We should be careful about words, expressions, and catchphrases, especially those political hyperboles that buttress the statist zeitgeist of our time. You are a product of greedy corporations. The author of the May 16 Economist newsletter “The World in Brief” says it in passing:
Walmart’s ad operation is much smaller than that of Amazon, which is ahead in e-commerce and video streaming. But Walmart has the advantage in the ground war. In its 10,000 stores advertisers can buy access to customers on signs, screens and in-store radio. Next time you browse a supermarket for products, remember that you are a product too.
It is not clear what exactly the journalist is referring to. To verify, I went to my usual Walmart but I did not see a single third-party ad—except of course for the brand names and slogans of the products on the shelves. I didn’t see any screen or hear any advertisement. The retailer does sell advertising to third-party sellers on its Walmart Marketplace website, though. What is the problem anyway with Walmart selling advertising?
Information related to your possible interest in exchanging is part of living in any society above the tribe or command society, especially in a prosperous society. Such information is quite certainly more beneficial for most people than state propaganda. Does private advertising mean that you are a product? Are you even a product of Google when it sell data that you give away by using its free services? According to Merriam-Webster, a product is “something (such as a service) that is marketed or sold as a commodity.” A slave would be a product. A free person of course is not. Even in a figurative way, you cannot be a slave of sellers whose proposals you are free to decline without any threat of punishment.
Referring to their concept of “slavery of wage labor,” Marxists would say that Walmart workers are slaves, which does not make sense: at any time, they can walk away and work for somebody else or for themselves. If Walmart employees are not slaves, it is even more obvious that its customers are not, even if they are exposed to advertising when they choose to visit the company’s physical or virtual sites.
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The more abstract the topic you try to represent with DALL-E’s cooperation, the more difficult it is to obtain zir cooperation. It is not surprising because an AI bot does not think. The featured image of this post is the best I was able to obtain after a large number of instructions that were not understood.
A “product” in the process of grocery shopping, by DALL-E and PL