Your Friends, For Sale
Summary
The True Value of You They say the user is the product in any service that is both free and convenient, and Facebook in particular makes a fortune in leveraging the data you directly and indirectly provide. As the man behind the plan himself said with a satisfied smirk in a congressional hearing “We sell ads, Senator.” In retrospect, we should probably count our blessings that the intent of advertisers up until recently has always been to reprogram us to buy stuff instead of something more nefarious, given how effective the methods are and well it has proven to work. My son was telling me about this game called Fortnite that the kids–and a staffer at Time–are using to make some pretty serious pocket change, like 500k a month in some cases. If you are one of the many former children whose parents and teachers told them that there was no future in playing video games, spite can be an excellent driver of financial success…just ask dissatisfied ex-Ferrari customer Ferrucio Lamborghini. Thanks as always for carving out a chunk of your busy day for this compelling installment of “Brad’s Blog!” Look out for next week’s edition, where I crow about all the fantastic devices I purchased from the Internet with my video game income and why this future we have here is so great.