If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch" (TANSTAAFL)
You are probably familiar with the no free lunch theorem.
TANSTAAFL is a phrase that describes the cost of decision-making and consumption. TANSTAAFL suggests that things that appear to be free will always have some hidden or implicit cost to someone, even if it is not the individual receiving the benefit.
Same applies to the free services out there, explicitly talking about the various social media platforms. If you are not paying for the product, you probably are the product.
We are the product, and we're being manipulated without even noticing.
The Social Experiment
I'm not using social media (and yes, too many people questioned my existence due to this very unusual fact), barely using Netflix (even when I do, I'm not following the recommendations). I am too obsessed about my privacy, maybe because I know too much, or simply because I refuse to participate in this giant social experiment.
Yesterday I watched 'The Social Dilemma'. It was disturbing and scary, but nothing really new for me. It was another reinforcement to the main reason I've been staying off the social media manipulation, and why I'll keep staying off it. One might argue that LinkedIn is a social network too, and all I can say is that I only joined last year due to the necessity of it to what I do, and after weighing up the pros and cons.
The Real Problem
Technology and AIs are going to be more integrated into our lives, and so they are getting better at predicting us, and this will only get worse.
We live in a world of chaos where we don't even know what truth is and what is a conspiracy. And no AI will have the ability to answer the question of what is the truth either, simply because we are creating them, and we don't know it ourselves. Google doesn't have the option of saying: oh, is this conspiracy? Is this true? Because they don't know what truth is. They don't have a proxy for the truth that's better than a click.
As Tristian Harris well said at the film, "this is the problem that is beneath all our problems, because if we can't agree of what's true that we can't navigate out of any of our problems". The only truth I know is that I want the ability to choose and think for myself, without being manipulated by any corporation that its selfish interest is making a profit from people staring at screens and consuming data instead of living their life at its fullest.
Our Real Worth as Humans
We live in a world in which nature is worth more financially, dead than alive, whether it's a tree or a whale. And I'm afraid this applies to humans too. Just not dead, yet.
What's frightening and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilisation to how flawed this theory has been in the first place is to see that now we're the tree, we're the whale. Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we're spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we're spending that time richly living our life. And so we see the result of that. We're seeing corporation using powerful AI to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention towards the things they want us to look at rather the things that are most consistent with our values and our lives.
Is Technology the Threat?
The real threat is not the technology, but the technology's ability to bring out the worst in society. And the worst in society is the existential threat.
I miserably failed to get people to delete their social media accounts, but I think that even just getting a few people off it matters a lot. The main reason why is that it creates the space for a conversation because all I want is the ability to have a societal conversation that isn't blinded by the manipulation engines.