Look! How the power of your eyes are harvested.

Social media has taken the entire world like a tsunami in the past ten years. And is now a multi-billion US dollars industry, that is run by big tech companies most of which are silicon valley based.
This revolution has swiped through the entire world by storm and presents both advantages and dangers for their consumers. The greatest advantage is undoubtedly the ability to instantly broadcast personal information worldwide and swipe the entire planet in a second. The main inconvenience is the security and privacy issues that arise from the possibility to use this power, to put it simply not everyone is a good guy and not everyone wants the best for everyone else.  In this blog post, however, I am not going to discuss these revolutions or their pros and cons. Rather, I want to talk about something that is not obvious to understand by most of us consumers of these products. I want to talk about the way the industry makes their money, and how this affects us both on an individual and social level. The companies that run these platform don't mine anything and yet offer their services free of charges while at the same time making billions of dollars in revenue every year. As the old saying goes, When you are using the product for free, then you are the product. So, How exactly do the silicon valley giant make a profit and how does the economic model they have created affect you on a personal level?

1) You are the resource.

In order to make money, the internet needs no more than to tap into the most precious resource of all. The Human soul. To achieve this hack, the system first needs you to provide your information to become part of it, The more information about you that you provide the more they get of your soul. And why would anyone offer their soul? Usually, it is in an exchange with the promise of a basic service such as the ability to communicate instantly with friends and family that have also been asked to register their information. This is just the initial transaction, between you and the world wide web.

2) Once subscribed you get to vote.

Now that you are subscribed to the web; and this is where the difference between the internet and other media occur; you are asked to vote on the relevance of the content presented to you. You do this every time you click on a link from search engines and social media profiles. The platforms then collect all your votes, and decide which content is more relevant to you and presents them to you over and over again, until a refined version of your choices is extracted and it can tap into what exactly is in your mind.

3) Once you have been figured out, the internet decides what to do with you

After a year of browsing the web, liking and disliking various pages, photos, videos, sounds, and others, a profile of your soul is drawn and from this point on the system gets to decide what it wants to do with you, most of the time it is  nothing worse than getting you to purchase a product. And targetting you with ads and content that are relevant to you. (Most of the time...)

4) But it goes deeper...

Although the points 1, 2, and 3 are the obvious business model of the internet, this system has pushed the voting mechanism an inch further with the introduction of the principle of views counts. What this means is that not only does what you click on matters now what you look at, even without clicking is also added to the metrics, and you don't have to actually click on a link to activate the information collection, now simply looking at an image is detected by the algorithms to influence trends in society.

5) Remuneration.

And finally, the creators of the top voted content, gets paid for receiving the most views, and clicks.


The ramifications of the above five points are incredible for society and for you. And this is how; I promise that after you have read what I am about to reveal to you, you will be very careful next time you open the Instagram app on your page.

Let say you have ten connections on social media, and you view an image X.

Now that you have looked at this image, I,  the creator of the image just got one vote from you. And the image is going to be presented to your ten connections as relevant in case they make a similar request on their respective pages. Let us assume that five of them do, and are presented with the same. Now they too have looked at the image that you have initially seen. That makes five votes, for my image again, Now I am up to six votes. and if each of the five has ten connections on social media, and five more of them make similar requests, that will make around twenty-five votes more for me adding to the six votes I already had, and so on and so on... With a single content online viewed just once By YOU. I can get up or more than ten thousands votes, ... this is a simplistic explanation but the system is much more efficient than this.

And now, with my ten thousand votes, I can convert them into cash, by joining one of the countless advertisement programs available on the internet. Even if I made 0,01 Usd per vote that would still mean, that By looking at my image you just made me gain 100 USD.

I will more likely reinvest this money to create more content and make more money. What This means is simple to understand. Every time you, click, like, dislike or view content online someone is making money out of you. So do be careful, with what you are sponsoring. Make sure it is something you want to see more in society, because if it is not. Then you are very likely hurting yourself and your family.  Think about this next time you watch explicit content online.... You are sponsoring just by watching. Your attention matters, be carefull where and to whom you give it to.