While you're farming...fake carrots or something, they are farming your amygdala.
I think most people think their bargain with Facebook is like the one they had with broadcast television. I sit here a few hours a day sidestepping drudgery and you feed me ads. But as you know (or know now), that’s not it at all. And it’s definitely not just for those ads being served on the site. The bargain we make collectively with “the web” might be Faustian if it were in fact a bargain between two parties. After all, what we are actually doing is trading our most intimate selves into the ether and in return we get creepily prescient ads for erectile dysfunction medication and whatnot. But our bargain is too often an implicit one with the back room we don’t know exists. Faust at least knew the terms of his agreement. Here’s what you need to know: Your mind is advanced enough to experience a self, a self that you think has intrinsic value. But that’s just a construction in your head. Your actual extrinsic value, I’m sorry to say, is just the sum of your known behaviors and the predictive model they make possible. The stuff you think of as “your data” and the web thinks of as “our data about you — read the ToS,” is the grist for that mill. And Facebook’s shiny front room is just a place for you to behave promiscuously and observably. While you’re farming, well, fake carrots or something, they are farming your amygdala.via Joel
