Oh. Great. Another anti-facebook post. Yawn. Stop reading now.
Maybe it's because it's all I can think of these days.
Facebook depresses me for several (dozen, hundred, thousand) reasons. From trying to make it as addictive as possible to a version of “transparency” that feels a lot like “I (Zuckerberg) will do whatever I want and you can't stop me” (which feels like Clark Kent changing into Superman in a telephone booth) to... well, fuck it, everything.
But one reason is that, back in the days when I didn't know that they were a few apples short of an ethical apple pie (please ignore the analogy it's almost midnight I'm really tired), the main story was the 2013 Snowden disclosures. The real bad guys are the government! Of course! They have a spy apparatus and they spy on everything and all they do is spy spy spy spy – again, midnight, please forgive me.
And it WAS a revelation. Before that, people suspected, but they didn't know. And by the way isn't it great that now Trump has access to all that information? This is why data should be treated like nuclear waste and discarded.
But that was the prevailing story that shocked people. Back then if you'd paid attention to news cycles you'd feel maybe a bit uneasy about Facebook or Google, or outright alarmed. But if you didn't... you'd think these were mainly honest companies run by honest people in their quest to be honest. Or something. And even the news cycle thing, it was 2013. Things were still relatively fresh back then. One issue with the 'net is that it's only been around since 1990. Things are still pretty new and shiny and fill people with a kind of doe-eyed wonder. Perfect pickins' for a Facebook to swoop in and preach the importance of privacy while rolling it back or to make it addictive as possible all while claiming “concerns are serious and will be looked into” or whatever (I'm paraphrasing, but still).
So you wouldn't think certain tech companies are the issue.
Until they became the issue.
And it wasn't just a problem of scale, either. Look, corporations will get stuff wrong. It would amaze me if Facebook or any other company didn't occasionally (OCCASIONALLY. IMPERATIVE WORD.) have bugs in their shit. Oversights happen. And Facebook would love to have you believe that the Cambridge Analytica situation was that. Or that the shifting privacy settings are a bug. Or whatever. And it's believable because hey, code is hard. Right? Never mind that that's a flimsy excuse when you can legitimately code basically whatever you want and this has been around for decades now and it's not actually as hard as you might expect (true, I'm not much of a programmer, but it stands to reason).
“The problems at Facebook are problems of complexity of scale” is just as much of a lie as “Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook” – he didn't, he took some of it from the Winklevosses and Aaron Greenspan in addition to I'm sure, to be fair, the original work he did do.
And that was the thing from the outset. Personal history should count for a lot and Zuck was known to not be a particularly trustworthy guy. But, you know, we all do dumb stuff when we're young, you know?
That was believable too.
And then years after the torpid beginnings of FB (where in the meanwhile there were really cool things like Beacon and probably a million other scandals I can't immediately recall) the company buys up Instagram and Whatsapp, brazenly lies and pisses off the founders.
Then, and only then, I began to realize that this is a problem. And I don't like this situation. You shouldn't have to pay attention to every single news cycle to avoid getting fucked. The world SHOULD be fair, you SHOULD be able to take things for granted.
Especially the conduit you have to your friends and the rest of the world and use as a main source of communication.
That's what pisses me off. That they've always been like this. Zuckerberg portrays himself as having a slightly stupid air, like, “Well, this is concerning, but we're going to look into this” while actively being malicious. That he is a sociopath is a very realistic conclusion.
The other thing that bothers me is that we never will know what connectivity on the internet would have become without Zuck. Does it not stand to reason that something similar to Facebook would have been invented eventually? Or some kind of public ledger where you can put your name and people can find you? Where you have the choice to be private, where feeds aren't algorithmic, where people can reach you by multiple means, using the built-in protocols of the internet? By the way, the fact people are afraid to leave because they'll lose their friends is nonsense; there is no good reason you can't read posts via RSS or something and communicate with Jabber or something. Facebook just doesn't want you to spend less time on site.
But they're 'connecting the world'.
Shut the fuck up, cunt.
So, anyway, that's the situation today. We've grown up with FB because we thought it was the next Myspace. And we've suffered for it because the people running it are bad faith actors and they don't care and they'll do anything for power.
As for the NSA's spying, yeah, it's not like that isn't a problem. And Snowden was right and that's a problem, too. I'm not saying that it's not. But the idea that corporations like Facebook and Google are on the right side “of history” (or even just aren't gigantic fucking assholes) turns out to be... not quite true. The internet is sad. :(