“Selling out” is a common idiomatic pejorative expression for the compromising of a person’s integrity, morality, authenticity, or principles in exchange for personal gain, such as money.
Wikipedia
An artist or musician who compromises his or her original artistic vision in order to produce more “commercial” work may be accused of “selling out.” A politician who claims to support a particular cause who later drops that cause for political expediency, is subject to the same criticism. Compromising one’s own integrity for monetary gain has long been seen as a moral failing.
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
Matthew 16:26
But what is the moral situation in a world wherein others compromise US for THEIR monetary gain? Does it make a difference if we willingly participate in the compromise? Is our culpability diminished if we are unaware of the compromise?
Broadcast Television
In the late 1960s, the National Association of Broadcasters, facing increased competition for viewers from the cable and satellite TV companies, ran a campaign to “Save Free TV.” They argued that people should not have to pay for the programs they were already getting for free. Their argument was popular, but deceptive. Television programming has never been “free.”
In the “over-the-air” “free” television broadcast model, programming is paid for by advertisers. But what do the advertisers get for their money? They get us, or rather, our attention. In fact, the television (and the newspaper and magazine) business actually uses the phrase “selling eyeballs to advertisers” to describe their business.
The primary business of a television broadcaster is to sell its viewers to advertisers. Now, of course, this means that they need programming that will attract viewers. The more viewers they have the more they can charge for advertising time. So they also need to sell their programming to us, the television viewing public. But the artistic or literary quality of the entertainment they provide, or the quality, importance, or accuracy of the news they report, is always secondary to the question of “how much audience will this attract?”
The Internet
The early attempts to monetize the internet started with banner ads that, not unlike roadside billboards, cluttered up any web page you were trying to read. The banner ads above, alongside, or mixed within the content one was actually interested in, were soon supplemented by the “pop-up” ad that appeared on top the content and required interaction to remove. A more subtle version of this was the “pop-under” add that showed up on your computer screen after you closed your web browser.
Today we live in the age of “big data.” The many computerized sources of information about each of us have been aggregated to create “profiles” of shoppers and voters who can be “targeted” by anyone willing to pay for the data. Every purchase you make, or survey you take, (or web site you visit), is added to your profile. True, some of the data about you is anonymized, but you have no clear way of knowing what personal information about you is, or is not, available for sale.
Our favorite online haunts, Google and Facebook, make billions of dollars by vacuuming up our personal information and selling it.
People began to notice some years ago that advertisers were using our personal data to customize the ads we see. They would research a possible purchase and then later notice that ads for that item started to appear on other sites they visited.
Google, of course, claims this is a “service” to us. Since we are going to get ads on our web pages anyway, they would say, at least “targeted” ads show us items that we might actually be interested in. Meanwhile, though, they are able to tell advertisers (whose money they want) that they are providing “eyeballs” that are already interested in their product. Rather than just selling “ad views,” they are now selling “quality prospects” — viewers who are more likely to become customers.
Google knows our interests by our searches and our clicks. Facebook has even more information about us. They know our family and friends. They know what interest groups we join. They even have pictures of our children. The astonishing thing about Facebook is that all of the information they have (and sell) about us was given to them freely. The level of blind trust millions of people have given to this corporation is unprecedented.
Facebook can actually sell, not just demographic information about us, but also information about our personality. Those playful Facebook games about “Which Disney princess are you?” or “Which Harry Potter character are you?” are not just innocent, harmless, games. The personality data you supply by answering the questions is collected, collated, and sold.
Facebook also provides the “convenience” of letting you sign in to other apps and web sites using your Facebook login. Giving Facebook your login to sites other than Facebook is a violation of your own personal security. But people do it voluntarily without a second thought.
DNA Ancestry Testing
Now we have companies who want to sell the biological code to our very existence. The so-called “genealogy” companies want us to send them a sample of our DNA so they can sell the information to drug companies and others. In this business model, we actually pay them to take our information.
In exchange for this most personal of information, these companies promise to tell us our “family story.” It is a compelling appeal, but the slick marketing covers up the inherent scientific uncertainties of genetic testing. This is demonstrated by the fact that submitting your saliva to different companies can give you different results.
Conclusion
The answer to the question, “Are you for sale?” is “Yes.” We may not have consciously chosen to prostitute ourselves, but the fact is that, a century and a half after the abolition of slavery, the capitalist marketplace has once again turned people into commodities to be sold. The only choice we seem to have at this point is to decide how fully we want to participate in giving parts of ourselves away to be sold by others for their profit.
It may be impossible to enjoy the benefits of living in a technologically advanced information society without giving up some of our privacy. And there will always be evil people who seek to maximize their own profit at the expense of others. But it is important that we each be fully aware of what is going on and carefully consider our own responses. Naivete will only allow others to take greater advantage of us. We don’t want to find ourselves in the position of helping to forge our own chains….
O that ye would awake; awake from a deep sleep, yea, even from the sleep of hell, and shake off the awful chains by which ye are bound, which are the chains which bind the children of men, that they are carried away captive down to the eternal gulf of misery and woe.
2 Nephi 1:13
Sources: Shankar Vedantam, “Our Mental Space, Under Attack,” Hidden Brain, NPR, January 1, 2018.
Nigel Warburton, “Like the emperor’s new clothes, DNA kits are a tailored illusion,” Aeon, May 13, 2019.
Richard Stokes, “I left the ad industry because our use of data tracking terrified me,” Fast Company, June 6, 2019.
Shoshana Zuboff, “The Surveillance Threat is not What Orwell Imagined,” Time, June 6, 2019.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Profile Books, 2019.
Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, Penguin Random House, 2017
We are all for sale, and we are under great pressure to sell ourselves on capitalist terms. Profits come from shorting labor – Marx’s Surplus Value. We must understand this.