I don't want to be the product anymore

Buy it and be done with it

I recently purchased a CD player (pictured). For seven years now I have been walking babies around in the evening while playing music off YouTube on whatever device is nearby—a phone, a laptop, a “Smart TV.” I am done with that. I hate it. I hate the act of pulling up YouTube and having to see the trash that makes up 95% of it—random movie clips, “content” made by content creators who grin and grimace at the camera and say things like “Hey YouTube, what’s up!”, videos of cats doing stupid cat shit, the latest painfully overthought comedy segment involving some sort of postmodern identity segment (“Here’s what Crunchy Grandmas do at Walmart!”). I hate wading through all of that; it feels like sloshing through raw sewage and civilizational detritus after a tsunami. I hate having to rely on some awful, humming server in Nebraska to give me music to lull my babies to sleep. I hate having to lug my laptop out into the living room, or turn on the television that I don’t want to turn on, or bring out the work-issued smartphone—all of these things pulling me, subtly and inexorably, out of my house and into the world I’m trying so hard to shake off as the evening glissades into night. I hate all of this stuff.

But mostly I hate being the product. I just hate it. I’m so tired of being the product. This is not a new observation, of course, but on nearly all of the Internet—the huge portion of it that’s “free”—that’s what you are: You are the product. When the product is free, you’re it. You are not buying; you are being bought. You are the transaction. Those endless, grating YouTube ads that come up when you’re just trying to listen to music so your baby will close her eyes—that’s you, being the product. The nonstop cascading ads that are increasingly on every single surface of the Internet, that’s your marker. These things brand you as the product. You’re being sold to the highest bidder. It is a prime example of what Wendell Berry calls, in capital, The Economy: A system that “buys [our] freedom, pays for it, and then persuades its money back again.” The product is you.

And I’m done with it. I’m just done. I don’t want to be the product anymore. I know at a certain point it’s sort of unavoidable, at least in a society in which any sort of economic activity is occurring. But I want to return to historically normal levels of marginal utility, in which being the product was an ancillary part of the macro exchange rather than a primary function. Put another way: Watching some local ads in between Single Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy was fine; being barraged with six different ads when you want to listen to two three-minute songs on YouTube is intolerable, and offensive on an existential level. I just want to listen to November Rain without first having to listen to some guy explain why his new UltraFlex™ T-shirt makes him feel more like a man. That guy’s a dipshit and they’re trying to make you into a dipshit by forcing you to listen to him. They force you to listen to him again halfway through the song, too! And by forcing you to become the product, they’re changing you, quietly but essentially, in a way that is not good.

I understand there’s a modest counter-proposal here, and that’s to just buy a paid streaming service, be it via YouTube or otherwise, that eschews ads altogether. That allows one to (a) reap the rewards of an infinite media library without (b) having to be bludgeoned with T-shirt ads every time you want to put your baby to sleep. That would be better than nothing, I suppose, but only in the same sense that standing on a box in an oubliette gets you four inches closer to the surface. I don’t want to be the product; I also want to own the product I pay for. Paying, repeatedly, for movies and music you don’t own and can never own feels faintly ridiculous. It makes no sense on a fundamental commercial level. They can and often do take those things away from subscribers on a regular basis, even though you’ve paid for them. You know what they can’t take away? A CD. Or a DVD. Or a book. Or anything else that you acquire as personal property in a typical economic exchange. When you buy that thing, it’s yours. It’s a product; there is no confusion as to the parameters of the transaction. When you use a CD player to play music off a CD you purchased you have closed a certain vital loop, one you should labor at some length to keep closed. You do not have to be the product.

There are, of course, some instances in which “free” services are worth the odd triangulated arrangement in which you yourself become sort of commodified. I enjoy listening to music on local radio stations when, say, I’m prepping dinner; local radio ads are low-key and unobtrusive enough to still feel commonplace in a comfortable way, and by dint of their local character they are considerably more relevant to my life than useless T-shirt lines. I feel the same way about affiliate network television; there is a normalcy there that defies the weird sort of asynchrony of Internet commerce, and local TV ads almost universally lack the sort of desperate, cringey quality that has come to define the Internet in the 2020s. And really there’s a charm to many of those ads that are rewarding in and of themselves. How many families often engage in high-spirited arguments over which local commercial is the best, which is the most annoying, which has the catchiest jingle? How many times, in contrast, do we have such entertaining debates over YouTube ads? The former is more human, more relatable, more recognizable; the latter is pure Internet, which is to say awful and sterile and stupid.

The upshot to this analog paradigm, of course, is that you have to work a little harder: I’ll have to seek out CDs, for instance, buy them, store them, make sure they don’t break, etc. But, I mean: so what? It’s a little extra effort for a much better payoff. That’s fine. It’s no big deal. Do a little more work and you get a little more out of life. It’s always been that way and nothing YouTube ever does can change that. So embrace it and be a little happier and a little less of the product. Only good can come of that.