MEMOIR OF A FORMER FB USER
I was once a Facebook user. I had a fair number of ‘friends’, though I was always a little uncomfortable with the term, as it always seemed presumptuous to me anyway that a this person, whomsoever they might be, would actually choose to communicate and conduct a friendship on something so restrictive as a social media site. Still, I figured, its not my choice of word, in reality they are connections, and tentative connections at best given the limits of the site and the fact that everything one does and says on the site is recorded, collated, stored, analysed, and used mainly for advertising profiling and of course for psychological profiling. We make about five or six friends, by this I mean real friends, in life. If someone has the wherewithal to conduct more, well bless their gifts I say.
CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA
Then came the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where by a company with a made up name, designed to sound pretentiously academic, conducted a social experiment so as to improperly influence people to vote in a certain way. They did this by a complex profiling mechanism, which enabled them with a high degree of accuracy to paint a comprehensive picture of the users in their pool of guinea pigs, and, after developing this profile, knew just were to push or where to tickle to get each person to vote in the way they wanted. It was a sophisticated form of brainwashing, mind control, social engineering. And, you guessed it, I was one of them. I was informed one day on FB, and it took me a long time to understand what had happened, and when I did, I was so angry.
TRUMP AND BREXIT
Cambridge Analytica’s work made Brexit happen. It got Trump elected in 2016. Despite all the dire warnings and Jeremiads about Trump and Brexit from our brightest and our best, it still happened. Why? Well back then this technology was so new no one really understood except a select few people, mostly those involved in building the beast, or funding it. This new force for oppression was new and freshly squeezed, and folks just didn’t know about the new tech that reached into people’s minds and hearts and subtly took away their freedom to choose all by themselves. I quit Facebook, naturally.
MINDFUCKING
Having my own personal, albeit peripheral, very angry brush with the horrible things that happen on Facebook, I began perusing the many excellent books coming out about social media and its power to effect a new world order. Mindfuck by C Wylie is thrilling, and F Haugens The Power of One also unputdownable. Haugens was a data scientist in Facebook. She found what Zuckerberg was doing with the algorithm deeply alarming in terms of harm to democracy, societal cohesion, harm to people, human trafficking, harm to young girls, and indeed the very future of civilisation especially after the siege on the Capitol. So, talking to the Wall Street Journal, and taking 24,000 documents with her, she quit and blew the whistle on the whole system. Wylie, on the other hand, was one of the main architects of the Cambridge Analytica system of analysis and thought control. The book he wrote was equally brilliant. By the way the movie about Haugens is terrible, has been universally panned, and is nothing like the book. Perhaps if they make one about Wylie it might be better. He is a witty and colourful fellow. I gently suggest not bothering with the movie as its probably going hurt your brain, as my annoyance at how badly this deeply important subject was handled by Sorkin et al prompted me to write this. But the books are cracking. And there are many more of them. Both Haugens and Wylie testified before various parliaments in the UK and the Senate in the USA. Both groups listened to both very clever folks, nodded sagely, took excellent notes, asked concerned questions, made worried sounds, and like some postmodern Samuel Beckett play, nothing happened twice.
HERE COMES THE NEW BOSS
So, nothing has changed and Facebook the leviathan is still hurting all it touches, radicalising people and undermining the social fabric of our world. It has billions of users, makes trillions of dollars and has unlimited power and resources. What should be a force for good, for charity and communication and the harmonisation of human relations, is turning into one of the worst multibillion dollar making disasters for civilization; a force not for good, but for rage bait, addiction, depression, mental illness, wars, human trafficking, suicides, low self esteem, loneliness, envy of others, misinformation, societal breakdown, monstrous timewasting, and epic stupidity. why? Pain makes for clicks and clicks and shares lead to ads and that makes for more engagement.
THE POLIICS OF ADVERTISING
I think often of the sheer madness of electing Donald Trump, and remember the warnings from the left and the right when he came on the scene. His election was effected through the manipulation of social media, which because of the non fact checking of political ads, allows lies to perpetuate on its platform, the kinds of social engineering spoken of by Wylie in his book and testimony.
PEOPLE ARE LYING TO US FOR MONEY
Nothing is for free. If it appears to be for free, as they say, its because we are the product. FB and its sister apps are literally feeding on our data, data they have no right to in the first place; data that is used for ads, politics, profiling, surveillance, policing, propaganda, time wasting, loss of freedoms. Sometimes you’re not paranoid if they are out to get you, to crib from Joe Heller.
FREE SPEECH
FB and its partner apps claim that they are blameless as they are ‘like a town square’ where people can say what they like, an advocacy of a notion of free speech absolutism. But that’s just nuts. No one is free to say what they like. Its sheer lunacy to say just anything, like we have no filter at all – except if you want to start a big row, and from that an endless supply of clickbait. I can give examples of what I can’t really say either on print or in person, but that would be inappropriate here, and put me in a kind of liars paradox situation. Let’s just suggest that experience and history shows that words harm just the same as any other weapon. Sharper than any sword, take a look – at social media – as the devastating, at times life ending consequences, of so called free speech is there for all to see. All those who have to sign NDAs before they join FB are absolutely unfree to say what they like. This free speech absolutism is a very one sided notion of free speech, useful on the platform, but has no place in reality. Speech has to be curated, not controlled. Insults, lies, false testimony, cruelty, etc has to be prevented and curated out of the social exchange for everyones safety. Absolutism in any form is a form of fascism. Free speech absolutism is nonsense, illogical, and ultimately a licence to do inmensurable harm by claiming free speech rights when terrible things are said and posted. Harvesting the products of rage/click bait keeps people posting and surfing and the dollars rolling in like a big green tsunami.
THE STATE OF FB
FB is a vast and multifaceted corporation that has become a kind of totalitarian state with its own great leader, someone who is very clever indeed, very hands on with his dispensation of policy, enormously erudite and thoughtful and creative, with no one to either rein him in or control the increasingly disastrous course social media is on. Absolute power, as they say, does not corrupt. It merely shows the man that was always beneath the boyish smile and thrilling success of the heady days in 2003 when he let down his friends and co investors after the huge success of the ‘hot or not’ site (a separate site sold for a fortune by its founders to Ashley Madison) that Zuckerberg used as a basis for Facemash, that later became FB.
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