We All Work for Facebook

Writing in the Harvard Business Review with Jaron Lanier, a prominent critic of social media, Weyl argues that if Americans were paid for our data, many would make $500 to $1,000 a year the way things stand now (an estimate that the authors believe is low). ***

Even absent economically powerful machine learning, companies benefit in a variety of ways from the work we do for free online—including in the least profit-driven settings. ***

Entertainment companies take advantage of another type of free labor: the work of fans.

Source: longreads.com