Quote of the weekend: We're the thing that's being sold

I doubt this is shocking to anyone reading this blog, but we're not always as aware of it as maybe we should be. I'm watching Douglas Rushkoff and Micah Sifry on BookTV* (haven't finished, but it's not bad so far), and some remarks from Rushkoff stood out in light of my last post and my next one. He's talking about developing and using communications technologies for democracy and social change...:

That’s where I get excited is people understanding the value they’re creating through these technologies, rather than just surrendering all the value they create to YouTube to get some hits or to Facebook so they can get more friends and be part of that very internal economy where, really, the people, the users, are the product. Alright, there are so many environments in which we think we’re the users, but when someone else is paying, usually they’re the customer, not you, right? We’re not the customers of Facebook. We're the thing that’s being sold on Facebook. And a lot of these environments that seem so free, are free ‘cause we’re not paying with our money, but someone else is paying for us, right?

*It actually says "Program not Embeddable." I like "embeddable," and hope to find new uses for it in the future.