Turn the WhatsApp lights off one by one

Starting day after tomorrow, May 15, WhatsApp will start turning off features if you don’t agree to the Facebook-owned messaging service’s new terms of service. ‘Terms of service’ are usually the boring bits that you blindly ‘ok’. But for many — enough to have made Facebook postpone the new terms in January — these terms make a Faustian deal. Your ‘soul’ — in the form of information from your WhatsApp that will allow businesses to connect shops with similar services on Facebook — is up for sale. All you have to do to KeepUp your WhatsApp features is sign on the dotted.com line.

But the Devil lies in incremental change. If you don’t approve of the new terms, certain features will be denied from Saturday. ‘After a few weeks,’ it will be total WhatsDown. What’s smart about Mephistophelean Facebook this time is it knows that as soon as many users find themselves not being able to, say, forward messages or sent memes, they’ll go for ‘ok’. Many hold-outs may well resist. After ‘a few weeks,’ many, unable to receive calls, or reply to messages, will cave in. Some freedom fighters will signal a further exodus to Signal etc. But what is interesting is the ‘turn off by a thousand cuts’ approach. It’ll scare most to StayPut with WhatsApp, despite late capitalism’s dirty tricks. There may be a lesson here for all marketeers. A devilish one, too.