The Honest Courtesan

I get that amateurs don’t think like whores, but…don’t most of y’all put at least some value on your time?  Every time I buy anything online or even go anyplace with my cell phone on, I am assailed by requests to provide “feedback”, answer “a few questions” or otherwise provide information for free.  Even if each of these requests took only two minutes, I receive dozens of them a week; I’d easily spend 40 hours or more a year doing uncompensated labor for corporations that make more in a day than I will in my entire life.  Amazon, Google, Wal-mart, grocery stores, restaurants, even fucking gas stations…the list is endless.  Day before yesterday I found in my mailbox a questionnaire from Seattle public transit – a service I only use when it’s cheaper & easier to catch the light rail from downtown or the airport than to find a parking place – asking for my “help”, with no offer of compensation in sight.  Hell, at least a few of them offer to enroll me in a drawing for some el cheapo prize that would barely compensate me if I won it on a regular basis (though the odds of finding a hundred-dollar bill on the sidewalk are probably greater), but most of them (I’m looking at you, Amazon and Google) don’t even throw out that parsimonious crumb.  I imagine many if not most people just ignore these begging leviathans as I do, but enough people must participate to make it worthwhile.  Good grief, don’t y’all recognize that the number one commodity in the developed world today is information?  It’s bad enough that these immense leeches skulk around behind us online and off, hungrily licking up the data traces we all inadvertently leave behind us as horses leave shit everywhere; do y’all really have to give them information voluntarily as well?  Google’s “We need some human help” is probably the most brazen of these, because it overtly acknowledges that it’s dealing with a human, then proceeds to treat that human as a machine from whom “help” (ie, valuable and marketable information) can be extracted merely for the demanding, with no offer of payment.  Fuck you, Google, and the same goes for all you other turgid, omnivorous blobs haunting Silicon Valley and Seattle.  Cut me in for a percentage of the profit on any data I give you and maybe I’ll consider it, but until then stop sniffing around my crotch and trying to get something for nothing like some gigantic Twitter rando demanding “debate” for free or a titanic time-waster trying to glean wanking material with your creepy questions.