The origin of the saying "You are not a consumer, but a product"

Dear Researcher Quote: For decades, the most powerful media has been television. The Internet has radically changed the process of our access to information. Today, society studies itself with the help of search engines. However, both of these channels for obtaining information for the most part exist through advertising. A meaningful expression describing such a distorted perspective sounds like this:

You are not a consumer, but a product

Could you explore the history of this maxim?

Researcher Quote: In 1973, artists Richard Serra and Carlota Fei Schoolman broadcast a short video titled "Television Delivers People." Under a soothing tune on a blue background, a white text slowly floated. The messages contained in it were essentially similar to the phrase under study.


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Commercial television delivers 20 million people per minute.
On commercial channels, the viewer pays for the privilege of being sold.
Consume the consumer.
You are the product of television.
You are delivered to the advertiser, which is the consumer.
He consumes you.
The viewer is not responsible for the telecast.
You are the end product.

Here are other additional quotes on this topic, in chronological order.

In 1989, “The New York Times” published a review titled “Video waves the waves in the world of art” [1989 November 17, 2007]. New York. (ProQuest)]. It described the exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The work of Serra and Schoolman was also shown at the exhibition.

Richard Serra, the most famous for the grand sculptures of sheet metal of the “Inclined Arch” type, created one of the first harsh videos, “Television Delivers People”, which is on display in the “World of Images” exposition. The only images in this video are words that scroll on the screen at low, but constant speed, and convey simple, critical messages like “You are a product of television.”

Richard Serra, Inclined Arch

In 1999, the company AllAdvantage launched a service that showed ads to people busy browsing the pages of sites. Ads appeared at the top or bottom of the screen. The users who viewed them received 50 cents per hour, with a maximum of $ 20 per month [1999 March 30, Associated Press Archive, Article: Internet users can get paid to surf the Web, Author: Martha Mendoza (AP Business Writer), Dateline: San Jose, California. (NewsBank Access World News)].

In December 1999, a message that appeared on the Usenet network, authored by Steve Atkins, discussed AllAdvantage and contained a statement similar to the subject:

If you want to sell crap, alladvantage customers are not the worst demographic slice to advertise. I don’t want to say anything about a particular AA client, just about their general demographics.

These customers are not consumers, but a product. All AA customers sell for a few kopecks per hour.

Written by Claire Wolf in 1999, she wrote an article titled “The Younger Brother Watches You: The Threat of Corporate America,” discussing electronic markets for personal data, biometric systems, black boxes in information recording cars, and other people tracking technologies. The article is preserved in the Internet archive . Its main thesis is just suited to the topic of discussion:

Perhaps because you are no longer a consumer. You are simply a “resource” that is managed for profit. The consumer is now served by someone else - and he usually has your interests not in the first place.

Who is the consumer? Not you, because your life is reduced to the data that can be sold, which can be searched, and from which conclusions can be drawn. The consumer is anyone who wants to get a piece of your life.

In June 2001, the topic of a message in the Usenet Usenet newsgroup from Tom Johnson contained a line that was completely identical to the topic under discussion:

Topic: You are not a consumer, you are a product.

And in the message itself was the following:

Back later: TV viewers are not consumers, they are products, and the demographic slice of young people is more interesting for advertisers, since the first are stupid enough to pay attention to advertising.

In August 2010, the Metafilter website published an article about the Digg news aggregator. The author of one of the comments under the nickname blue_beetle left a sharp remark. Andrew Lewis’s name is on the blue_beetle profile:

If you do not pay for it, you are not a consumer; you are a marketable product.

In September 2010, influential publisher Tim O'Reilly made a tweet mentioning this Lewis comment, and pointing to the Metafilter page:


In the book of 2012, “Pretend: Your personality online is worth its weight in gold. Digital Self-Defense Guide ”[2012, Fake It: Your Online Identity Is Worth Gold. Tranberg and Steffan Heuer Guide to Digital Selfdefense, Chapter 2: You Are The Product, Unnumbered Page, Published by Berlingske in collaboration with People's Press, Copenhagen, Denmark. (Google Books Preview)] was the following passage:

“If you do not pay for it, then you are not a consumer; you are a selling product. ” So said the Internet user under the nickname blue_beetle, whose real name, apparently, Andrew Lewis, in the post of August 2010. It became the meme and motto of people who stopped buying “free” tickets with which the web companies fool us.

In conclusion, it can be noted that this saying has evolved over time. Richard Serra and Carlota Fei Schoolman created an interesting premise in 1973. Tom Johnson wrote a very similar thing in 2001. An extended definition was given by Andrew Lewis in 2010.