A People's History of Silicon Valley by Keith A. Spencer

Author:Keith A. Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eyewear Publishing
Published: 2018-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

The Internet Gets Social

In the future, things should be tied to your identity, and they’ll be more valuable that way.202

– Mark Zuckerberg, CEO/Founder of Facebook

When the product is free, you are the product.205

– Clara Jeffery and Monika Bauerlein, writing in Mother Jones

For the most part, Web 1.0 companies were not that different from their non-web-based counterparts. Many Web 1.0 companies were either middlemen or glorified delivery services. The only difference was the way their products were ordered: online rather than by phone, mail, or in person. For instance, Priceline.com was a digital travel agent. Amazon.com did virtually the same thing as a department store like Walmart, but online. WebVan, a colossal flop of a company that spent hundreds of millions of dollars building factories to deliver food, was a grocery store delivery service.203 Only purely online services, like search engines and Internet service providers, represented truly new industries – and in the case of search engines, they were essentially marketeers who made money selling ads, not unlike a newspaper or television channel.

Web 1.0, it could be argued, was merely a precursor to figuring out the true profit model for making money online. As Google, Facebook, Twitter and other services discovered, in Web 2.0, you don’t look for consumers to buy your product – you make the consumer into the product.

Social media sites and search engines make money every time the user interacts with them. When you click on someone’s profile or pen an update on your life, when you look at a friend’s photos or do a Google search for ‘hemorrhoid cream,’ the data from your interactions is recorded, saved, and analyzed to figure out how to best sell you things. One’s profile has a habit of following one around on the Internet: since most online services ask you to log in to search, comment, or post, the data from your interactions can be tracked to build a profile on you, the user. Over the course of one’s lifetime, these social media companies accrue gigabyte-size dossiers on every Internet user on Earth, which are used to prey on consumers’ insecurities and desires in order to sell them things more effectively. Some argue that these companies’ true customers are not the people making searches and creating profiles, but rather the advertisers that pay to reach their eyeballs.204,205

If the consumer’s data is the product, then it behooves social media corporations to generate as much data as possible – data that is generated whenever the user interacts with their site, or reveals more about themselves online. ‘The longer we look at our screens, the more data companies collect about us, and the more ads we see,’ said Ramsay Brown, a startup founder who studies neurology in apps.

Frighteningly, it is in the interest of social media companies and phone-makers that users become psychologically dependent on their products and devices. Indeed, designing products that manipulate users into interacting with them as much as possible is known as ‘brain hacking’ in the tech industry. ‘There’s a

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