He's made a slew of false claims before I turned off the video. Among which is the idea that companies like Facebook are merely valuable because of the "labor we provide". In fact, they make money through advertising and sharing data with advertisers. If socializing was all there was to value, these companies would be redundant. The service provided is content-delivery in various forms, that isn't free and it isn't something "anyone from the CS dept" would do as well.
To call it "labor" to share boomer-humor memes and use Marketplace (i.e. users doing what they want on FB) is stretching the term. As with youtube, the prolific creators on instagram and the like also make piles of money. Yet it's being framed as though they're putting all this effort for the company's benefit only.
Agreed. But I figured that slippery equivocation was obvious: the value provided by the big cloud platforms is an insane amount of engineering and system administration work to provide a reliable and large scale way for people to connect and share data, that's why we all go there, as well as, as you say, advertisements. The idea that any random CS department could replicate the Amazon Marketplace or AWS, or Facebook's infrastructure, is absurd.
To call it "labor" to share boomer-humor memes and use Marketplace (i.e. users doing what they want on FB) is stretching the term. As with youtube, the prolific creators on instagram and the like also make piles of money. Yet it's being framed as though they're putting all this effort for the company's benefit only.