Facebook is Celebration, Florida, the surreal Disney-owned community so effectively critiqued by Naomi Klein in her stimulating book, No Logo. It is a similacrum in the disturbing Dick/Baudrillard sense of the word. It is also a surrogate for more authentic and rich human connections.

So I’ll be extracting myself from Facebook over the next few days. Community and social media are supposed to contribute to humanity with new means of connecting, but when the price of that contact is sacrificing my privacy and autonomy as a citizen, we get a paradox.

Facebook has us hooked like the crack dealer who gets new clients by giving away product to create an addiction. 400 million have now become dependent to various degrees on Facebook as a core means of social communication. Getting off the drug is hard. Our community interactions are now being held hostage. We must pay with compromises to our privacy.

The increasing restrictions on my ability to determine what I share with others, combined with expanding defaults of openness that subject the millions of Facebook users to abuse. Certainly the majority of users, I believe, are not being as vigilant as they should be at protecting their identities from unobserved, and not so secret data mining.

Try this game.

Click on one of your Facebook friends. Then click on one of their friends who you don’t know. Click on their profile picture. Does it open into their whole folder of profile pictures? If so, they probably haven’t navigated the ever changing maze of Facebook privacy settings, or they don’t care who sees what, which is their prerogative. Then repeat this game 10 times going from profile to profile, seeing how many people likely neglect vigilance.

What are the threats? Two high profile ones are the Facebook data mining corporation itself and the app designers who get monstrously wide access to your identity data and activities in social media.

Years ago, people flocked out of AOL onto the internet in part because they didn’t want one corporation being aware of all their online activities.

It’s like Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he argued that it is not Orwell’s 1984 that we should fear but Huxley’s Brave New World because its model is totalitarianism by friendly hugs and not Orwellian jackboots.

Facebook is a system of subservience that we actually embrace. It has time-wasting games, ways of keeping up with friends’ Friday nights out, but within the context of disturbing increasingly anti-autonomy privacy policies. Explore these critiques of the latest imposition of Facebook into my autonomy, like this one. And despite some wonky logic in parts of this one, there are many thoughtful ideas that challenge the Kool-Aid we’ve been drinking.

At least in Twitter what we say we say, what we don’t say we don’t say. That’s it. Spammers are entering, but the anarchic community blocks them out quickly.

That’s also why the prominence of open source communication models like WordPress is growing because we don’t want “The Man” to be tracking our data/identity/existence.

So what am I going to do?

I’m going to stop compromising my autonomy and privacy for the sake of a communication/community platform.

There are new open source social media sites going live sporadically. We should be exploring these, supporting them and promoting them. In time we can get an open source, anarchic social media platform that functions better than the buggy Facebook and doesn’t compromise our freedom as a rule, something of that the freedom/anarchy of the original internet culture.

In the end, I just can’t handle the paradox that in order to partake of the access to connections in Facebook we have to give up core values of community: independence, equality, citizenship, interdependent responsibility. Developing community in the Facebook model is more than slightly like The Truman Show, where there is no benign master providing us the platform.

So my plan is to eradicate my personal profile from Facebook over the next few days. Politics, Re-Spun will still have a presence on Facebook, but primarily to drive human interaction to my website where what I post is not entirely owned by Facebook by virtue of it merely being there.

In the end, there is no real community in Facebook if the price of admission is accepting their claim of ownership over all community activities and where they set the rules for how we interact.

  • No Related Posts