The “free” economy comes at a cost
economist.com
economist.com
The infinity scrolling appeals to our hunger for more and more stimuli, which in turn has us spend more time browsing the network. That longer exposure allows FB to monetise even further.
One thing that worries me – and it's not discussed in the article – is the loss of productivity, as well as cost of the opportunity for the individual.
In fact, individuals who become addicted to social networks may carry a psychological cost as well, which in turn reflects on the productivity of the individual inside the global economy system.
You could argue that time spent on Facebook would've been spent on other leisure activities anyway. But is it true? Much of this time is now spent due to compulsive behaviour, every 5 minutes, 10 minutes, as soon as you wake up, before going to bed, etc.
People commonly use productivity to try to quantify something in dollars, but it's always struck a nerve. It seems like when using that argument, the arguer assumes the world is owed any type of productivity by nature.
In your argument, you say you are worried that Facebook use results in a loss of productivity, as if the world is owed productivity. It is not. I'm not criticizing you, it's a common argument, but it is based on a misconception. If a person wants to spend almost all their time reading Facebook, or reading literature, as long as they are neutral with the system (pay for themselves in some way), that's perfectly fine.
I think you can actually reconcile both views in terms of happiness i.e. the global economy measured in terms of happiness generated. With this sort of model in mind, both you and person you are replying to can both be correct in that it is possible that social media is sub-optimal compared to some alternative that delivers some combination of increased immediate happiness and/or increased probability/reliability/sustainability of future happiness.
I think the Quality of Life indicator represents what you are talking about.
The greater productivity enters the picture because now I read things like hacker news and look up random things on the internet. This has lead to me learning useful skills and enough general knowledge to be helpful with different courses I've taken and small chat with people about their professions, interests etc.
Granted, there's the whole issue of people choosing their smartphone over interacting with the equally bored stranger next to them, but thats an entirely different problem.
I'd gladly pay $5 even per month for Facebook or Google if only they treated me as a customer instead of the product.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/05/24/wh...
Also, the advertisers will still be advertising at you, BTW. They'll just be doing it with even less information about what ads might actually interest you. They'll be finding other ways to make sure their ads stay in front of your oh-so-valuable eyeballs. There'd be a lot more "sit through this damn video before we deliver content" all across the web. I for one would not be grateful for that.
Good, Ads should be Contextual to the context of the site/subject being viewed NOT contextual to me.
i.e if I am on a site reading about the latest hard drive to come out, Show me ads for a NAS or a Computer, etc. Do not reach into a collection of data about me and show me diaper ads because you think I just had a new child
So, it turns out that you completely ignore those adverts because you have banner blindness and you're on the site to read about the latest hard drive, not the one someone is paying to reach you with. If those ads worked, the CPM would be higher and advertisers would invest in those instead. But they don't, so contextual it is.
if a Ad gets through I spend some time figuring out why then ensuring it is blocked going forward
I always found it fascinating that a TV Channel can sell Ads with out any real tracking any real data on the individuals users watching the ad, and they can sell these ads for $$$$$$$
Yet you tube which has much higher viewer numbers than any TV Channel can not seem to sell ads at all, the ads are of low quality, and they need to be ultra targeted.
At the end of the day though, if they can not find away to market their ad space with out tracking me and knowing every detail of my life well then they need to simply exit the market.
There is zero justification for building these types of databases, they should be resisted as strongly as possible, and we need to institute much strong data security and privacy regulations on how the data is collected, stored and used. Including the ability to require all services to allow individuals to audit the information they are collecting about them and to force a company to delete all information about them if the user wishes to stop using the services.
Half of all advertising is useless. The problem is no one knows which half.
(Mind you, case can be made that Google's lack of the same makes the account more secure.)
If you paid them you'd just be the customer AND the product. There's no way they will not exploit your data.
Such as providing support and a contract instead of ToS.
Your $5 a month won't far for that
Most consumers really don't like paying for things and don't really mind unobtrusive ads, so seems unlikely the economics would work out for google search or facebook.
It's not just about losing 'reach', if only a few percent of people bought the opt-out that would probably be a minimal issue. It's also about who buys the opt-out; the people who can (and would) afford to do so are presumably wealthier than average and help justify ad sales more generally. I don't know the exact breakdown, but presumably it's a power-law situation. If you're the kind of consumer who could conceivably buy a truck through a Ford ad, how much more are you worth than everyone else? 2x? 10x? 20x?
(Of course, the kind of consumer who deeply dislikes ads is probably less likely to click them regardless of wealth. So maybe charging the ad-block contingent a flat rate would actually work out?)
The users most likely to go for it are the ones with the highest disposable income, i.e. the people most valuable to Advertisers.
Users with high DI * fee for removing ads < value of users to advertisers lost * users with high DI
Basically meaning that the revenue gained from allowing removal of ads would devalue their user pool in terms of advertising revenue so much that it's a net loss, even if they gain reputation with the users and possibly attract new ones.
This is just my theory though.
This is what Communists mean when they say they are opposed to Free trade. Because the sale of labour-power for wage is an unequal relationship from the outset, in a similar way to how the feudal serf producing his quit-rent-corn for the feudal lord - yes, he may refuse to hand it over (he has the freedom of choice), but should he take that freedom, which is human-created, structural, he is liable to poverty, destitution and death.
Edit: I must also note that it also works the other way. The capitalist is not free from capital either, within a capitalist economy - he must employ wage labour, make it his only concern, in order to survive, without which he will either be forced to become a worker, or if he cannot find work then become destitute. As such, Property itself is a restrictive force, acquiring a mind of its own. It is in the self-interest of the workers and the capitalist to counter this system which restricts them so.
[0] Kropotkin wrote in The Conquest of Bread: "We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We call those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must accept, or die of hunger.
The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong direction. Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Its only aim is to increase the gains of the speculator. Hence the constant fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial crises, each of which throws scores of thousands of workers on the streets."
There is no such requirement. Nobody is being slaved/forced to work (and if they are it's illegal) with anyone. And that's not what Free Trade is about at all.
Do you think many people, especially the poorest or those in the least favourable jobs, would engage in such wage labour if they had the opportunity not to? No, they engage in it beacuse they are forced by the circumstance of the capitalist system. It is an impersonal force, but a human constructed social and structural force nonetheless.
I realise that there is a distinction between 'killing' and 'letting die', and it is philosophically significant, but most people would agree that a system in which 'letting die' is a fine course of action save for the intervention of the twisted charity of the State which defends the system is not an ethical one, nor a moral one, in a world in which it is certainly possible to do better.
Kropotkin's solution to the evils of capitalism is anarchism - a utopia where people would just cooperate and get along. This is a fantasy, and to substantiate it he day-dreams about the good old pre-feudal days(which never existed in the way he dreams of them). Just like communism, his proposals rely on fundamentally changing human nature - they are meant for a different species, not us. Your "certainly possible to do better" world is nowhere in sight, from my point of view.
We've had poets, sci-fi writers and activists speak about how we should do better, how we should find that utopia where everyone is equal(ignores intrinsic human variance), everyone is happy and getting along(ignores basic human nature), and no one is poor(ignores the relativity of wealth). In fact, the changes in human nature that these systems require would also change capitalism for the better - i.e. you don't need a system that fairly redistributes wealth, if everyone is as altruistic as Gates after his career.
>Is this the "not ethical" "not moral" system that is "letting people die"?
Yes, none other than it. You'll notice that your point about raising standards of living is actually irrelevant to the deeper point I have made about selling one's labour-power for wage, which people must continue to do - it is this which I regard as the oppressive element, or rather, the Private property which ensures its existence. If mere standard of living were my concern, I'd be a social democrat, not a Communist.
>Just like communism, his proposals rely on fundamentally changing human nature
I love how unsubstantiated this argument always is. Is human nature unchangable, and to what extent can it be changed, and how can this change be examined? Erich Fromm examines this in Escape from Freedom, which is a psycho-social work. Marx comments:
>The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-change [Selbstveränderung] can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice.
>where everyone is equal
No. This is a severe misunderstanding of Communist theory. I am no Leninist (not by any means) but he replied to a man (a "liberal professor") who made a similar mistake to you, here:
> Mr. Tugan repeats the old trick of the reactionaries: first to misinterpret socialism by making it out to be an absurdity, and then to triumphantly refute the absurdity! When we say that experience and reason prove that men are not equal, we mean by equality, equality in abilities or similarity in physical strength and mental ability. It goes without saying that in this respect men are not equal. No sensible person and no socialist forgets this. But this kind of equality has nothing whatever to do with socialism. If Mr. Tugan is quite unable to think, he is at least able to read; were lie to Lake the well-known work of one of the founders of scientific socialism, Frederick Engels, directed against Dühring, he would find there a special section explaining the absurdity of imagining that economic equality means anything else than the abolition of classes. But when professors set out to refute socialism, one never knows what to wonder at most—their stupidity, their ignorance, or their unscrupulousness.
>and no one is poor(ignores the relativity of "poorness")
Socialism does not promise that some will not have more than others; the relativity of poverty is accepted.
>i.e. you don't need a system that fairly redistributes wealth, if everyone is as altruistic as Gates after his career.
Again, I must correct you - it is not about redistribution, it is about workers owning the products of their labour and their free association. Capitalism guarantees neither (and in fact relies upon the infringement of both!)
I'll also finally note - it is extremely rare for my knowledge for the lowest wage labourers ("rags") to accrue sufficient capital via their wage, to support their family, etc. in order to become capitalists themselves. And if it does happen, there is still a huge number of people engaging in wage labour. Capitalism requires there to be more labourers than capitalists. So beacuse the injustice is a little smaller, it should be neglected, as you say? No, new people born every minute are destined to wage labour. The idea that it is possible ignores that for most people it really isn't possible. They still exist, and their state is a sorry one.
Many people could afford to live in very small homes, and live with about nothing but a bed and a shack and decide instead to have big cars, huge houses, big fields, 3 TVs and 3 smartphones, while they probably need none of those to live well. So "most people" are certainly not working just to sustain themselves, they are actively working to keep getting richer. That's what we see across the world, read any recent World Bank report explaining how poverty is decreasing everywhere and level of life is increasing (yet people still choose to work for more money, to buy more stuff when they can, not just be satisfied with what they have).
Poorer countries with less developed markets are forced to open their domestic markets to foreign countries and competitors who then completely outcompete and dominate the local offerings. This prevents local business from developing and many existing ones go bankrupt in the face of foreign competition. This tends to leave the local market largely undeveloped in terms of domestic companies, and results in money flowing out of the country to foreign shareholders.
Another problem is that so-called "free" trade isn't totally free.
Some of the places that espouse free trade, like the US and Europe, don't practice what they preach. The most egregious example I can think of is agriculture subsidies, which effectively prevent (for example) African farmers from selling their produce in those markets while additionally making produce (like poultry) from those countries cheaper than local offerings, which again bankrupts locals.
Poorer countries which can't sell their agricultural goods on the global market don't fare too well. It goes both ways. Check the level of life in Cuba for example.
Which proves free trade is a shit of a system for most developing countries.
I don't believe in a 100% free market but I do believe that giving developing countries access to our economy is good for them (look at large parts of asia) and is better than less free trade.
[1] https://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21695855-americ...
most likely an additional tax on the provider once their product is marked as a service. the users won't object because they won't be charged the cost, it would merely get passed on to investors and costs of advertising would increase to pay for it or more advertising would appear. embedded taxes are the easiest for governments to use, it puts the blame on the provider for the costs
Why shouldn't governments consider vc-backed free services as dumping, like they do with steel & manufactured products?
In my view this is an obvious regulatory failure.
That's a really good point. To the extent that power is the accumulation of capital, and gaining dominance in free services to produce lock-in and monetization in other ways, this is an obvious insight.
Also, it's been Google's business model this whole time, which suggests that it works really well. There's a conversation worth having about the balance between the benefits we get from natural monopolies of this nature, and the power traded away through enabling them.
I can't say he wasn't right about this one.
Advertising that is targeted using said data. One might be able to argue that it once was true (10 years ago?) that data was just a byproduct that people found a use for. But now it's more explicitly a goal for companies to collect. I don't think anyone can argue that the data google and facebook collect is incidental and they're just trying to find some use for it. Collecting users' data is a core part of their business model.
Collecting data is part of product strategy, it's not a business model unless you're actually selling it - which none of the companies people wring their hands over do.
I worked at a startup where part of the pitch to investors is that we would get in early and collect all this data that would be expensive and maybe even impossible to replicate. Well, we collected all the data during the course of actually providing our service, it just turned out there wasn't a whole tonne of value in large volumes of unlabeled data.
Every product person hopes that data will make their product better, but not all data is created equal. If it's not signalling what you want somehow, it's basically worthless.
It may have been true a few years ago, but now the actual data is very valuable.
It can be used in all kinds of ways not just for advertising. It is actually very dystopian and scary to think about sometimes.
Example: "tiny payments for digital contributions might correct yet another problem, a misallocation of labour. If companies paid people for useful data, rather than mopping up what they leave behind as they use online services, then prices could nudge people towards more productive online activity."
Correct a problem? A problem for who? Neither the consumer nor the provider appear to be in any kind of trouble. The use of "mopping up" implies that the acquisition of data is somehow accidental, and simple an act of unwanted stuff discarded by the visitor, whilst in truth it is an aggressive and intelligent machine that flenses data from the visitor. Finally "productive online activity" is completely fucking meaningless in this context. productive how? for whom?
Yet another faux-intellectual bullshit piece by the Economist.
A problem for users' whose privacy is violated without their understanding, and for content providers, who have to cater to lowest-common-denominator clickbait nonsense.
In a recent lecture at the RSA [1], James Williams (former Googler who worked on metrics and strategy for search advertising) makes the case that:
- The ‘distractions’ produced by digital technologies are much more profound than minor ‘annoyances’
- So-called ‘persuasive’ design is undermining the human will and ‘militating against the possibility of all forms of self-determination’
- Beginning to ‘assert and defend our freedom of attention’ is an urgent moral and political task
I'd recommend giving it a listen. Tristan Harris' recent TED talk offers a more popular primer [2].
[1] https://soundcloud.com/the_rsa/are-digital-technologies-maki...
[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tr...
This should've been done years ago with the billboards plastered around nearly every major city.
It is almost like people don't even care about the actual article, and only read what they want to see....