The ‘you are the product’ critique predates the web by decades

Evidence

That phrase was, nearly verbatim, what critics had been saying about all advertising-supported media for decades. “In selling commercial time to advertisers to sell products,” wrote Robin Anderson in the 1990s, “broadcasters are also selling a product—their audiences.” Richard Serra, the artist and cultural critic, put it this way in 1973: “Television delivers people to an advertiser…It is the consumer who is consumed…You are delivered to the advertiser who is the customer. He consumes you.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1117

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the web-era critique of surveillance capitalism restates an old broadcast-era insight, echoing themes across earlier attention-industry chapters. — connects to: Early Internet designers overwhelmingly opposed permitting advertising on the network — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 662