You are the Product
I talk about this a lot in this series: that you are the product.
But what does this mean?
What apps do you have on your phone?
- Snapshot
- YouTube
- Rumble
Do you pay for any of these?
Of course not; they are free.
I actually pay for YouTube, so I don’t have to suffer ads.
Even with services you pay for, you are still the product.
- Amazon Prime
- Netflix
- Hulu
- Disney+
We are sold by these services to data brokers, advertisers, and marketing agencies.
We are the product.
Uploading our lives to their App.
We might think of them as being a product we download and put on our phones.
No, we are the product, and they got us to upload our lives to their apps.
No, they are not free.
We pay for these apps with our eyes, which are filled with ads.
With ears, which get filled with curated content aimed at manipulating us to buy and accept ideas that we don’t even know we are being programmed to follow.
We pay for these apps with our privacy, our friends’ privacy, our time, our understanding, our individuality, and even our community’s consciousness as we all change.
Our knowledge is altered, our sense of right and wrong gets reprogrammed, we get subverted by subtle suggestions as to who is a good person and who is a bad person.
Addicted to Dopamine
Shadow banning changes who we hear from.
Cancel culture can totally remove someone from of feeds.
There is a thing. We have YouTube subscriptions, Facebook friends, Instagram followings, but none of them are in our control. All our social media contnent is managed and promoted or demoted by unknown, faceless, hidden people and closed algorithms.
The depths of information we freely give these algorithms is stunning.
We are the product and we pay the bills with information.
You go to church on a Sunday.
You have your phone in your pocket.
If you were to look at Google maps as you traveled, you would see green and orange and red lines on your map. You could take a different route to miss the traffic jam.
How on earth does Google know there is a problem at that intersection a couple of kilometers away?
Well everyone else on the road has a phone in their pocket.
Google knows where you are, Google know how fast you are travelling, and so can deduce if you are driving, cycling, running or walking.
Google see multiple people slow down in unison, everyome is sharing information with google. Maybe a car with a dash cam may already have shown Google an accident. Or the car the accident happened to may have had accident detection software in it that is shared with Google. Or it may just be that all the phones in that area are slowing down.
As you arrive at church, so do 50, 100, 1000 other phones.
Google, and Facebook and snapshot all see people arriving at the same location at similar times. People arrive before 9 and before 10 30.
Emails are sent, Instratum photos posted, videos uploaded and all that social media now knows the name of the place you are at.
Hop o. Google maps and you will find listing of places that have never registered themselves to be known. But they are known. You are the product, and you told social media where you are, why you are there, when you are there and who you are with.
I have been on. Amazon many times just looking at stuff, a book, a DVD, a airplane neck rest. I have then gone some were totally different on the internet and now I have ads for a neck rest.
You are the product and you are getting sold, over and over again.
You do not have anonymity, you are public property.
It goes much deeper than this.
The know you.
they know who you associate with, when, where, how often, even whay you do together. They know what coffee shop you are at, they know what you had, they can even deduce if you treated the other person to coffee or they treated you. Now of course they often get it wrong. They might match the wrong people together. They might falsely assume that two people know each othe that do not. You have been at the same coffee shop as them, twice. You have been to the same movie, maybe even the same church service. But you do not know each other and now Google has falsely created a connection that doesn’t exist.
But they all do know enough things that are true to make it worth while to track you as deeply as they can.
If you know you are the product, you can start to realise that you are being programmed to do things the algorithms wants, to buy according to the algorithms, agree with ideas and opinions that the algorithms wants for you. You will be feed social, political and even religious ideas I accordance to presets in dozens of different algorithms.
An algorithm is merely a flowchart of if this -> do that. It is an array of if statements that are even sometimes in contradiction to each other. Two algorithms can even end up fighting each other, they often give false information, as all of this, AGIs, AIs, algorithms are only dealers in information, and the predictive manipulation of information. The is no knowledge or understanding in an algorithm or AI. They are just fast and trhough and so apper to have knowledge when they don’t, it really is a case of don’t look behind the curtain. The wizard of Oz does not want to be found out, the king does not want you to say his fine clothes are his nakedness
How not to be the product.
Realize that you are the product.
Choose what apps you really want on your phone.
Do you have an addiction?
Use brave as you browser not Google Chrome.
Nothing is a coincidence.
Don’t Impulse buy.
Don’t let your kids Impulse buy.
Shop with a shopping list.
Don’t food shop hungry.
A sugar treat is not a treat, it is an addiction.
Learn to reward yourself with good rewards. A reward we reward ourselves with is salmon, not ice-cream.
So often the momentary joy of the sugar on the tongue is later a sore stomach, or the next day a bloated intestine. The delay between consumption and bloating means your mind never connects the two.
Turn you phone off when you go out with your friends.
Be present with them.
Make a pact with each other, all phones in the basket, the first phone out has to pay your waiter an extra tip.
Act, don’t react
Don’t go into debt to get something.
My current phone is costing me a little over $10 a month extra on my phone bill. It was worth it not to have to pay the whole amount straight up. The difference between buy my phone on the open market and off my cell phone provider was $0.00. I know my cell phone provide does this to lock me in to them for a new two year contract. I know they make a profit from the $10 a month. In know I have become their product. This is an acceptable cost to me.
If you know you are the product, you will become aware of when you are being treated like a product, this will give you capacity to be less of a useful product to those Parasite companies, these parasite social media groups, or Parasite institutions.