Originally posted on Facebook June 14 2026. Edited for clarity.
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There’s an old phrase ‘when the service is free, you are the product’.
When a business gives you “something for nothing”, they have calculated that giving this to you will result in more benefit to them than their cost in providing it.
Someone Pays, Sometime
It may be YOU, in an obfuscated way - maybe you reduce your privacy, expose yourself to advertising, or degrade your personal circumstances in some way that isn’t directly charged in Money At This Very Moment, or maybe they are banking that after receiving this free sample of their product you will in the long run pay more money to than their ‘free’ thing costs them to produce now.
Or others may be paying FOR you. But someone, or someones, does pay.
What Is A Business?
This might seem obvious but I think people lose sight of it. Businesses exist to extract more value than they provide. This is the definition of profit.
Businesses and corporations (bigger, more evil businesses) and megacorps (even bigger, even more evil businesses) exist to make profit.
They are not In The Business of giving away more value than they accrue.
This selfishness is codified and, in the case of publicly traded companies they additionally seek to maximise short-term profits at the expense of, and with an essentially total disregard for damage caused to, any other entity than the business themself, and even their own long-term company health.
Short-Term Thinking Is How Capitalism Is Done
I’m planning to write a longer piece about the perils of issuing stock and a board of directors, but this ‘short-term thinking’ is (in US case law at least) famously codified by Henry Ford being sued by his shareholders in 1916; rather than allow him to reinvest his company profits into business expansion, he was compelled to essentially gift the money as dividends to investors.
This is technically non-binding case law in the states, but it became the de facto way publicly traded companies are run. The point is to make money; not things. Money Now beats real value later. Degrading a business’s real value is always correct if it gains the shareholders money in the present.
This obviously sucks. But it’s how essentially all publicly traded companies act in 2026.
Billionaires are individual human beings who act with the ethics of corporations (acting always within their own interests despite any morally or socially unjust action they must take to do so).
Facebook & Meta
Someone I just spoke to made the WILD claim that “Facebook is free” and sir it is NOT.
Facebook (and its parent company Meta) is an advertising business. Based on their public filings, in 2025 fully 98% of their revenue came from advertising. That’s not a hyperbolic number; it is what they reported.
The mechanism by which they make money from advertising is to have ‘captive’ users on the service; there is a constant push-pull between how little value they can provide those users (connection with friends, family, and others) and how much value they can extract through advertising to those users.
Their goal is to maximise profit - no matter what. The more personal information they have on their users, the more they can charge external companies to access those users.
This is all ‘settled law’ so to speak; no one seriously disputes this reading of the Meta Value Proposition.
Meta tracks you everywhere you go on the internet; not just while you are using their service.
Up until very recently they did have an option (absolutely BURIED under layers of settings) by which you could stop their “off-app” tracking of you (though they REALLY didn’t want you to realise that and certainly didn’t want you switching it off). They’ve just announced that the option is gone.
There is no way (outside of some good third-party applications) to turn off their tracking now. The fig leaf they offered in removing this option is now you can have the ads you are served in-app be ‘unpersonalised’.
Oh good. Thanks so much Meta I’m really enjoying all these AI Booster ads now. You're the best.
They also LOVE to sell your data to other companies (who plan to sell to you, manipulate you, or extract value from you in some other way). Some of these are literal scammers. They sell this data (and access) as a matter of course.
We used to have a term that has gone out of vogue: “Spyware”. It used to be considered malicious hacking. Now its become so normalised that folks think its weird If you bring it up.
The Great Pixel Trick
Google (another advertising company, who deliberately and maliciously made their search worse in order to serve more ads) and Meta created the ‘Meta Pixel’ and ‘Google Pixel’ and said ‘hey you should install these on your personal websites so we can more effectively spy on more people in more places because it will very incrementally improve your own sales to those people’ and we have bought that hook, line and sinker. It’s not enough that they try to trap you into their ecosystems of search, Facebook, Instagram and Threads; they want you to collaborate on giving personal information from the few folks who do find their way to your personal website.
This is very actively collaborating with evil corporations to more effectively profit from us, our friends, and our loved ones.
Third Party Anti-Spyware & The App Ecosystem
Every wonder why a lot of companies insist you use their app rather than a web browser to access their stuff? Or why there’s a bunch of functionality locked off on the browser version?
They want you in the app because they can more effectively control you in a ‘closed system’. It’s their best way to harvest data (to sell to others, and to use to more effectively manipulate you and serve ads to you). It’s more profitable to control you more completely.
In a web browser you can run third-party software to limit their invasion of your privacy. In an app, the ecosystem is locked down and they can force themselves way further into your life (to extract maximum value from you, for their benefit and your detriment).
Why Is Tracking A Big Deal??
“Why should I care if they’re tracking me??” you may ask. Let me first say that if you have ever been worried about state power and governmental overreach you’d better realise that corporations are now wielding WAY more power over your life than governments in the modern age have ever done.
Mega corps have much more in common now with feudal landowners than what we might think of as a regular business. There is a term for this: techno-feudalism. You can read about it here.
Facebook Got Donald Trump Elected
In 2016 Cambridge Analytica leveraged Meta’s massive database of user information to manipulate the US election. This again is ‘settled law’ (in this case literally). They were found guilty of wrongdoing and fined not very much money (I personally received USD $5.91 from the settlement). It’s not an extreme statement to say that Donald Trump would likely not be in power RIGHT NOW if not for this specific abuse of user data.
They continue to harvest the same data they were fined for selling, now as a matter of course. They changed some minor wording on their permissions and continue to do this very damaging thing.
Whether you were happy about this election result or not, this is part of the ‘cost’ we all pay to Facebook and their ilk; corporations, megacorps and billionaires who have your worst interests at heart are able to leverage the platforms they own, to manipulate public sentiment and world events.
They do this to extract more value from you and make your life harder.
In 2024 Meta's own figures report that 10% of their revenue came from literal scams run on their service; how much of the rest do you think is made up of misinformation that they don't bother to track?
The increasing distrust we must all view information presented in the world with, is part of that cost.
Degenerative AI Costs
In the case of degenerative AI they are sucking up your personal information, increasing inflation (which you pay at the supermarket and elsewhere), increasing the costs to run websites (and degrading their effectiveness) throughout the internet, increasing the price of computer hardware, and socialising the environmental damage, water and power cost increases locally anywhere you have one of their ridiculous and foolish huge AI datacentres (that in many cases will never finish construction anyway), increasing carbon emissions which accelerate climate change (which increases the cost of food because its more difficult to do agriculture in a variable and overall hotter environment), etc etc etc.
That is the cost that you are ‘not paying’ - by using AI to make a poster for a show, for instance.
Are You Owed Free Things Because You Are Not ‘Making A Profit’?
An argument I’ve seen folks who use degenerative AI to manufacture online content, or to advertise a comedy show, or a community meetup group, is “hey I’m putting on the show / organising the group / whatever just because I’m a great guy, and because I'm not directly turning a profit on this it is FINE that I socialise the cost of the poster.
To restate that: they are charging EVERYONE IN THE WORLD so that they can have a free poster.
This extends out to AI content in general; they say 'hey I'm not making much money from this, so I shouldn't have to pay anything to make it - YOU pay". Moving past the argument of whether degenerative AI even *IS* art (it's not) - does you wanting to be seen as a "creator" mean I and everyone else in the world should foot the bill?
We Do Not Need Your 'Content' On The Internet
There's a lot of cool stuff out there already, and a lot of terrible stuff, and a lot of in-between stuff, and the rate of entertainment production has only increased over time.
If all videogames and movies and TV shows stopped getting made TODAY you would still never finish everything.
The problem of New Art isn't that it is unavailable - the problem is there is SO MUCH that identifying the Good Stuff within the deluge is really challenging.
This means that in addition to your AI 'art' costing money & resources (paid by all of us), its existence in the wild actively limits our ability to find meaningful things, because this 'slop' (low-effort, usually degenerative AI content) has so polluted to the online ecosystem that human-made creations get buried beneath it.
In most cases, this content is only being produced to try to serve more ads and extract a portion of the ad revenue. And the ads suck. Bad content to serve bad ads to manipulate people to benefit evil megacorps and morally repugnant or at least cynically exploitative individuals.
I say this with full awareness that spending my life pursuing standup comedy is a silly and self-indulgent use of my time but maybe if you can’t afford to make something - you don’t need to!
Or you should take personal responsibility to pay the costs of production.
Anyway this has gone on too many tangents.
Free stuff costs something.
And any time a corporation or billionaire gives you something, they are really taking things away. Never trust them.
Disclosure: I’m $15000 in debt, in part because I pay human beings for their work. Additional disclosure: a significant part of that $15000 is to folks I still owe money for their work.