Which Justin Bieber Cheekbone are you? / facebook quizzes and why nobody gives a shit about data harvesting

There are some downright silly quizzes on facebook. You’ll be familiar with the format. You type in your details, ignore a whole load of smallprint about how they now have access to your email and phone camera, and click “accept” so you can see which famous dictator you are, or whatever the hell quiz you’ve selected. Then usually you get some analysis which is shadier than a tabloid horoscope page. “You are an uncompromising badass, who tells it like it is and isn’t afraid to take a stand.” Brilliant. Share to timeline, wait for the like to come in from your one solid family member or crush who likes all your posts, regardless if they’re absolutely gut-wrenchingly eye-bleedingly banal. Sometimes they give a percentage, like “you are 1890% hot”, which makes it look all sciencey. Or they have three photos of celebrities that you would only resemble if the person witnessing your blank eyed pouting face had shotgunned a 24 pack of Bacardi and coke readymix. Again with the percentages.

All this blatantly serves to prop up the fever dream parade of the ego that facebook is using to hijack you into willingly giving all your data to them, so they can sell it to people, who then sell you things with what they know about you as a guidebook to your likes and dislikes. This would seem quite a dodgy thing to do if we didn’t all know about it. But for some reason we don’t care. If we cared that Brexit and the election were probably decided by swinging the marginal seats using paid adverts, and thus undermining the fragile illusion of democracy, we would delete facebook and Instagram and go and live off grid in a portacabin with a petrol generator covered in camouflage netting.

But we don’t. We carry on updating that little box asking “what’s on our mind” with our likes and dislikes, our hopes and dreams, feeding them into the machine so the ad targeting can find out that we like restaraunts, or cars, or whatever. You’ve probably heard, people in IT say “if you can’t see what the product is, you’re the product.” This is weirdly flattering. I think we’re glad that someone is interested in us, if only a multi-billion dollar bloodsucking organisation that only wants us for our consumer profiles. But we want to stay in touch with our friends, which like the alcoholic that kids themselves they’re a social drinker, really means we want to keep hitting that reward mechanism of social approval, that very well paid and clever psychologists have developed to make you value each like, each love, each ‘care’, a little less every time so we need more and more to keep our endocrine system awash with fuzzy warm smack hits of dopamine and noradrenaline and whatever other perfectly nice chemicals we have to keep injecting through our eyeballs. So if that means someone’s making money off us, so what, as long as we get our fix. Now please like and share this article because I’m hurting like crazy.