FARM animals could be forgiven for wondering how they got so lucky. Plenty of free food, shelter from predators and cold winters. They have minimal workloads, lots of time to trot about, occasional sex: the farmyard must feel like a purpose-built beastly pleasure palace. Sadly, for the beasts, they can never imagine the sinister human purposes behind their existence until it’s too late. They can never possibly know that they live not to consume, but to be consumed, and that all their pleasures are leading them closer to the abattoir.

We can hardly blame these humble creatures for their delusions. Their species can’t conceive of industrial-scale exploitation.

But what about ourselves? Surely we’d never be naïve enough to plod around in our own pens and farmyards without twigging that we are, in fact, the meat?

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The outrage over the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal suggests that, actually, it’s perfectly possible. For a decade, barely anyone stopped to ask how a company offering a free service could also be worth half a trillion dollars. If only we’d remembered the economics of the farmyard. Facebook was only as “free” to us as swill is free to a pig; ultimately, we weren’t customers of a great free product, we were somebody else’s product.

That’s why, despite myself, I feel a new sympathy for the predatory multinational at the heart of the scandal. Blaming them for data mining is like getting mad at your pet boa constrictor when it strangles your cat. What did you expect? Crushing prey is built into its DNA. Similarly, Facebook is a vehicle for delivering highly targeted ads by collecting data that you freely upload about yourself. If it doesn’t do that it doesn’t realise its purpose and it dies. Forget Mark Zuckerberg’s half-baked rhetoric about human connectivity. Facebook is a parasite feeding off your attention: every other fact about it is secondary to that one basic purpose.

Most importantly, barring regulation, Facebook must logically continue to suck more and more from us. After all, it’s hitting peak user numbers. And it’s a capitalist firm with shareholders – they want, no, they need, to see growth.

We’ve already been living with the consequences of this for years. Facebook’s algorithms have got better and better at sucking the juices of our most immediate, base-level reactions. While at first it seemed to offer a platform for the full range of emotions, increasingly the lighter side has been drowned out by panic, unreflective outrage, barely concealed bullying and boasting. Every click overstimulates our ancestral impulses: fear and desire. And if Facebook is to continue growing, its algorithms will need to get even better at tweaking these immediate, attention-grabbing sentiments.

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Not that all emotions are bad, even in politics. That’s a common misconception. Indeed, emotion is what makes the politics of solidarity possible, and yes, occasionally, Facebook even seems to offer tools to promote this. However, never forget that it feeds off our attention, and the faster our reactions, the better. In that calculation, rational argument loses out because it’s far slower than the instincts you feel with your gut.

Facebook’s algorithms are basically little robots delivering stories to our news feeds that will brew up our fastest, lowest, most uninhibited responses so that we stay “engaged”. Thoughtlessly negative sentiments are flourishing as a result. The ideal user exists in a state of endless irritation, with little niggling self-doubts and grievances acting like itches burrowing into your bones until you must scratch them.

Is there an alternative that can preserve the good side of Facebook? There’s actually a very easy way to do this, but sadly in our current global climate it’s almost unimaginable.

Traditionally Facebook would be thought of as a natural monopoly. It attained that status far quicker than old-fashioned examples of monopoly industries like steel and oil. Monopoly, in fact, seems to be an inbuilt design feature of most internet industries that show any sign of profitability.

The solution, then, would be obvious if democracy had any power behind it. If Facebook was run as a public resource, there would be no need to constantly plumb the limits of our reptilian brain for the profit of advertisers.

We could then preserve most of the platform’s advantages without sacrificing rational debate and our capacity to live in public without surveillance.

Maybe, for some, the idea of a publicly owned news and opinion platform sounds dangerously Orwellian. It’s an understandable worry. But isn’t our current internet model already something of a dystopia, as multi-billionaire pharaohs with mind-control technologies bestride the world and “make the future” while democratic leaders declare their own redundancy? If that isn’t Orwell, it’s certainly Phillip K Dick, and just as dark.

In any case, a public response to Facebook is incredibly unlikely. Partly that’s because Facebook is a multinational firm that escapes all control by governments elected at the merely national level.

But mostly it’s because liberalism in America is banking on “good” billionaires like Zuckerberg to beat the bad billionaires like Trump.

Even though Zuckerberg, far more than Putin, was culpable for Trump’s triumph in 2016, American liberals will continue to kiss up to this self-declared saviour of mankind.

De-activating your Facebook might be a good idea, for so many reasons. But let’s not pretend we’re newly outraged about the mining of our data. It is part of the bargain we signed up for and, deep down, we must have known all along.

We have been fully complicit in our own exploitation.

This is simply a reminder, but don’t expect it to get better with a few half-baked reforms, because exploitation is in Facebook’s DNA.