Forget Facebook
Facebook is not what the internet should be. It is the internet redesigned by people who want information to be owned, and specifically owned by them. It is the internet enclosed, territorialized, packaged up and sold off. The internet for dummies.
Facebook is a walled recreation park, circled by corporate vultures and watched over by beady-eyed CIA spooks. Within the park is an attractive collection of shiny play-equipment, all of it spattered with vulture-shit. People play tag and pretend to be zombies, ride on toy scooters and clamber over climbing frames in the shapes of tractors and space rockets. On the other side of the wall are real tractors and real space rockets: open standards like Atom, SMTP and XMPP, free (as in speech) software like WordPress, MediaWiki and Moodle. Inside the park, you can peruse advertisements for hair removal clinics and online gambling. Outside the park – well, there’s plenty of that crap there, too; those vultures get everywhere. But there’s also Wikipedia, Freesound and Project Gutenberg.
Facebook is to the real internet as those Vtech “laptop” toys for children are to real laptops. It’s a cheat, a con, a distraction. It gives you nothing you don’t already have, if you have an email account, a blog (doesn’t have to be owned by Google; this one isn’t), a bit of webspace you can post text and photos to. You don’t need Facebook to join a discussion group, or to join forces with other people who are concerned about the same social and political issues as you. You don’t even need Facebook to play silly word games.
I wanted to say that I deleted my Facebook account today, but as a matter of fact Facebook won’t let me do that. I can “deactivate” it, for sure, and have done so; but as for getting the personal data I was stupid enough to put on their servers taken off it for good, well, that’s at their discretion. They own a piece of me now, forever. It’s not a big piece, but I certainly don’t want it getting any bigger. Fuck ‘em.
* * *
And the same goes for MySpace, which is less evil only to the extent that it’s comparatively incompetently executed. I’ve cancelled the MySpace accounts for both w/trem and Spiral Jacobs; they’ll both be disappearing presently. If you want to hear my music, you can download all of it from this site, and in better quality.
January 15th, 2008 at 1:53 am
Well, you’ve certainly convinced me that I’m right not to have a Facebook page and not to feel any anxiety about said lack.
January 15th, 2008 at 12:16 pm
Quite. I finally deleted my Facebook account completely (having deactivated it a while ago) by following the advice in this post. Blogs to the rescue once again.
January 16th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
As the man said, you’ve taken your first step into a larger world.
January 16th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
I find it surprising that you ever had a facebook account at all.
January 16th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
But no one is under any illusions about Facebook, surely. The fact that it’s not run by two bearded men in a yurt with organic laptops has always been clear.
Whilst it clearly is a silly, childish waste of time, it is very, very useful for reminding you to wish people happy birthday and for turning up to things you’d agreed to go to but had forgotten when they were. That is about it though.
January 16th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
So basically (1) whatever you can do on Facebook you can do somewhere else, (2) you can’t retract and destroy every trace you’ve made through Facebook (and this is oppressive), (3) people act silly on Facebook and silliness is reprehensible, (4) other blogging platforms avoid information ownership problems.
Each of these claims is indefensible and obviously false. Sure the Facebook moguls are not the most admirable people, but is drawing so thick of a line between it and the ‘internet proper’ really justifiable? Not to mention the fairly conservative, Situationist-style position you seem to be supporting (phony ‘tractors’ on one side, real ones on the other) … I suppose all Facebook users are mindless consumers of corporate experiments (opposed to you ‘real’ bloggers)? I have to say I’m also disappointed to see infinite_thought (lightly) lamenting ’silly behavior’ and ‘childish wasting of [precious?] time’, when her blog otherwise seems to champion this lost form of the subject …
January 16th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Oh yeah, monkeys and pigs are fine, just not so keen on friend comparisons and ‘which vegetable are you?’-type quizzes (actually that sounds quite good). Am not really against childish wastes of time. And, hey, I never, ever say anything against ’silly behaviour’, which is an entirely different kettle of pork rinds.
January 16th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
1) is largely true; nearly all of the pieces of Facebook have an independent existence outside of Facebook, all of them can be (and have been) implemented using existing free (as in speech) software and open standards. I’ve been thinking about whether there are any significant exceptions, particularly in the area of access control: assuming there are things I want only certain people to see, what’s the least bothersome (to them) way of letting them provide me with appropriate credentials? One doesn’t want to have to be entering passwords all the time. Here’s where the walled enclosure approach has somewhat of an unfair advantage over a horde of discrete sites in the wild; there’s still a need for a widely-adopted decentralised identity management system. I think it will come.
2) is nearly true; it is in fact possible to get an account thoroughly deleted, but it’s a serious hassle. The fact that it’s not available immediately on demand is irksome; there’s no real practical impediment (or if there is, this is down to negligently bad design). UK data protection law says various citizen-friendly things about what companies are and aren’t allowed to retain once a customer has chosen to terminate a relationship with them. I’m not a lawyer, but I think it’s safe to say that other online service providers are much more comfortably on the right side of this law than Facebook is.
3) is rather besides the point. People do indeed act silly on Facebook; I spent a fair amount of time devising sarcastic and/or filthy answers to 10-second interview questions. It isn’t the silliness that’s reprehensible, it’s the petty crapness of the silliness that’s on offer. On the internet we can do grandly, stupendously silly things together. On Facebook we can muck about in a slightly desultory way with a few widgets. Maybe if we petition the owners long enough and hard enough, they’ll let us describe our current “status” without using the word “is”…
4) is certainly true, inasmuch as there exist ways of having a blog that don’t have these issues around privacy and information ownership. Having a blog on Blogger is not one of these ways. Running free (as in speech) blogging software on a web account you control, hosted by a company with a sound privacy policy, is greatly preferable.
I signed up on Facebook originally when I heard they’d opened up their API – the thought of being able to extend a social networking system in interesting ways, connecting it with other systems and making it a full web citizen (so to speak) was quite attractive.
It turns out there’s some limited scope for doing that, but it’s not a coincidence that the predominant model for Facebook apps at present is to pull in some content from an isolated silo elsewhere, and try to sell advertising on top of it (since the bandwidth costs have to be met somehow). Most of them seem to be pyramid scheme-style attempts at magicking up money; there’s a trend for new apps (of little or no intrinsic worth or interest) to insist on your forwarding invitations to at least twenty other people before they’ll let you get at their spurious goodies.
My problem isn’t just that Facebook’s owners aren’t nice people; it’s that Facebook is a quite consistent presentation of that sort of person’s idea of what the web should be like, and their idea of what the web should be like is antithetically opposed to that of the people who built the web, and most of the good things in it. In terms of that vision of a massive decentralised communications network where information can be freely shared and new and powerful collectivities can come into being, it’s a bad joke and a blind-alley.
January 17th, 2008 at 6:14 am
Attacking Facebook on the grounds of intellectual and social bankruptcy makes sense, as well as the fairly exploitative directions it’s going in re: user identity – but saying that’s antithetical to the INTERNET? Even if it hasn’t been the “vision” of those that built it, the internet gets to some semblance of the kind of decentralised, deterritorialized ideals you talk about precisely BECAUSE it allows entities like Facebook to exist alongside Wikipedia, WordPress, etc.
It’s not exactly convincing to argue for a “free” network if you’re going to argue for the exclusion of certain, more unsavory networks within that condition of freedom. The internet is such a generously anarchic, motiveless technology to begin with, I’m not sure how you can really try to and lay some rubric for congruency at its feet. Maybe what you’re getting at is the inability of alternate networks to levy as much pressure against Facebook as you think necessary?
January 17th, 2008 at 7:19 am
I missed the bit where I argued for the exclusion of Facebook, called for legislation to prevent it from existing, etc…
I don’t think we should ban Facebook. I think we should ignore it.
January 17th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
Poke.
:-)
January 17th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
I missed that bit too.
Sorry I wasn’t clearer: I was thinking of your claim that “Facebook is to the real internet as those Vtech ‘laptop’ toys for children are to real laptops” – that because Facebook is a con it should not be thought of as a substantial part of the “real” internet? Or maybe I misunderstood?
January 17th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
It might be worth comparing the long-running argument about whether SOAP-encoded RPC-over-HTTP really deserves the name “web services”, or whether a word like “web” carries normative as well as descriptive connotations. Obviously I’m making a normative claim here: “the real internet” is necessarily only a very small subset of the actually existing internet, an unmeasurable portion of which is unquestionably crap. I take your point that the true ethos of the internet generously tolerates such crap and that it wouldn’t be the internet if it didn’t.
What I particularly object to in Facebook is its enclosure of already-existing technologies – “feeds”, “messages”, “groups” and so on, as if no-one had ever bothered to invent RSS, email and bulletin boards. It really is a case of privatising the air, then selling it back to you in little plastic bottles “with added nitrogen!”…
January 18th, 2008 at 10:13 am
“Enclosure” is apt, as in “enclosure of the commons”. Problem is that “ignore Facebook” as a strategy is akin to “ignore industrialisation” – it can’t help but slide into exasperated impotence.
Q: is Facebook any worse than Google?
January 18th, 2008 at 11:17 am
“Maybe if we petition the owners long enough and hard enough, they’ll let us describe our current “status” without using the word “is”…”
That’s been possible for a few weeks now.
January 18th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
Back in about October I invited a group of students to investigate whether or not Facebook had any potential educational value. They fairly quickly concluded that it didn’t.
I signed up to it so that I could play asynchronous Scrabble with your sister (which I do, generally with 3 games running simultaneously). As I’m sure I’ve told you, I was an early adopter of the ISC (when there were only about 50 people playing, as opposed to the 4000 that are normally there now). ISC had the advantage that you could play really high-powered games against the computer – for that service you now have to pay, and wait your turn with hundreds of others. I mostly found playing real-time games with people in far-flung places rather tedious.
I really don’t want to do most of the silly things that Facebook has to offer, any more than I want to read the magazines you go past when you queue up in Smiths or Boots – on the other hand, just occasionally I pick up something useful (were you aware that one of your aunts was 60 on Wednesday, or that your youngest aunt is 50 next week?).
The thing is, I don’t really care who might be snooping on me – I haven’t given away any information about myself that is not freely available in a lot of other places on the web, and I have no intention of doing so – and I don’t mistake this stuff for the ‘real internet’. What proportion of the world’s blogs are currently inert? Is it about 75%?
January 19th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
I presume you are aware of Open Social (http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/). What are your thoughts?
January 19th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Yeah, that’s more the kind of thing. Ideally I’d want it to be the case that anybody could host a node of “OpenBook”, with trust relationships between different nodes meaning that logging in to one node would get your credentials recognised by other nodes that trusted that node (there might be different levels of trust).
Publishing an XML document with things like your birthday and a list of your favourite movies is not hard, and neither is aggregating all your friends’ published profile documents and having a page that tells you when they update or alerts you when it’s someone’s birthday. Restricting access to such documents to people who ask for it (and you’re willing to give it to) is a more interesting problem, hence the need for some sort of distributed authentication system. That, I think, is the hard bit…
January 20th, 2008 at 3:56 am
Openid gets you the basics of distributed authentication, I think. If you published a list of OpenIDs that you trusted (as it might be, via FOAF), it shouldn’t be all that hard for a web site to then restrict access to people you trust. DiSo looks to be the beginnings of just such a project.
January 21st, 2008 at 11:43 am
True. Also, highlighting breaking technologies which have implications in social networks, Microformats are gonna be a big deal soon, though some tell me that RDF will be a better solution, but as a developer I am sceptical in the short term – I could roll out Microformats in a few hours of hacking on my live site and not have to learn anything new, where as RDF would need a lot more work.
Sad thing is though, that like back in the day when everyone programmed for IE 4 even though its rendering was absolutely shit box when it came to standards competence, the Facebook API is become a de-facto standard – for example, Bebo launched its own application API yesterday, BUT it supports Facebook API now and Opensocial only later this year. Which completely shows the situation.
This is, I feel, because big web standards are naturally slow moving things, where as corporations can just declare this kind of stuff by fiat.
The Facebook homepage ain’t even valid XHTML! – http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Ffacebook.com&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0 . Don’t even bother with Myspace – “The checked page did not contain a document type (“DOCTYPE”) declaration.”
January 21st, 2008 at 3:31 pm
Sam Ruby has a good HowTo on OpenID here:
http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-SuperUsers
January 24th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
No doubt you saw this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook
January 27th, 2008 at 1:57 am
We share sort of the same views on this. And while the majority of the text in >http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook < seems like repetitious droning, I can’t say he’s much far off from the point either. But, really – and this is where I think the article really doesn’t do enough here – I think the biggest reason I had deleted my account was not because of the inescapability of capitalist coercion (or anything like that)…but because it never gave me any route to re-invent myself. Here’s The kid I sat next to in math class (we talked?) and Richard Bleekins from Wake Forest University (um, how did we meet?); it felt like apparitional representation of social structures. I’ve got friends who hyperventilate over girls on this thing, manifesting fictitious, alluring personalities of not just themselves but of people they want to meet.
And Facebook feeds off this. They didn’t just stop by one-upping the compulsive away-message-makers of AIM with the “what I’m doing right now” feature, supposedly (could be a rumor) something more confrontational, more illusory is in the works in terms of a person-to-person chat function.
“And the same goes for MySpace, which is less evil only to the extent that it’s comparatively incompetently executed.”
But I have to commend MySpace not just for its ‘democraticization’ , but for its commitment to continue with cursory demarcations. Tt’s ‘incompetence’ is actually more its anti-connection and perhaps more so, it’s phantasmal distinction as opposed to Facebook’s bold attack at turning black to gray.
January 27th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
Pissed off with that article seemingly imply René Girard is some kind of right-wing neo-con ideologue. Sent a letter to the Guardian to this effect, didn’t get a reply.
February 1st, 2008 at 3:54 pm
For what it’s worth, I probably wouldn’t have the quality or quantity (not a huge amount) of friends I do if Facebook hadn’t existed. Of course, I started using at the perfect time, for the perfect reason (i.e. its original intent): in the summer before college, before it was open to non-college students, so I could make friends with anyone worth “friending” so I wouldn’t be lonely the first few weeks of school. It was the perfect thing for a socially unambitious kid looking for others with odd interests (meaning, it’s not the case that w/o Facebook I would have gone “out” and made friends the good ol’ fashioned way: I would have just been friends with a smaller, more geographically local group of students, and I would have been less satisfied).
So, I consider the essence of Facebook — or maybe not essence, but at least the original incarnation of Facebook — to be a positive thing. Perhaps it was just that exclusivity (college students, faculty, alums only) which made it good (it didn’t have to pander to any larger interests, etc.).
March 25th, 2009 at 6:56 am
Facebook, MySpace and its ilk have taken on such a look and degree of high immaturity I’m still trying to decide to what extent I should participate on them, if any.
I’m told that it’s important to have an online presence that includes these, especially if I want to enhance my career. I’m told if I’m not found online then I’m pretty much a nobody.
However, I also hear that employers nowadays Google job candidates prior to job interviews. If I am judged by the company I keep, do I really want to be seen in Facebook and/or MySpace where so many have such a casual attitude that is anything but business?