NO, THAT WEBSITE IS NOT FREE
If you’re old enough to remember when Facebook wasn’t entirely made up of unsettling memes and guys trying to sell opened packages of pork chops out of their garage freezer, there was a sort of… well, I don’t know if scam is the right word. A bit of fearmongering that would regularly make the rounds, centered around the idea that Facebook was going to start costing money. I can’t remember if it would send you to a fake petition, or if it was a classic like-farming attempt, where supposedly Mark Zuckerberg was closely monitoring how many Angry Reactions popped up on a status from a guy who dropped out of your junior high school. The basic claim, of course, was that Facebook was going to start charging a minimal monthly fee.
It would always be shut down, sometimes finding a wide enough audience that Facebook would have to make an actual statement on it. They would assure the masses that Facebook would always be free. That they had no plans to rely on a subscription-based system, because the platform was profitable thanks simply to ad support.
Which, at the time, we were dumb enough to see as a positive. Algorithms were simple enough that we gladly allowed them access to the base of our brain stem. “Sure,” we thought, “I’ll happily get a couple Lands’ End promotions instead of paying $2.99 a month.” Unfortunately, what it turned out they were asking was “this will be free, if you simply let corporations twist at the knobs on the back of your brain like a bored dad going at the radio on a road trip, for the rest of your life.”
I absolutely despise advertising, which of course isn’t a new viewpoint. Though what I’m arguing against is a far cry from soap commercials that interrupted The Simpsons. Ads, for a long time, have operated on emotional manipulation. What we’re dealing with is a new class of weapon. In terms of efficacy, accuracy, and destructive potential, modern ads are MOABs that make the “ask your parents to go to McDonald’s” gambits of the past seem like Civil War muzzleloaders.
That’s how ads used to feel, at least in my eyes. Broadly aimed shots across the bow, a spray-and-pray strategy that would probably end up sending somebody to Jared. Ads used to at least have to sit in your mailbox, instead of somehow tucking a cologne sample between the pages of a letter your friend sent you. Operating largely on speculation, hoping they’d hit on a personal insecurity in the window they were allowed between 7-minute chunks of Friends reruns.
Now, thanks to us naively offloading what feels like the entirety of modern person-to-person communication and connection to Meta, what we’ve ended up with is an emotional tapeworm. Even the experience of looking at another human face you recognize, in order to remember you’re not an animal, can’t be done without a worm getting a bite at the pink apple upstairs.
On the surface, it’s simply annoying. You can’t see what your friends are up to, or shoot off a quick message to someone whose phone number you don’t have (something I curse myself for allowing Messenger to monopolize every day) without an ad popping up somewhere in the process. But I think behind rolled eyes, there’s much greater damage happening.
Again, I want to emphasize that advertising is built on negative emotional manipulation. It’s incredibly hard to sell something, especially something largely unnecessary, to a person feeling any level of inner peace. Products solve problems, so every shortcoming you can be convinced exists opens a new space they can convince you needs filling.
Unfortunately, thanks to the personal dossier collected on you, happily provided by any number of data merchants, they’ve already got a great idea of what bits to poke. Your weak points are outlined on page one, under a picture taken of you through your bathroom window, staring unhappily at your blackheads. They’re already in possession of the kompromat they need for advertising so effective it approaches blackmail.
Insecure about your weight? Simply buy this activity tracker. Fitness buff? You could surely increase your efficiency with an activity tracker. Do you have a family history of neurodegenerative disease that you’ve been worriedly researching? We applaud your proactive take on your health, and think our activity tracker could provide you with some much needed peace.
Advertising’s grip is so deeply ensnared in our short-and-curlies that it’s even ready for the inevitable mental fatigue caused by its constant adjustment of your mood. Start looking up “monastery living” and “how to destroy every computer in the world” and the algorithm easily pivots to selling you dumbphones and analog clocks, because if you’re really going to disconnect, it wants a piece on the way out.
Plenty of fun has been poked at the people, (usually baseball players for whatever reason) who buy hats that block Wi-Fi, and bracelets that repel dastardly EMF. Which is fair. But we should also realize that we’re all being fed fake problems packed side-by-side with solutions like the dress-shirt-and-tie combos they stock at TJ Maxx. They’re just not as easily scientifically debunked. Your necklace might not have any magnets in it, but it is meant to block the mysterious waves of Unfuckability that you were clearly emanating before you were smart enough to give them seventy dollars.
One thing that’s stuck with me since I first saw it was something discussed in a TED Talk (NOTE: not a TEDx talk, which are independently organized and, whether by design or not, tend to piggyback undeserved on the intellectual reputation of the former) by sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. You can find it around the 7 minute mark here. She discusses that algorithms built to advertise as effectively as possible, completely unburdened by even a whiff of ethics, can identify some very vulnerable cohorts.
The example she gives is an algorithm asked to sell people tickets to Vegas. When she suggested at a conference that the algorithm could identify people with bipolar disorder on the brink of entering mania, people who would be deeply, destructively up for a Vegas weekend? A researcher informed her afterwards that they had found it was capable of doing specifically and exactly that. Neither had evidence that this particular process had been deployed, but if you believe a third party figured this out before a team of C-suite ghouls, I assume you get a lot of targeted ads for magic beans.
If you’re thinking, “ok, but I got to this post from your post on Instagram,” I’m not going to deny it. I’ve tried to wholesale abandon the platform multiple times. Unfortunately, each time, within a week, it feels like I’ve faded from the lives of everyone I know, Back to the Future style. If your head isn’t regularly popping up in a rainbow circle along the top bar, people assume you must have been nothing but the wind.
God forbid you actually need to get in touch with someone, unless they’re your parents, the person who inherited your childhood landline, or Empire Flooring & Carpet. In a shrewd move approaching military tactics, Meta’s seized our lines of communication. We can’t congratulate a friend on a new baby without a salivating ad-man at the switchboard calling up to high command with instructions to liberally shell our location with ads for Star Wars onesies.
Not to mention that they’ve somehow managed to position themselves as a necessary news source. As if the only way to keep up with current events is through forty-five reposts of the sort of video that would be shown to someone with their eyelids clamped open. Something they’re very happy to provide, given that people struggling with feelings of hopelessness and lack of control make for fish in a barrel, as far as advertisers are concerned.
Everyone seems to be wondering about the roots of the current “mental health crisis” resulting in widespread anxiety and depression. Meanwhile we’re all on Instagram, (or, thanks to data sharing, really any internet site) having our mood tweaked and manipulated towards insecurity dozens of times a day. Which is a thoroughly conservative estimate.
Ads are happily suggesting flaws you might have in a manner so direct that it would get a physical human punched in the jaw. It’s no wonder that everyone is constantly worried something is wrong with them. You’re left a burned-out, twitching husk, not even wanting to get out of bed because the world might notice what the algorithm assures you is obvious. At which point, it really thinks you might benefit from affordable psychiatry provided by BetterHelp.
If they launched that old urban legend of paid Instagram, tomorrow, without ads? I’d jump at the opportunity. Unfortunately, it’ll never happen, because you're worth much more as a product than as a customer. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. And if tech is involved, you’re probably the lunch.