You don’t know it, but you’re working for Facebook. For free.

[Commentary] What do you call a multimillion-dollar, for-profit company that’s run in large part by unpaid or underpaid grunt laborers? A century ago, you might’ve dubbed it robber-barony or sharecropping — if not, you know, outright slavery. In 2015, though, we call it the social Web: a glorious dystopia where everybody works for likes — as in, “for free” — while a handful of tech tycoons profit.

“Digital labor is like a meeting with free pizza and soda,” quips the new media scholar Trebor Scholz, “but the Stasi is listening in.”

That may seem like a dramatic analogy — the Stasi were, after all, a Cold War-era secret police — but it goes pretty far toward explaining exactly how blurred the lines have become between things we used to consider distinct: things like pizza parties and espionage. Or playing and working. Uploading a selfie to Facebook, for instance, seems like something we do for fun. But Facebook, the very company that convinced us that online “sharing” was a natural facet of the human condition, uses that selfie to target ads and boost its profits.