The Blind Giant by Nick Harkaway

Author:Nick Harkaway [Harkaway, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-345-80372-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

There’s another aspect to the discussion of services that are notionally free at point of use. When you pay for a service in personal data, you aren’t a consumer. You are not, as media theorist Douglas Rushkoff observes pointedly, Facebook’s customer.10 You are the commodity in which the company behind the service trades. Rushkoff suggests that users fundamentally do not trust Facebook, because they know there’s a tension between what they want the service to do and what the service provider needs from it. And it’s certainly true that in my experience of using the service, it is set up to avoid giving me perfect control of my data. When the new Instant Personalization service was rolled out recently – a service that allowed Facebook to pass data to partner websites to allow them to customize their services for Facebook users – it was impossible to switch off before the service went live. In the run-up to the launch, the option to disable Instant Personalization was visible (buried deep in the site’s somewhat arcane privacy settings interface, where many users never venture anyway) but not alterable. To turn it off, you had to wait until after it was switched on.

Being a consumer, a customer, implies a measure of control over the nature of the relationship. The provider of a service sets out to please the customer; unhappy customers generally mean that a company is doing less well than it could. Customers assume – and receive – a certain level of care. The service is set up to make things work well for them. The commodity, on the other hand, gets the minimum necessary attention to keep it in a marketable state. More, companies will always try to get more and more out of their resources; it’s the natural momentum of capitalism. Perhaps the best way to change your understanding of who’s on top in the context of companies that use this business model is to compare them with livestock farms. The farm animals might imagine that they are the beneficiaries of the farmer’s efforts. Pigs get mash and a place to live; cows get open fields, barns when it’s cold and plenty of hay. They even get medical care and, in extreme cases, massages. They are, of course, not the customer. For some of them, this will become apparent when they are brought into a narrow pen and emerge as sausages. For others – cows on dairy farms, for example – the prognosis is less stark. They will simply live a life of ease from which others will profit.

It’s impossible, in this society, to go through life without ever being treated as a commodity. And it’s not as if commodification renders a person powerless. I’m writing this page in the week of 4 July 2011. The News of the World newspaper, founded in 1843 and with a circulation in April of 2.6 million, will cease to exist on Sunday. The reason: the massed disdain of the British public. The paper

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