You know, I've seen a lot of people walkin' 'round
With tombstones in their eyes
But the pusher don't care
Ah, if you live or if you die
— Hoyt Axton, “The Pusher”
With the impending demise of twitter, I’ve been thinking about the value, or perhaps the mechanisms of social media—the nuts and bolts, the business ideology that operates beneath the apps.
Apart from being a crowning example of hubris, Musk’s sewering of Twitter shows us a lot about how social media apps function, and how they turn a profit. With his introduction of a paid verification method, a slew of impersonation accounts flooded the feeds and raised signal fires for advertisers.
With advertisers pulling out of the app in droves, market shares also plummeted for massive corporations such as Lockheed Martin and Eli Lily following some rather poignant impersonations.
While certainly humorous (and undoubtedly a just reckoning for these exploitative industries), I believe it also confirms something concerning about the design and business ideology of these social media apps.
Let’s do my favorite thing: take cursory glances at a myriad of concepts!
A Commodity
What exactly constitutes an exchange? To boil down commerce is to rely on the now cliché phrase: supply, and demand. Typically, money is exchanged for a service or good.
This is fairly straight-forward: I want a monster energy drink, so I pay to acquire it. I want my house painted, I exchange money for it— so on, so forth. Goods and services that one exchanges money for, are called commodities.
Exchange, whether through bartering or money, is how the economy—more or less—has functioned for centuries. But, something happened to this fundamental relationship, a re-arrangement of sorts which has set us on the concerning trajectory we find ourselves today.
Advertisement
The idea of advertising is nothing new: You have a product or service that you must monetize, therefore you must let people know that they can exchange their money for it.
Advertising as we know it began with the circulation of newspapers, and then exploded with the widespread adoption of radio and television. Networks were incentivized to make serials—programs that drew millions of eyes and ears to the radio/screen, usually at the same time every night, because they knew that companies would pay to have attention brought to their products through commercials and brand placements.
Advertising is one of the most profitable industries today, accruing ~ 600 billion USD in 2021, and estimated to hit 1 trillion by 2030. (Link)
As a result of the advertising boom, media companies started to view their products/services not as means for direct monetization from their consumers, but as a means of attracting advertisers. No longer were they only competing for their consumers money—they were competing for something even more valuable: their time.
When we consider that this is the profit avenue of social media apps, it presents an interesting aberration of the classical commercial relationship.
Consider the following shoddily-made diagram:
In the classic commodity market, the consumer exchanges money for the commodity, which Marx defines as “first an external object, a thing which satisfies through its qualities human needs of one kind or another.” (Marx, pp. 27)
I, the consumer, exchange money for the Silent Hill 2 remake, because it satisfies through its qualities my human need for nostalgia.
The Value of Commodities
Assessing the value of commodities is an interesting conundrum. Recall the aforementioned example of Silent Hill 2: The object of the commodity is the disk, which, compared to its MSRP of 79.99$, is far overvalued. Given that the disk probably only costs pennies to the dollar to manufacture, and essentially has no use-value, there must be something else contributing to its value.
Marx writes that
Commodities as objects of use or goods are corporeally different things. Their reality as values forms, on the other hand, their unity. This unity does not arise out of nature but out of society. The common social substance which merely manifests itself differently in different use-values, is – labour. (Marx, pp. 27)
Marx believed that there is an intrinsic quality of commodities that underlies their exchange value. The substance of the exchange value of commodities is a social one, relating to the human labour of its production.
Thus, the value of Silent Hill 2 remake is constituted as such: The studio develops the game, and the social value of the game, so says Marx, comes from the technical and creative labour of the likely overworked devs and artists.
Of course, the capitalist reality is that prices aren’t set according to the approximate labour of the commodity, but to maintain/exceed corporate profit margins.
Scrolling Market
So what happens when the profit relationship shifts from a direct monetization between consumer and product, to advertisement?
Let’s consider this other, equally shoddy diagram:
Social media acts as a facilitator for advertisers, providing a user-base to be advertised to. In this sense, the true consumer of social media is advertisers, and the true commodities of social media are its users, with the platforms acting as the middle-men between the two.
Herein lies the nefariousness of this market: the relationship between social media apps and advertisers is symbiotic, whereas their relationship to its users is parasitic; even more so considering many of these platforms actively participate in the harvesting and arbitrage of your data. (Link)
In effect, your attention is pimped out to advertisers by social media.
One could argue: “Social media provides me with the service of entertainment and social connection,” and, in a sense, they wouldn’t be wrong. I myself enjoy twitter, even though I recognize that it is probably an ultimately negative force in my life.
I think that’s inherently the problem: it is too entertaining, because it’s manufactured to be that way. Hell, there’s a reason “doom scrolling” has become a popular colloquialism; we subject ourselves to the absurd and traumatizing forms of the internet in an unending, steady stream—but it’s so damn hard to look away. It’s a rote reflex: ignore the mundanity of your own reality and just keep scrolling.
All social media apps operate on complex algorithms designed to keep you glued to the screen—to keep you scrolling. That’s why all the major platforms (Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter), have shifted to algorithmic homepages that feed you suggested content, instead of solely the content you’ve consciously followed. To this end, social media algorithms tend to generate user-personalized feeds intended to keep eyes on the platform for as long as possible.
A consequence of this algorithmic feed is that the algorithm will detect what types of content keeps people engaged, and will slant its feeds towards it. It just so happens that reactionary, outrage/bait content tends to be what garners the most engagement, so content creators feel incentivized to create this content, furthering the echo-chamber effect—a pipeline of reactionary, right-wing content that either side of the political spectrum then share and react to.
The Commoditization of People
With the “scrolling market”, it is users themselves that become commoditized. But what does that mean? What does it imply?
Well, considering people as product has, historically, never ended well. However, one needn’t even need to look to slavery to prove this point, for there are many everyday instances where we commoditize people, whether we realize it or not.
Sartre has much to say on this topic with his example of the café waiter:
Let us consider the waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the customers with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the client… All his behaviour seems to us a game. He applies himself to linking his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. (Sartre, pp. 101)
Sartre uses the café waiter as a means to explore his concept of “bad faith”. For Sartre, humans are beings-for-itself, creatures possessing a radical freedom, and to act in bad faith—i.e. to reduce oneself to an object/act inauthentically—is a betrayal of this freedom. To not infuse all aspects and activities of one’s life with authenticity, to yield to societal pressures and adopt false values, is bad faith.
Now, Sartre seems to imply the bad faith, the fault of it, resides in the individual—in this case, the waiter. However, I would argue that the bad faith is shared with the consumer, the actors of society, and the society as a whole, who have formed the expectations of the dining experience that the waiter is adhering to.
Consider going to a restaurant: Most people tend to eat out for the experience of having seasoned chefs/cooks prepare foods one would not normally have the skills—nor the time—to prepare at home. But, for many, being waited on, served, is also an essential part of the dining experience. In this sense, the wait-staff themselves become part of the service, part of the experience. Hence, the staff themselves become one with the commodity.
Consider, too, the social connotations of dining. Think about what constitutes a “good” dining experience: friendly, fast service with a smile. Think about how we reduce wait-staff to their roles, how we would react or feel about the experience if they suddenly dropped their professional façade and told us all about their dreams, or families, or trauma. Many of us, although we’d be sympathetic, would certainly consider the interaction strange, or out of place. There’s something uncomfortable about a worker revealing their true self, something incomprehensibly wrong about it.
Kant would call this treating people as a means to an end, and not an end in themselves—to not recognize their capacity for reason and their moral agency.
The Bad Faith of Social Media
Now that we’ve talked a bit about commoditization and bad faith, let’s bring it back to social media.
The bad faith of social media is twofold. On the one hand, influencers are guilty of committing what Sartre would call bad faith: projecting a false, glamorized picture of their lives for their envious audiences. But, it’s important to remember that these apps and advertisers reward these influencers for doing so, which further endorses and encourages this form of content. I believe the worst perpetrators of bad faith are the social media platforms themselves.
With the scrolling market, the very foundations of these apps are malign. To treat their users as little more than a means for attention, to prey upon their isolation and need for community, to suck and exploit their leisure time using whatever manipulative algorithmic tricks they can for advertisement revenue—regardless of the internalized and/or externalized harm—is acting in bad faith. One might argue that it is the advertisers that are the driving force of this bad faith, and they are certainly culpable, but we must remember that it is social media providing the platforms for scrolling to attract advertisers, and they are implicit in the harmful consequences of the content that their algorithms are pushing.
As commodities on these apps, we are reduced to our exchange-value, the social substance of which—the labour of which—is our engagement. What are you getting in exchange for it?
It’s important to remember this the next time we feel compelled to react to content that seems designed to be reacted to. Ask yourself: are you being made to play a role, like Sartre’s café waiter, following the app’s anticipated cues and movements—goaded into the algorithm’s clutches. I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of this; I certainly have.
In the end, we are all susceptible to unseen, manipulative forces. Hell, that’s advertising, baby.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels, vol. 1, Progress Publishers, 1887, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/ download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel Estella Barnes, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2003.