Goldman Sachs, the Nigerian Scam, and Facebook Quizzes

A darkly comic piece of internet culture in 2010 juxtaposed three things that seemed, at first glance, to have nothing in common: Goldman Sachs, the Nigerian advance-fee scam, and the endless parade of Facebook quizzes and invitations that were consuming hours of productive human time daily.

The comparison between Goldman's business model — particularly its role in structuring complex financial products that benefited one party at another's expense — and the Nigerian scam had been made by serious financial journalists with straight faces. Both, the argument went, relied on information asymmetry: the Nigerian scammer had information (that the offer was fraudulent) that the mark lacked; Goldman, in the Abacus affair, had information about the product's design that its customers lacked.

The Facebook angle was different in kind but related in theme: Facebook quizzes and app invitations of the era frequently harvested user data and contact lists in exchange for trivial entertainment — personality tests, horoscope generators, "what kind of pizza are you" assessments. Users clicked through terms of service agreements without reading them and gave apps access to their social graphs. The transaction looked free; the product being sold was the users themselves.

The convergence of these three things in a single piece of cultural commentary was a specific kind of 2010 media moment — attempting to make visible the invisible value transfers that were happening at every level of the economy, from the grandest investment bank to the most innocuous-seeming internet quiz.

The lesson, repeated in various forms throughout the year: when you can't identify the product in a transaction, you are the product.