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The Farmer & Farmer Review . Modern Medicine . The Problem of Advertising

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The problem with non-addictive tools — particularly when they're free — is that they're bad for business, especially when that business is advertising. On the Web, where people have learned not to value things directly, the most common business model is to make a product, give it away for free, attain tremendous scale, and then, once you have a lot of users, to turn those users into the product by selling their attention to advertisers and their personal information to marketing departments. This is a dangerous deal — not necessarily in economic terms, but in human terms — because, once the user has become the product, the user is no longer treated as an individual but as a commodity, and not even a precious commodity, but as one insignificant data point among many — a rounding error — meaningful only in aggregate. Thinking of humans this way produces sociopathic behavior: rational in economic terms but very bad in human terms. Yet many companies operate under this premise. Businesses

The Farmer & Farmer Review . Modern Medicine . The Problem of Advertising The problem with non-addictive tools - particularly when they're free - is that they're bad for business, especially when that business is advertising. On the Web, where people have learned not to value things directly, the most common business model is to make a product, give it away for free, attain tremendous scale, and then, once you have a lot of users, to turn those users into the product by selling their attention to advertisers and their personal information to marketing departments. This is a dangerous deal - no

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