Nothing in Life is Free: Uncovering the Hidden Costs of Technology

Abstract: “Nothing in Life is Free” was written in response to the 2020 Massey Lecture series in which Ron Diebert calls for a “reset” on our use and overreliance on technology. Although this piece was written for a grade twelve English course, as noted by the reviewer, it ties in “many lessons learned in CTS classrooms” while touching on many of the dilemmas posed by current digital communication environments. Blending my own reflections on growing up in late-stage capitalism with references to literary texts and Diebert’s research, this personal essay questions the paradox of “free” in a society that binds our physical and digital existence, entangling us in systems of control under the promise of liberation.

Nothing in Life is Free: Uncovering the Hidden Costs of Technology

When I was younger, every time my family went to McDonald’s, my siblings and I would attempt to convince our parents to order us Happy Meals. Although we enjoyed the food, the best part was inedible and free. Unfortunately, our parents weren’t quite sold on the prospect of a free toy. Most often, they’d reply to our enthusiastic sales pitch by saying, “nothing in life is free,” which we quickly learned was a code word for “no.” This response, which would be used in a variety of contexts from buy-one-get-one-free sales to free digital apps, would frustrate my younger self, who believed that “free” products were free.

That iconic red box was among the many things that I saw through rose coloured glasses in my childhood, and as I outgrew them, I began to see that Happy Meals aren’t as happy as they seem. McDonald’s has faced controversy surrounding their Happy Meals in the past couple of decades. Recently, McDonald’s released a free Happy Meal app that comes with a multitude of child-friendly games allowing customers to unlock special features by scanning the smile on their Happy Meal box.¹ Astoundingly, this app now combines two things that are unhealthy for children, fast food and technology, yet somehow manages to market it successfully. This pairing is fascinating because fast food and technology are two entirely different things, yet they share a shocking number of similarities, not just in their appeal but also in their negative potential. Both became accessible to the average home in the late 1970s and have since become a normal part of our lives. Children who eat large amounts of fast food or spend excessive time on technology are more likely to continue this habit as adults, and adults who do this are likely to pass this lifestyle onto their children, possibly creating problematic intergenerational cycles.²

¹ McDonalds, “McDonald’s Happy Meal App,” Happy Meal App, March 4, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20220304220708/https://www.happymealapp.com/country/ca.

² Agata Rocka et al., “The Impact of Digital Screen Time on Dietary Habits and Physical Activity in Children and Adolescents,” Nutrients 14, no. 14 (July 21, 2022): 2985, https://doi.org/10.3390/nu14142985.

In addition to both being somewhat addictive by design, their overuse contributes to health problems such as obesity, cardiovascular disease, type two diabetes, depression, anxiety, concentration issues, and sleep problems.  ³⁴⁵⁶

As public awareness about the harmful effects of fast food has grown, McDonald’s has faced increasing pressure to provide more transparency about their ingredients. Nutritional information has now been made widely accessible, alongside changes to their menu that promote a more health-conscious image. Regarding technology, in the 2020 CBC Massey Lectures, Ron Diebert wondered whether consumers would still want to buy electronic devices if they included full lists of ingredients. Unlike Happy Meals, the ingredients in electronics don’t directly pollute our bodies, but they have a devastating impact on our environment. Even before devices are purchased, their mining and manufacturing processes generate about 95% of electronic-related waste. There are around 70 chemical elements that make up our electronics.⁷ Mining them creates an enormous amount of waste, air and water pollution, habitat destruction, and mistreatment of local populations.  Our electronics also produce waste from assembly, packaging, transportation, toxic chemicals, energy, and carbon dioxide, as well as contributing to social issues such as child labour and unsafe working conditions.⁸ Clearly, our current production of electronics isn’t sustainable. In her 2018 TED Talk, Kim Preshoff noted that “the ingredients we mine to make our phones aren’t infinite. One day, they’ll simply run out, and we haven’t yet discovered effective replacements for some.

³ Emily Heil, “The Happy Meal, a Triumph of Marketing Blamed for Childhood Obesity, Is Turning 40,” Washington Post, November 6, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2019/11/06/the-happy-meal-a-triumph-of-marketing-blamed-for-childhood-obesity-is-turning-40/.

⁴ Jon Johnson, “Negative Effects of Technology: Psychological, Social, and Health,” Medical News Today, February 25, 2020, https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/negative-effects-of-technology.

⁵ Priory, “Internet Addiction Symptoms,” Priory Group, July 2018, https://web.archive.org/web/20210122064322/https://www.priorygroup.com/addiction-treatment/internet-addiction-treatment/symptoms-of-internet-addiction.

⁶ Kris Gunnars, “How Food Addiction Works,” Healthline, December 4, 2019, https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-food-addiction-works.

⁷ What’s a Smartphone Made of?, TED Ed, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIdJ22AfsO8.

⁸ Ron Diebert, “Burning Data,” 2020 Massey Lectures, n.d., https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/reset-reclaiming-the-internet-for-civil-society-1.5795345.

Despite this, the number of smartphones is on a steady increase; by 2019 it’s predicted that there’ll be close to 3 billion in use.”⁹ Due to rapid technological growth and planned obsolescence, our mountain of e-waste grows as we buy new devices and discard the old. In 2014, discarded devices accounted for 14 million tonnes of e-waste. Experts project that figure to rise to 74.7 million tonnes by 2030.¹⁰

I had no idea of the calculable environmental damage I was contributing to when I paid for my first smartphone-like device, an iPod touch, at age 13. Even further from my mind were the incalculable or hidden costs of technology. I was simply enraptured by the abundance of free information, communication, and entertainment I now had at my fingertips. Immediately, I began to download “free” games. Alas, there were limits to my newfound freedom: parental controls requiring my parents’ permission to download. So, I prepared a mini sales pitch explaining the pros and cons of each app with emphasis on the feature that they were free. Once again, I heard that familiar phrase “nothing in life is free”. Sure, I had to sit through a bunch of ads each time I played, but I could rationalize that. After all, the app was free and needed to make money somehow. 

It turns out that I actually did pay for these games. Although I wasn’t charged a monetary fee, they ended up costing me time, which is arguably more valuable than money. After all, we can spend time to make more money, but we can’t spend money to make more time. Whatever time we spend on technology ultimately comes at the cost of another experience, which might have been a better time investment than staring at a screen. Although there is no consensus for the maximum amount of screen time adults should get, studies show that adults spend an average of eleven hours per day on electronics.¹¹  This number was shocking to me, but as Jeremy Gordon describes in his essay, Dear God, do I really game that much?, the amount of time we actually spend on electronics often comes as a surprise.

⁹ Kim Preshoff, What’s a Smartphone Made of?, TED Ed, 2018.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIdJ22AfsO8.

¹⁰ Carolyn Gramling, “Earth’s e-Waste Stash Is Bulking Up,” Science News 2, no. 198 (2020): 5.

¹¹ Scripps, “How Much Screen Time Is Too Much?,” Scripps Health, February 8, 2019, https://www.scripps.org/news_items/6626-how-much-screen-time-is-too-much.

This is supported by a recent study which found that “self-reported screen time differed significantly from actual screen time,” with young adults significantly underestimating the amount of time spent on their smartphones.¹²  This goes to show that not only do we often forget that time is money, we also don't realize how much of it we’re spending. 

I’m among the young adults who receive an unpleasant surprise every time I check the screen time on my phone. My biggest time waster is definitely Instagram. I will intend to spend five minutes on it checking my messages, then wind up an hour later wondering where the time went. Instagram was the first social media account I ever created when I was fourteen, and it took over a year to convince my skeptical parents to let me get it. I sat through many talks about the dangers lurking online and the importance of protecting my privacy, all with that underlying message, “nothing in life is free’. By fourteen, I could now see why they said this about Happy Meals, as the toy’s cost is built into the price of the meal, but I remained smugly convinced that Instagram was free.

Naively, I enjoyed the free services of Instagram, Google, and other online platforms without questioning how they earned billions with no user fee. Prior to listening to the 2020 Massey Lectures, I would only ever consider the lower-level function of these platforms: the overt benefits they offer users. I was surprised to learn they also serve a higher-level function in their underlying business model of data harvesting and surveillance capitalism.¹³ Consumers often don’t realize that we pay to access free information with our personal information. Online services can get permission to access a myriad of personal information, including IP addresses, names, locations, contacts, cameras, and cookies from which they can derive our relationships, lifestyles, and preferences in order to create detailed profiles of their users.

¹² Leora N. Hodes and Kevin G. F. Thomas, “Smartphone Screen Time: Inaccuracy of Self-Reports and Influence of Psychological and Contextual Factors,” Computers in Human Behavior 115 (February 1, 2021): 106616, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106616.

¹³  Ron Diebert, “The Market for Our Minds,” 2020 Massey Lectures, n.d., https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/reset-reclaiming-the-internet-for-civil-society-1.5795345.

This harvesting of consumer data results in the widespread elimination of consumer privacy. With such a wide range of personal information accessible to third parties, the situation takes on a much darker tone, not unlike that of the dystopia found in George Orwell’s 1984. After all, if we aren't paying, we are the product. Online platforms like Google and Facebook collect our data and make billions from it through surveillance capitalism.¹⁴ According to Ron Diebert, “the real customers of online platforms are other businesses that are interested in predictions of human behaviour generated by social media platforms and data analytics machinery.”  The data that free platforms collect can be used to tailor advertisements to their users’ online activity, influencing what people purchase in order to produce revenue and market control.¹⁵ This raises the question, how much of our freedom are we selling to get a free product?  

Whether we’re talking about the free toys in Happy Meals or electronics and free apps, everything comes with a price. The word free is like the screen on a phone. It entices us with pretty pictures while covering up all that happens beneath and beyond its surface. Although electronics were integrated into modern society with the promise of improving our lives, the price of our ever-expanding digital world often isn’t evident when we first sign up. Money only covers a portion of these costs. We pay for electronics when their usage negatively impacts our mental and physical health as well as the health of our society and planet. We also pay for technology with our lives, both in terms of time and identity, as the irresistible offer of a free product ultimately transforms us into products. When we think beyond what is directly presented to us, we begin to realize the abundance of costs not included in the price tag of our phone. Ron Diebert’s question still remains: does knowing the costs or seeing the full list of ingredients change consumer habits? Is the next step one in which we choose not to purchase a phone, or do we need something bigger to save ourselves, our planet and our digital world?

¹⁴ Ibid

¹⁵ Ibid

Bibliography

Diebert, Ron. “Burning Data.” Massey Lectures, 2020 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/reset-reclaiming-the-internet-for-civil-society-1.5795345.

———. “The Market for Our Minds.” Massey Lectures, 2020 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/reset-reclaiming-the-internet-for-civil-society-1.5795345.

Gramling, Carolyn. “Earth’s e-Waste Stash Is Bulking Up.” Science News 2, no. 198 (2020): 5.

Gunnars, Kris. “How Food Addiction Works.” Healthline, December 4, 2019. https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-food-addiction-works.

Heil, Emily. “The Happy Meal, a Triumph of Marketing Blamed for Childhood Obesity, Is Turning 40.” Washington Post, November 6, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/voraciously/wp/2019/11/06/the-happy-meal-a-triumph-of-marketing-blamed-for-childhood-obesity-is-turning-40/.

Hodes, Leora N., and Kevin G. F. Thomas. “Smartphone Screen Time: Inaccuracy of Self-Reports and Influence of Psychological and Contextual Factors.” Computers in Human Behavior 115 (February 1, 2021): 106616. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106616.

Johnson, Jon. “Negative Effects of Technology: Psychological, Social, and Health.” Medical News Today, February 25, 2020. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/negative-effects-of-technology.

McDonalds. “McDonald’s Happy Meal App.” Happy Meal App, March 4, 2022. https://web.archive.org/web/20220304220708/https://www.happymealapp.com/country/ca.

Priory. “Internet Addiction Symptoms.” Priory Group, July 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20210122064322/https://www.priorygroup.com/addiction-treatment/internet-addiction-treatment/symptoms-of-internet-addiction.

Rocka, Agata, Faustyna Jasielska, Dominika Madras, Paulina Krawiec, and Elżbieta Pac-Kożuchowska. “The Impact of Digital Screen Time on Dietary Habits and Physical Activity in Children and Adolescents.” Nutrients 14, no. 14 (July 21, 2022): 2985. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu14142985.

Scripps. “How Much Screen Time Is Too Much?” Scripps Health, February 8, 2019. https://www.scripps.org/news_items/6626-how-much-screen-time-is-too-much.

What’s a Smartphone Made of? TED Ed, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIdJ22AfsO8.

Author Biography: Amelia Flynn (she/her) is an undergraduate student double majoring in English and Culture & Technology Studies at the University of Guelph. When she’s not exploring the intersections of literature and technology, she enjoys spending time with her dogs and perfecting her coffee routine.