You And Me. Products.

Probably one of the best book reviews I have ever encountered. John Lanchester's piece is an article inspired by three publications:

• The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention Is Harvested and Sold, by Tim Wu
• Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine, by Antonio García Martínez
• Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon have Cornered Culture and What It Means for All of Us, by Jonathan Taplin

Instead of saying what he likes or not, Lanchester gives us a provoking article about Facebook, Google — basically, the future of us as elements of tech giants' business models.

Let me give you couple quotes:

1. Google in my experience knows that there are ambiguities, moral doubts, around some of what they do, and at least they try to think about it. Facebook just doesn’t care.

2. It’s crucial to this that Facebook has no financial interest in telling the truth. No company better exemplifies the internet-age dictum that if the product is free, you are the product.

3. advertisers [...] don’t want to appear next to pictures of breasts because it might damage their brands, but they don’t mind appearing alongside lies because the lies might be helping them find the consumers they’re trying to target.

I am on one hand very happy that more and more tech reviews are written by humanists, and moral questions rise not only excitement about new features. Facebook has been particularly "evil" by trying not to see the problem. It controls major communication platforms worldwide. 

I myself use(d) Facebook as a creator primarily. One day I was welcomed with a message "dear advertiser, you mean a lot to us". Since that moment it was perfectly clear FB does not care about content — only about the wallet. I am not and never will be an advertiser. I occasionally use FB Ads (because my organic reach was brutally cut) without much choice to reach the audience that once trusted and followed me.