be kind to yourself. Cut each other some slack, and use your damn turn signal.