You’re Not A Customer To The Media, You’re What’s Being Sold

If you don’t pay for the news you receive, what you receive is not news, it is propaganda. Propaganda is free, just like slop is free to pigs. It’s not given because they appreciate you as a living being, it’s given in order to turn you into sausage at some later date. Because, although most people haven’t realized this yet, you’re not the customer. The customer is always right, but it aint you.

It’s easy to tell who the customer is: the customer pays money. That’s why the customer is always right, because businesses are out to make money.

So who pays for the media? The overwhelming amount of media is paid for by advertisers. They are the real customer, they are the ones media has to please in order to get the cheddar. Please the advertisers, make money. Displease them, no money. Get it? You can feed pigs caviar, but it doesn’t help the bottom line.

So who are we, we who watch the news? We are the consumers, and that is quite a different thing than customers, although we feel as though we’re being catered to, just as the pig comes to believe the farmer owes it to him to dole out the slop on a regular schedule.

And it is slop. You, me, Republican, Democrat, we have no illusions that what we are consuming is high-quality. We know it’s not nutritious stuff we’re swallowing, but it does kind of taste good going down. In a fatty, salty, processed kind of way.

Do you know why Facebook was telling its users “always free, always will be” a few years back? Because they know if they started charging, you’d leave. Or at the very least, you’d start demanding Facebook cater to your needs. That’s the last thing Facebook wants because they’re already making billions. Mark Zuckerberg is worth somewhere in the range of $120 billion. How much is that compared to the ordinary Facebook user’s net worth? A lot. A whole fucking lot. More a lot than your puny mind can comprehend. Way more a lot than Mark Zuckerberg’s mind can comprehend, and he’s spent a lot of time contemplating it.

Now you may ask, how did Mark Zuckerberg get so incomprehensibly rich giving you Facebook for free? What, have you already forgotten what I said about the pig and the slop?

That’s right, you’re not only the consumer of slop, you are the product Mark Zuckerberg sells. You’re the pork chops. He sells your information to those who profit from your information. If you’ve stopped believing the Tooth Fairy pays you money for your teeth, you can stop believing that Facebook gives you something for nothing.

All the media is in the hands of obscenely rich people who are not interested in making you one iota smarter. In fact, they work really hard to keep you stupid. Looking around, I have to say I’m impressed by their success. Although $120 billion is a hell of an incentive.

Your stupidity keeps the advertisers and the media really wealthy. Why would you think they are on your side? Why would you believe the sales pitch they are selling? They want you to eat Doritos and drink Mountain Dew, for fuck’s sake.

As wealthy as Zuckerberg is, that’s still nothing compared to the net worth of Jeff Bezos, who currently is worth a shit-ton and some change. I say shit-ton and some change because none of us could ever really get our heads around how much fucking money he really has. Jeff Bezos can’t figure it out either, all he knows is it isn’t enough. Amazon and Whole Foods and the Post Office aren’t enough for him, he has to buy a newspaper, too. That’ll add a few bucks to his pile. Something comparable to a brick in the Great Wall of China, though, so you gotta wonder why he’d waste his time buying the Washington Post. Maybe, just maybe, because the readers aren’t really customers, they’re just consumers. He’s not making his money selling papers, he’s making his money by making you believe he’s only there to give you what you’ve come to expect to see in your trough.

The life of a pig isn’t so bad, I guess. It must be pretty okay, because I’ve never ever heard of a pig uprising, although maybe that’s just because the media has never saw fit to tell us about it. More likely, however, the pigs have come to think that they are the customer, that they are the ones being catered to. But should they ever discover the truth…