In a recent article for the London Review of Books titled “You Are the Product,” John Lanchester takes a rather skeptical view of Facebook and Google, arguing that these sites don’t exist to bring people together or provide information, but rather to collect data on their users that they can sell to advertisers. Lanchester goes so far as to deem Facebook “the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind,” adding “it knows far, far more about you than the most intrusive government agent has ever known about its citizens.” The article creates a frightening portrait of the social media landscape—Lanchester writes that Facebook is basically an amoral operation, selling user information to whomever pays for it, including organizations that seek to spread disinformation in the form of news. The site, he argues, is a threat to journalism as well as privacy.
After Marina dies, strange things start happening on Laura’s social media account. Her account shares the video of Marina’s suicide, even though she didn’t actively choose to share it. Then her close friends start getting hypnotized by a supernatural force in their computers that compels them to kill themselves. It turns out that Marina is a demon who’s using the Internet to haunt Laura, malignly intervening in every aspect of her life that’s affected by computers. Laura finds that she’s unable to delete her online profile or even turn off her electronic devices—her connection to the Internet is irrevocable.
