every single digital company, if you can find a way to collect extra information about your

customers, is like, it's on the table for them.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Daniel Joseph.

Daniel is a senior lecturer of digital sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University,

and he's also written for a number of publications, including Briar Patch Magazine,

motherboard, and real-life magazine. Daniel was last on the show in November of 2020, episode 35, if you want to go all the

way back there and listen to it. And we talked about the way that capitalism has shaped the

video games industry from its very origins when it first started to emerge to what is happening

to today and the changing

business models. In this conversation, we talked about something a little bit different, but

still somewhat related. Daniel had a piece come out the summer where he discussed how

the incentives to adopt an advertising business model are underplayed in a lot of the discussions

around tech companies and the way that they have

developed since their emergence. And also how there is a specific kind of incentive or drive

for companies to adopt this type of business model because of how integral advertising is

to selling people things under modern capitalism. We certainly recognize how

companies like Facebook or Google are reliant on advertising as a key source of revenue,

but we underplay the degree to which a lot of these other companies have shaped their business

models to respond to that type of business model, to

collect data on us, to inform advertising profiles and things like that, and how as these companies

get increasingly squeezed, it looks like they'll be doubling down on that even further,

...