Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Meta will finally monetize the one thing it has always done best: knowing everything about you. The company is now selling AI tools to other businesses, which is a polite way of saying they are franchising your browsing habits, your secret crushes, and that embarrassing thing you searched for at 2 a.m. in 2019.
Investors, however, are not thrilled. Meta’s stock fell on the news because apparently Wall Street expected the company to figure out how to make money from artificial intelligence without actually having to, you know, sell anything. The dream was that AI would simply generate profit through sheer vibes and quarterly earnings calls full of buzzwords.
What Meta is really saying is this: we spent billions building these AI systems by training them on your data without asking permission, and now we need to recoup those losses by selling access to other companies who also want to know everything about you. It is the circle of corporate life, except the circle is made of surveillance.
The absurdity reaches peak performance when you realize Meta’s strategy boils down to “we messed up our ad business, so now we are selling the infrastructure that made us messed up in the first place.” It is not innovation. It is not even particularly clever. It is just Meta doing what Meta does best: taking something that should probably be illegal and finding a way to charge money for it.
So congratulations. Your data is now a product line item.