Crease

“Google gets $59 billion, and you get free search and e-mail. A study published by the Wall Street Journal in advance of Facebook’s initial public offering estimated the value of each long-term Facebook user to be $80.95 to the company. Your friendships were worth sixty-two cents each and your profile page $1,800. A business Web page and its associated ad revenue were worth approximately $3.1 million to the social network. Viewed another way, Facebook’s billion-plus users, each dutifully typing in status updates, detailing his biography, and uploading photograph after photograph, have become the largest unpaid workforce in history. As a result of their free labor, Facebook has a market cap of $182 billion, and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has a personal net worth of $33 billion. What did you get out of the deal? As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier reminds us, a company such as Instagram—which Facebook bought in 2012—was not valued at $1 billion because its thirteen employees were so “extraordinary. Instead, its value comes from the millions of users who contribute to the network without being paid for it.” Its inventory is personal data—yours and mine—which it sells over and over again to parties unknown around the world. In short, you’re a cheap date.”
― Marc Goodman, Future Crimes

“The economy is just a metaphorical device, it's not real-that's why it's got the word "con" in the middle of it.”
― Russell Brand, Revolution

“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Douglas E. Richards, Mind's Eye

“The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates