IRL Prosumption

Hi everyone,
Throughout this course we have discussed how prosumption has grown from web 2.0 taking advantage of its users free labour, to Manzerolle discussing how social media companies have figured out how to straight up exploit us, monetize our work and increase their profits through advertising they force on us through their apps.

I would like to talk about how this is increasingly concerning because businesses IRL are beginning to take hints from the online industry.

In this article "Prosumption: Why Just About Everyone Unwittingly Works for Free," the author lists a bunch of things that are technically prosumption in the offline world.  Things like building IKEA furniture, pumping your own gas and now even making your own food at restaurants.

I thought this was significant to talk about on the blog because we had talked about IKEA furniture in class earlier, but I think we were able to justify it's "worth" for the consumer by saying that by building the furniture ourselves it saves us money.  This is similar to how with social media, at first it wasn't really significant that our personal data was being mined, because we got to use the service for free.

Now however, restaurants like these ones are charging restaurant prices for food that you could buy for much cheaper at the grocery store, and advertising it to you as "DIY Restaurants," like it's a fun outing with your friends. In reality though, you are paying to do what these businesses formerly had to pay employees to do.

This to me is just like the way we as social media users are being exploited for our personal data, as well as by being the primary content producers on these platforms.

Can anyone think of any other ways that these IRL prosumer businesses might be detrimental, other than just being exploitative?