Your Love for Awoof Will End You
I heard the following statement dozens of times when starting out in marketing — “If it’s ‘free,’ then you are the product.” That is a simple but supremely loaded comment. Amongst other things, it means that if you deceive yourself into thinking that you can insulate yourself from simple economics, you are chasing a fool’s errand. Everything costs something and someone must foot the bill eventually. When it is simple and best, is when that someone is you, like Netflix deducting it’s horrible N4,000 from your expense account every month at the worst possible time. When it is complicated and Black Mirror-y is where we start to have some real problems.
We see it in the so-called “attention economy” of the Internet where for years people firewalled and resisted every attempt to make them pay for the content available there, which of course was not created or maintained for free. Eventually, some bright sparks at places like Google and Facebook figured out a way to monetise people’s internet use without charging their credit cards, but with something even more valuable than $9.99 on the 3rd of every month. When Facebook figured out the evil science of building terrifyingly accurate personality profiles based on consumer data it has unlimited access to, then we started having real problems in the world.
Remember Cambridge Analytica?
For the benefit of Nigerians reading this who have been living under a rock, or you know…in Nigeria, here is a really brief rundown of what happened. So some rich guys wanted to influence elections in the U.S. and the Brexit referendum in the U.K. Well I say “influence,” but they actually wanted to basically hack the voters and swing them a certain way. If that sounds suspiciously like mind control, then yep, that is precisely what it aims to be.
Using one of those brilliant tech startups that knows how to build God using Python (Cambridge Analytica), they bought huge tranches of consumer data from Facebook and basically set about deconstructing human pysches into various general archetypes. For each relevant archetype, they developed suitable campaign messaging deliberately designed to bypass that psyche’s critical reasoning and desire to ask questions, and they unleashed this franken-monster on the U.S. and Britain.
Next thing you know, Britain voted to leave the world’s largest and most prosperous trading and economic bloc so that it could have blue passports and sing “Ruuuule Brrritannia, Brittaaaania rules the waaaaves, Brits never never neeever shall be slaaaaves.” Oh, and the U.S. elected a ball of unfried puff-puff to sit in the White House. So yeah, that is Cambridge Analytica.
Why is this Crap Important?
Well for one thing, it illustrates the danger of outsourcing payment for what you consume to this so-called “attention economy.” It is naive to think that free content is paid for using “advertisements.” That may have been the case 15 or 20 years ago, but now it’s so much more than that. Advertisers are not paying hundreds of millions of dollars just to flash their stuff in 100 faces when 99.95 of them will never engage with the advert or buy the product. Nobody is paying websites to advertise on them and receive phantom clicks from Chinese click farms, oh no. Everyone has wised up and the game has changed.
You see that thing that Cambridge Analytica perfected? Every advertiser either wants it or already has it. If you or your friends have ever been on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Foursquare, TikTok, Instagram or any of the multiplicity of social media in existence, chances are Facebook and Google already have a stunningly accurate profile of you including your photo, your friendships and relationships, your addresses, your day-to-day movements — everything. They are selling this information to advertisers whenever you visit websites to consume “free” content because these advertisers can then target you with extremely personalised messages which have increased ad-engagement and revenue by as much as 40% in some cases.
It’s not really free. YOU are the product. Or to be more specific, your data is the product.
It’s Not Just Foreign Content
In Nigeria, this may not be so much of an issue yet though it eventually will be. There is however, also the problem that when you refuse to pay for journalism and other content you consume in this country, you are merely making sure that someone else pays for it. If you won’t pay Premium Times a N1,000 monthly subscription to read high quality journalism, they will end up being bankrolled by a corporate or political interest who will use that platform to fill your head with propaganda.
If you won’t support independent Nigerian journalism because you want freebies, well you’re gonna end up with NTA and exclusively corporate-funded media houses who will never break stories that their funders don’t like. If Nigerian journalism is reduced exclusively to NTA and the MTN Y’ello Quarterly Magazine because you won’t pay for newsprint or digital subscriptions, then as the Warri people say, anything your eye see, make you take am like that.
In real life, nothing is ever truly free. Someone must pay. It’s up to you to decide if you want that someone to be you, or someone you don’t know who is using the leverage to hack your mind. It’s your choice.
