The Panopticon Artists

How Social Media Swindles its Users

The Structure of a Swindle

“Something for something”

In Arthur Leff’s Swindling and Selling, Leff observes that swindlers and conmen never claim to offer their targets “something for nothing.” Such gratuitous offers are hardly believable to the target, especially coming from a stranger. Offering up something for nothing arouses suspicion: the target will wonder what’s in it for the offeror. To succeed, the swindler must explain why he will also benefit from the proposed transaction, thereby rendering the offer more credible to the target. Thus, a convincing swindle almost always takes the form of a deal: “something for something.” [1]

Social Media's Methods

The Conventional Theory and its Limitations

A common refrain about the swindling exploits of social media companies is, “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.” I have no doubt that social media users are swindled and that they are turned into a kind of product for the profit of internet behemoths. We have all read extensively about how social media companies commodify their users by spying on them, selling their attention, and manipulating their behavior. However, I think the expression “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” can be misleading for two important reasons.

First, the expression suggests that there is something inherently sketchy about anything that is exchanged for free. The logic of the slogan is that if you’re not paying money for something, and it’s valuable, you must be paying for it in some other way, because you could never get something for nothing. Moreover, the free product or service you use must be part of some kind of scheme to derive value from you, because no one would ever provide a product or service without expecting value in return. These rationales reflects the common folk-economic wisdom that you can never get something for nothing (a belief Arthur Leff calls the social equivalent of the first law of thermodynamics). [2]

Second, I think the expression suggests a misleading and potentially harmful explanation of our decline into technological dystopia. The story is that we leap at the chance to use social media because it is free and we don’t realize that we have to give up anything in exchange for it. We don’t realize we are giving up anything for it because we don’t realize we are, in fact, the product. Hence, the need for a maxim to enlighten us about how free services inevitably commodify us. It is important to not that, in this contrived story, what leads to our ultimate demise is failing to understand that we can never get something in return for nothing.

Toward a New Theory

We have seen how a popular expression about how social media companies swindle their users actually embodies a larger theory based on the idea that you can never get something for nothing. This popular theory of swindling is that valuable services can never really be free, but that social media users fall for the false promise of costless goods because they don’t realize the non-monetary price they are paying.

My contention is that the popular theory is completely backwards. We need look no further than Arthur Leff for an explanation. Leff stresses that the vast majority of people believe that you can’t get something for nothing. Straightforwardly gratuitous offers, therefore, makes for bad cons. It is therefore doubtful that the ultimate swindle perpetuated by social media companies was giving out their services on a free basis. Most people, are too shrewd to be lured by such a conspicuous gimmick.

Perhaps, then, social media users know that the social media companies have something to gain from them, but have been swindled into thinking they are getting a good deal. Under this theory, it is comprehensible why people still use social media and flock to new forms of social media no matter how widely publicized and grave the misdeeds of these companies are. Even if users realize that they are commodified and that social medias companies profit from them, they maintain a sense that the convenience and benefits of the services they receive are worth the tradeoff. Thus, the real con is not that social media companies lured users in with free services. Rather, the con consists of convincing users that trading in their data and privacy for a Facebook page is a good deal.

The Fruits of the Swindle

The Purpose of a Perfect Despotism

If the goal of the social media con is turn users into products, who buys the products?

Consider Facebook, which surveils its users on an unprecedented scale. It trains its machine learning algorithms with the data it harvests from us, so that it can manipulate our emotions and behavior in precise and subtle ways. It has studied and exploited our psychological vulnerabilities, to the point where many of us can’t put our phones down to sleep. It has embedded itself into our social fabric and sown fear and discord into our politics. Within the trenches of Silicon Valley, the science of a “perfect despotism” has been invented—and to what end?

Apparently, to bring us targeted ads.

Conclusion

Advertising revenue is the lifeblood of tech behemoths like Facebook.Thus, the immense apparatus of mass surveillance and human experimentation that social media has brought to bear on the world is mobilized for no higher or lower purpose than this: increasing the efficacy of advertising. Social media is not just a con—it is a panopticon.

[1]Leff, Arthur A. Swindling and Selling. Collier Macmillan, 1977.

[2] Id.