About Humans

According to Aristotle, humans are sociable animals by nature. Humans' intrinsic instinct and yearning to thrive in civilisations is personified by social connections. Such bonding has arisen partially due to its own evolutionary necessity, and partly, but uniquely, due to the ambitions of companies that emerged to affect our lives. Social media expresses the inevitability of development by claiming to re-establish broken social relationships and transcend national borders, culminating in the fulfillment of the secular "one world" ideal. Buyers were promised less discomfort and more time for productivity through online shopping, virtually justifying their embedded inseparability. With corporates coming to realize the endless potential of the unexplored analysis of consumers’ online habits, their intent changed for the betterment of their profits and shareholders, albeit at the expense of the consumer. Today, online activity growing with the advancement of the Internet proclaims its superiority over consumers’ conscience. The Internet activity across the world has relentlessly claimed to offer countless options of growth and ease the discontents of living, but, on the contrary, it has turned human beings into insentient products of large corporates. Douglass Rushkoff, a man who withdrew from Facebook in 2013, writes without an iota of doubt that “the product online is not the content, the product online is you!”

This essay critically examines Rushkoff’s statement and identifies the implicit reasoning hidden inside. In addition, the essay also examines the author’s intent behind the statement, its relevance in contemporary times, and the influence it has on the future use of the Internet. The essay argues that commodification of users as products of monetary advantage by corporations’ and advertisers’ is unreservedly immoral and does outright injustice to the fundamental role and function of the Internet.

Understanding the Intent behind Rushkoff’s Statement

The Internet is ever transcending, seeking to manifest itself in umpteen number of ways and to perpetually reinstate the fragility of trust it demands from users. Ever since the Internet’s arrival, it has never recoiled or regressed, but only escalated and advanced in new ways. The primary role of the Internet lied in transcending physical distances and the lack of communication as well as expediting communication across the globe. Its common function is to manifest as an expedient in resolving human issues of communication and provide the refreshed means of productivity. However, as corporates entered the Internet and became masters of using it as a tool for fulfilling self-justified means, innovations in exploiting the user knew no bounds. Online selling companies like Wal-Mart, Amazon, and others spotted the opportunity of exploiting an unconscious Internet user to their advantage. Ultimately, liberalism allows all forms of practices intended to subjugate the powerless. Online users remain unaware of their surfing habits, acceptance, and rejection of products and services, as well as liking and disliking issues and non-issues. These habits, representing social thinking and behaviours, considered worthy of enormous data-based wealth, continue to be utilized ‘at will’ by multinational corporations. In an age where data is used and manipulated to impose, create, or even artificially build an idea or a conception advantageous only to the creator, the Internet is skilfully deployed around the humankind. Landers et al. (2016) clearly demonstrate the web-scrapping method where information is automatically collected and used for various psychological studies.

Rushkoff’s primary intent behind the statement is the knowledge that when a user enters the Internet and uses multiple websites, he or she is tactfully led to become a product for large corporations. For example, a person using Facebook or YouTube tends to join for free, engages with other friends, discusses with them, accepts and rejects propositions or advertisements, and becomes a case study. The latter is then packaged as a tool for the further exploitation of mass users while clarifying near-impossible doubts for advertisers and corporations (Rushkoff 2011). Facebook and YouTube, having obtained free case studies of users’ preferences, aversions, habits of liking and disliking, the likelihood of engaging with others, and selecting and shunning different kinds of discussion, sell them to advertisers selling product and services and large corporations. This data collected for free by these websites constitutes the wealth of information for large enterprises to act in alignment with their shrewdest strategies of utilising the medium of the Internet to exploit users (Rushkoff 2011). Corporations, thus, start gaining profit and outline their strategy on the forecasting techniques they use to trap the Internet users. It represents the basic intent of Rushkoff’s statement that all Internet users are unknowingly, albeit out of necessity, giving away free information that is repeatedly used to entice them, and in this transaction, the people obtain nothing, but the corporations make significant profits. The product of the Internet, which is claimed to be the content it displays, is actually a deceit to entrap users to reveal their thoughts, habits, and social spending knowledge, and in the end, people become enwrapped in the corporations and advertisers’ luring techniques. In short, companies who benefit from the information of users’ Internet habits estimate people as products and not as genuine consumers.

Critical Examination of Rushkoff’s Statement

Rushkoff does not hesitate to unfold the mystery that corporatism hides its heinous intentions behind its scrupulous strategies. In fact, he pinpoints the agenda of elite corporates who deliberately control users’ affairs and mercilessly exploit them for the personal gain. The irony in such practices is the justification offered to users about the benefits and the advantages begotten by using the Internet, without really divulging into the realm of consciously planned unethical practices. Although Rushkoff’s observation is precise and undoubtedly legitimate and urgent, it is essential to determine the worth of the statement from the other side of the advertisers and the corporations.

The Internet determines the liberalised progress in a nation, confirming that the state authority is mindful of the changing demands of global needs and interconnectedness. The Internet comes with innumerable opportunities for work and comfort. The corporations who work and provide the ease of business, communication, work responsibilities, and the social networking tend also to accidentally suggest demands of more comfort and leisure as spill-overs. Worthy of the critical acclaim, the Internet also eases the way people connect, work, and come closer to one another. Advertisers and online selling companies provide numerous services and connect users from developing nations to products and services coming from developed nations (Bailey 2008). Social media connects friends and relatives and even make marriages. Benefits of the Internet are self-manifested. So are these advantages not worth enough for the Internet to be termed a worthwhile means to the end it sells? Is it not changing lives and resolving large issues with its outreach? Are self-represented benefits not a reason to rescue the Internet from allegations of its vicious role? Questions continue to rise with the assessment of Internet’s positive features and drawbacks.

It is naive to deny the self-manifested benefits of using the Internet, but it is equally ingenious to regard it as the omnipotent and undeniable entity that dictates how one behaves and spends time. Lately, many corporations, especially social media and online selling companies, have become centres of psychological studies where they extract online habits of users and categorise them in specific compartments of their construction (Evans, Jamal and Foxall 2009). This data, which is simply accumulated information, is then turned into an invaluable tool of their well-articulated marketing. When any user indulges in the Internet usage, it does not imply that the service provider must extract all possible information of a person because it is coincidental and obvious. It is outright contradictory to the right to privacy. While utilising users’ online behaviour data based on the premise that they are offered invaluable services of the Internet, corporations cannot extract any private information without the consent of a user. Thus, the question of ethics and morality resonates throughout the use of Internet everywhere.

The Internet has been beneficial to millions of people as it provides working opportunities to distant employees and poor people, the ease of communication, international shopping, and the reduction in the geographical distance that defines national boundaries. It has been tremendously utilized by medical companies to forward their mission of advanced healthcare and unprecedented enhancement in productivity. These activities of users that fulfil the demand of their object are ambiguous to be put into an area that alleges the Internet for its exploitative intent. Lanchester (2017) states that entire industries tend to base their business model on being evil and extracting users’ content without consent. For example, an online user living in Australia and buying a product from Europe is seen as a justified act by this person and the company selling the item. It is considered on the ground that it reaches the desire of the buyer while the company obtains its reward of profit by selling the product. However, the Internet becomes a medium for the selling firm to track the buyer’s behaviour and use it to tempt once again by alluring the person to buy more items. Is such an act considered a successful marketing strategy or a violation of ethics to have commoditized a user? If such an act succeeds and the buyer ends up buying more from the same company, it is reasonable to expect that the latter used the former as a product and not as a sentient being or a genuine consumer. When the buyer is “sold” something without an affirmative consent rather than feeling satisfied to have “bought” something, it is possible to consider that a person and his or her habits have been commoditized, and the laws are violated. Thus, the buyer becomes the product, and the fundamental role and the purpose of the Internet are diluted of its essence.

The incalculable content on the Internet makes the way for extraneous information for users, and the latter become a plethora of options to select. The provision of unlimited choices is revered; it justifies the inherent role and the function of the Internet. However, it then becomes a tool for extracting the information, which it has no right under the law as it is a violation of privacy. Kubi, Saleem and Popov (2011) assert that even a crime or an illegal behaviour in the digital world seems justified because it is accepted as the digital technology and a mark of progression. However, is such progress justified or even desired? Hence, the difficulty lies in the conundrum between the ethical and unethical use of the Internet. On the one hand, it is manifesting its identity as a means to a user’s end, but, on the other hand, it exploits a user as means to justify meeting their self-propelling ends. It is becoming more obvious that corporations and advertisers use people on the Internet as products for pushing forward their business and profit agendas, and one primary influencer of this is the rising global competition. Marketing, being the potent weapon of outstripping competitors, came to be regarded as the centre of innovation and creativity. Extracting consumers’ details to attract them to keep buying is the aim of marketing, and this is expressed in the way the Internet is used as a medium. Rushkoff warns users of this extraction and terms this as violable and unconscionable on the part of the extractors.

While discouraging users from using social media and the Internet, Rushkoff promotes the local community bonding and retrieving the alienated self that results out of using the Internet excessively. His contention that such phenomena as the global overtaking the local, the corporate culture overtaking the local one, and users being commoditized are rationally justified. If the Internet had been the harbinger of giving equal access to all, there would have been a decrease in income inequality, but contrarily, it has kept increasing and continues to do so. To explain the character of the Internet and its endless entrapment of users for the personal gain, Rushkoff uses the analogy of the debt based businesses. He says that when the debt is the conditional ingredient, businesses must continue to grow in order to return more money than was borrowed, which highlights the ‘growth trap’ of businesses and the justification of the Internet-based enterprises’ unethical practices (Tucker 2016). The Internet is similar in its working; it captures users’ data and articulately structures it to entice more people, and perpetual the process becomes. Converting sentient beings into products by the Internet is certainly immoral and works in defiance of all extents of users’ privacy. Such fraudulent practices overshadow its utility at the unmatchable pace. The lure of freedom of using the Internet is the core theory of exploiting people, leading to the commodification of users and their Internet behaviour. Rushkoff has been upfront and unrestrictive in his vocal opposition to large corporations and advertisers who use the Internet to fulfil their profit motive and nothing besides. Online content, though free, has been instrumentally utilized to tempt users into a world that is bounded by their own boundaries. Thus, whatever the conception of freedom and privacy users conceive while using the Internet, they always remain within a boundary that is invincible to perceive, owing to the entrapping layers hid by the corporations and the advertisers.

Online content is indeed not the product, which is justified by the corporations and advertisers transcending the boundaries of ethical and moral obligations. The user is deemed an insentient product in the large world of web entrapments and appears only as a small means to the unjustified end of greedy businesses and advertisers. The inauthentic use of the Internet destroys the identity of a user; hence, Rushkoff’s statement is justifiable and aligns with the actual reality of the Internet.

Conclusion

The Internet is an inseparable part of beings as it renders itself a mighty power of the self-justifying force. It meant to reduce the uneasiness of distant communication and complicated workings as well as provide sufficient opportunities for productivity. Instead, it came to be used by corporations and advertisers in exporting their monocultures throughout the world and destroying all defences of the local culture and identity. Unwholesomeness describes the current state of social media platforms, and automatic data extraction has become the primary condition for large corporates to utilize the Internet. Since data is indispensable in its utility in designing future strategies, this stupendous encircling of freedom of the Internet, unethical extraction of users’ data and using the same to entrap new ones shall never stop. Rushkoff’s statement is fully justifiable because the content online, which is to be used for servicing users, has become the peripheral product while users’ behaviour is the prime product. The commodification of online users is the most abhorrent in its moral standing and must be heavily regulated. Unfortunately, the very increase in the need to use the Internet shall continue to elevate the heightened importance of marketing in applying the medium of the web-network to justify the degenerate practices.

References

Alim, S., 2014. Automated data extraction from online social network profiles: unique ethical challenges for researchers. Human Rights and Ethics: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications, p. 389.

Bailey, D., 2008. Cyber ethics. New York: Rosen Central.

Evans, M., Jamal, A. and Foxall, G., 2009. Consumer behaviour. Chichester, England: Wiley.

Kubi, A., Saleem, S. and Popov, O., 2011. Evaluation of some tools for extracting e-evidence from mobile devices. In: Application of information and communication technologies (AICT). IEEE, pp. 1-6.

Lanchester, J., 2017. You are the product. London Review of Books, 39(16), pp. 3-10.

Landers, R., Brusso, R., Cavanaugh, K. and Collmus, A., 2016. A primer on theory-driven web scraping: automatic extraction of big data from the Internet for use in psychological research. Psychological Methods, 21(4), pp. 475-492.

Rushkoff, D. (2011). Life Inc: how corporatism conquered the world, and how we can take it back. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks.

Rushkoff, D., 2011. You are not Facebook's customer - Rushkoff. [Online] Rushkoff. Available at: [Accessed Dec. 6, 2017].

Tucker, I., 2016. Douglas Rushkoff: 'I’m thinking it may be good to be off social media altogether'. [Online] The Guardian. Available at: [Accessed Dec. 6, 2017].