There is an old saying—updated for the digital age—that if something is free, you are the product. It is a useful warning, though I am no longer sure it is sufficient. Because now, it seems to me, you may also be the labor.
I am reminded, as well, of the older phrase from The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress: TANSTAAFL—“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.” It is usually invoked as a kind of economic realism, a corrective against naïveté. Everything costs something. Someone, somewhere, pays.1
For a long time, I assumed I understood what that meant. Now I am less certain.
Consider the strange afterlife of Pokémon Go. At the time, it felt almost quaint: a game that coaxed people outdoors, that overlaid imagination onto sidewalks and church lawns, that briefly made the world feel shared again. Children and adults alike wandered parks chasing creatures that did not exist, but which nonetheless reorganized behavior in very real ways.
I did not play it myself. I remember watching others—some in my own family—move through familiar places with their attention tilted just slightly away from the visible world. They experienced it as harmless fun, and perhaps it was. I was more skeptical, though I could not have fully explained why at the time. It simply seemed unlikely that something so engaging, so widely adopted, would ask for nothing in return.
I had, by then, already begun using an example in class: the Strava heat map incident, where aggregated fitness data unintentionally revealed the outlines of sensitive military installations.2 A tool designed for personal improvement became, without malice, a mechanism of disclosure. That episode lingered with me. It suggested that systems often know more than their users intend—and reveal more than anyone anticipates.
And yet, even with that in mind, I did not quite see what Pokémon Go might become.
Years later, we learn that the game’s developer accumulated billions of images from players scanning their surroundings—streets, statues, storefronts, corners of cities from every conceivable angle. These images, gathered under the soft pretense of gameplay, have since been used to train systems capable of guiding machines through the physical world with remarkable precision.3
In other words—or at least, this is how it now appears to me—while people were catching Pikachu, they may also have been mapping the world.
Not just mapping it, but refining it. Improving it. Contributing, piece by piece, to a machine-readable version of reality.
There is something almost monastic about this—though I hesitate at the comparison. Pilgrims, after all, knew they were pilgrims. They walked toward something, even if they could not fully articulate it. Their journeys, over time, became roads, and those roads became the scaffolding of trade and settlement.
We, on the other hand, walked for reasons we barely examined. Or at least, I suspect many did. The purpose was not hidden, exactly—but neither was it fully seen.
The deeper issue is not that companies reuse data. That has long been part of the digital bargain. We receive convenience, connection, or entertainment; in return, we surrender data, attention, and behavioral patterns.
But this feels, to me, like a different category. Because it begins to collapse the distinction between use and production.
We tend to imagine ourselves as consumers of digital services—even when we acknowledge being “the product.” But here, the role appears more active. The user becomes a kind of surveyor, though an unknowing one. A participant in building systems they will never directly control.
The map is not just watching you. You are, perhaps, helping to build the map.
And the map, in turn, may be used to coordinate systems—commercial, logistical, perhaps eventually governmental—that operate with increasing independence from the individuals who made them possible.
It would be easy to call this exploitation, and there may be some truth in that. But I am not entirely convinced that the word captures the whole of it. It may simply be efficient.
After all, what better way to map the world than to distribute the task across millions of willing participants? The game did not force anyone to contribute. It invited them. It rewarded them. It made the act of data collection feel like leisure—like play.
And perhaps that is where TANSTAAFL begins to feel less like a warning and more like a misdirection.
Because the lunch was not free. It never is.
But neither was the payment what we assumed.
We tend to think the price is paid in data—in preferences, in attention, in behavioral signals. And that is true, as far as it goes. But here, the cost seems to include something more active. Something closer to effort. To contribution. To work, however lightly it is disguised.
Not just being the product, but helping to produce the system itself.
The medieval peasant knew when he was laboring. The factory worker knew when the shift began and ended. Even the early internet user had some dim awareness that their clicks were being counted and sold.
But now, the boundaries seem less distinct. The system does not so much interrupt life as settle into it. It follows our habits, our curiosities, our idle moments—and draws value from them, often without requiring any deliberate effort on our part.
Not through coercion, but through design. There is, I think, a moral question here—though I am not sure it can be resolved by terms of service alone.
Yes, the disclosures were likely present. Yes, consent was technically given. But there is a difference between informed consent and something more ambient—something closer to participation without full awareness.
Trust, in this sense, is not merely about privacy. It is about alignment.
- Do we understand what we are helping to build?
- Do we share in its benefits?
- Would we choose differently if the purpose were made plain?
Or is the system, in some quiet way, dependent on our not asking too many questions?
The old warning still holds: if something is free, you are the product. But I am beginning to suspect that even this is incomplete.
If there is no such thing as a free lunch, then it matters very much how the bill is paid—and whether we ever realized we were the ones picking it up.
And I find myself wondering what else I have mistaken for play.
References:
- Heinlein, R. A. (1966). The moon is a harsh mistress. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. ↩︎
- “Strava heat map reveals military base locations.” Wired.
https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-bases-fitness-trackers-privacy/ ↩︎ - “Pokémon Go players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30 billion images.” Popular Science.
https://www.popsci.com/technology/pokemon-go-delivery-robots-crowdsourcing/ ↩︎
