Consumers work for their paid services
Awhile ago, my wife and I purchased new smartphones. What a troublesome experience! For eight hours, our service provider walked me through the steps to back up all the stuff that was on our old phones to the new ones and to activate them. I accidentally backed up the stuff on my wife’s phone to mine, and had to do the backup again.
Then there was the mystery of why the SIM card didn’t work, the overnight delivery which took three days, the new SIM card that didn’t work, and then the miraculous restoration of the first card to functionality.
Perhaps you’ve had similarly exasperating experiences. I was pretty peeved. But that subsided and the whole episode provoked a few insights.
Think about how consumers have become workers, even though they have paid for a service; how smart devices have changed the way we conduct our social lives, and how these devices have become the basis for a new form of capitalism.
Why am I doing this work when I’m the customer? Then I remembered how businesses and especially large corporations figured out that they could increase profits by getting the customer to do some of the work in a business transaction.
There was once a job called gas station attendant. He filled your gas tank, checked your oil and cleaned your windshield. Then, changes in the technology of gas pumps made it easy for the customer to pump gas, and thousands of jobs disappeared.
We are often unaware that we are working for the service we paid for. This business model is fairly new, but most of us dutifully clean our tables at fast-food restaurants, pump our gas, check ourselves out at Walmart, and fix problems with our phones. I remember the full-service gas station, but young folks don’t. They’ve become accustomed to being “free labor.”
Smartphones are deeply ingrained in our everyday lives. Visit a university campus and you will see students walking across campus engrossed in cyberspace. Even if they unplug for class, they quickly re-engage after class. Anxiety sets in when someone doesn’t answer a text.
While some of the effects of the smartphone are trivial, others are not. Social psychologist Jean Twenge has been researching teenagers for decades. In her book “IGen” she shows the dramatic influence that smartphones have had on what teenagers do, think and feel.
Since the smartphone was introduced, teens seem less interested in driving and premarital sex but more isolated and depressed, living in the virtual world of Facebook, chats, games and tweets. We know less about the effects of mobile phones on adults, but we sense that screen time is shaping the way we live.
While we are more connected to others in the virtual world, especially since the pandemic, we interact less face-to-face with people outside our immediate families and friends, and this probably contributes to how fragmented and alienating our society has become.
Then there is the matter of surveillance capitalism: the simple act of theft (gathering information about us without our permission) that companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft commit when they collect and store information about us. Then they bundle and auction this information to advertisers, amassing spectacular profits.
The power of computers allows for creating algorithms that sort through data banks about us to predict what we want, will buy, and even how we might behave in the future. Information about us has become the resource for a new version of capitalism. All of this has profound implications for getting and keeping auto and health insurance, loans, and many other aspects of our lives.
As Shoshana Zuboff emphasizes in her book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” the goal of all this analysis is to ultimately raise profits by eliminating uncertainty in business transactions. She contends that this might well mean our choices and even our freedom could be restricted, every click scrutinized.
The time I spent on our new phones so we could continue doing what we were doing on the old phones made me think. I’m working to use the device I paid for, my life is being changed by this device in ways I can’t anticipate, and I am contributing information that companies use to make profits.
When my phone travels with me, I can be tracked, and I am known to marketers by what I eat and buy. And to think I labored eight hours to enable all of this.