you are the product

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

This is a quote about television advertising from the 1970s. The earliest known reference is from this YouTube video.

The original quote actually is, "The Product of Television, Commercial Television, is the Audience."

Television Delivers People by Richard Serra

1973 | 00:05:55 | United States | English | Color | Mono | 4:3 | Video

Television Delivers People is a seminal work in the now well-established critique of popular media as an instrument of social control that asserts itself subtly on the populace through “entertainments,” for the benefit of those in power—the corporations that mantain and profit from the status quo. While canned Muzak plays, a scrolling text denounces the corporate masquerade of commercial television to reveal the structure of profit that greases the wheels of the media industry. Television emerges as little more than a insidious sponsor for the corporate engines of the world. By appropriating the medium he is criticizing—using television, in effect, against itself—Serra employs a characteristic strategy of early, counter-corporate video collectives—a strategy that remains integral to video artists committed to a critical dismantling of the media’s political and ideological stranglehold.

where is there to go after you have been around?

Evil has no positive worth of its own. It is always a parasite, a terrible absence of goodness that seeks to draw all things that are good into its own emptiness. This emptiness is the real nature of the world in all its guises. The world has nothing to offer; it can only consume and destroy. Its synthetic smiles and frantic entertainment cannot conceal the void within. On the streets at night, around gambling tables, at bars, in airports, in boardrooms, on golf courses – in countless places the world reveals its true poverty, always in the same way. The eyes of the world are glazed, hard, empty. The sparkle is gone, the innocence is gone, the spontaneous excitement in the new moment is gone. Weary but not from service, old but not with wisdom, they scan the space before them. Perhaps there is still one thrill untried. Perhaps things would be better with a new job, a new house, a new husband, a new wife. Where is there to go after you have been around? 

The Lord’s Question: Thoughts on the Life of Response by Dennis Rasmussen. Brigham Young University Press. April 1985. Chapter Four, “Whom Shall I Send?” p.44