If you didn't see the intro, i posted it last week - going to be putting out write-ups on 6 rules of the internet that will greatly enhance your ability to function in peace and not be a victim of the whims of culture. Enjoy. Its a longer read.

#readurbible

Someone is making money on your attention.

I’m not really sure when it started. There was napster and limewire back in the day. My friend would teach me how to “download” this file and get to play this song for free. The idea being that it’s “free” (sorry to all the musicians out there). Then there was the term emerging in society call “ebayers” - some fringe individuals that spent all day in their garage. Someone was making money on the internet somewhere, selling something. And now 20 years later amazon seems to have won the internet and will take your money anytime, anywhere with just 1 click.

The understanding for most people, myself included was you can buy and sell stuff on the internet and it’s replaced the local mall in most cities, and perhaps JC Penny. To a degree that is still true. All of commerce, including on the internet is this exchange of money for goods/services. This was pretty basic when it was an exchange of $40 for a pair of shoes, or when you would hire someone to paint your house for a few Benjamins. So what’s happened in the last 40 years?

Again, still don’t know that I could explain the logistics, but I do want to bring your attention to how the internet has evolved this exchange of goods/services.

It all hinges around the idea of “free”. Nothing is free.

Why is there a free app store on your device? Where you can log in and download thousands of free games, tools, templates etc. If you had it in your skill set to create an app that served thousands of people and put it out for free, what benefit is that to you? Why would anyone just invest their time into building something of value and put it out for free? They wouldn’t. So what is the catch?

The catch is that you are the product, being sold. Or your information is the product.

Two significant ways, but there are plenty more.

First, most of the apps or programs that you are using will require you to create an account. Let’s say it’s a budgeting app that provides you free templates to budget and it will connect into your financial information, and the guy that created it is named Rod. To use this needed free product, you share your name, number, email and other basic information with Rod as you create an account. This information goes into a list, that gets compiled with everyone else’s information that’s using this app, and over time that list gets bigger and bigger and bigger. Amazing. All of these people are being served by this free app. Meanwhile, Rod takes his list out into the internet and shops it to companies in the finance world. These companies may be interested in all this contact information to sell their product to the people that are using Rod’s free app. Rod is making money, this new company that bought your information is calling you trying to sell you something and just like that you are the product being sold.

Is Rod a bad person? No. You signed the terms and conditions that gave him the ability to sell your information in exchange for his sweet app. Can Rod be a bad person? Sure, but the point is not to be afraid of Rod, rather to understand how your use of free on the internet is making you the product.

The second thing to understand is advertisements. You are the product of all advertising. Someone out there is convinced that if they can get that thing to pop-up on your internet browser, or that 15 second app to pop up on your youtube they can make money selling you something. So how does it work?

Again, we need to understand free.

The internet is free. When you get tapped in, you have the information of the world at your fingertips. Therefore, anyone that is creating webpages on the internet has access to anyone that is on the internet. So again, if I’m creating information on the website for free, what is driving that? Is humanity just being driven by the goodness of our hearts? People just need to know this information so I will put my time into getting this information out. No.

Nobody is doing that.

Rather, creators of these pages are being driven by getting people to click their stuff. Why? If a creator of weather content can get 100 people to their site to tell them about the weather, then they can tell an umbrella company to put a little advertisement with a hyperlink on their website. Hoping that these 100 people may click that link and go buy and umbrella.

This makes these 100 people the product, or their attention the product.

Then another website creator comes along offering weather information. They are then competing for those 100 people’s attention. To compete for those people they need to make things more dramatic, or entertaining to hold attention. The content then becomes increasingly dramatic, and more and more people click to see. The 100 people coming through then become 10,000 people, the advertisements increase, as does the dramatic nature of the information. And we that consume said information are the product consuming crazier and crazier information. See 2020.

Understanding these two ways that your attention is being the product will greatly enhance your ability to navigate with purpose the internet. Nobody likes a scam, but clicking and clicking, or scrolling and scrolling, is making us a generally blind product being sold with overly dramatized, partially true information. #fakenews