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Facebook has 59 million users - and 2 million new ones join each week. But you won't catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not now that he knows the politics of the people behind the social networking site.
I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you". But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?
And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.
Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval. ("I like Facebook," said another friend. "I got a shag out of it.") It also encourages a disturbing competitiveness around friendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts for nothing and quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better you are. You are "popular", in the sense much loved in American high schools. Witness the cover line on Dennis Publishing's new Facebook magazine: "How To Double Your Friends List."
It seems, though, that I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time of writing Facebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in the UK, Facebook's third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That's 59 million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about. Right now, 2 million new people join each week. At the present rate of growth, Facebook will have more than 200 million active users by this time next year. And I would predict that, if anything, its rate of growth will accelerate over the coming months. As its spokesman Chris Hughes says: "It's embedded itself to an extent where it's hard to get rid of."
All of the above would have been enough to make me reject Facebook for ever. But there are more reasons to hate it. Many more.
Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don't mind being bombarded by adverts for the world's biggest brands. As with PayPal, national boundaries are a thing of the past.
Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third investor called Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners (more on him later). Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook when Harvard students Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to meet him in San Francisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the site. Thiel now reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook's current valuation of $15bn, would be worth more than $1bn. There is much debate on who exactly were the original co-founders of Facebook, but whoever they were, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, although Hughes and Moskowitz still work for the company.
Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine recently called him "one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the country". He has made money by betting on rising oil prices and by correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken. He and his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been labelled "The PayPal Mafia" by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLaren supercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely competitive. He has been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury when losing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitveness, saying: "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser."
But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls himself "way libertarian".
TheVanguard is run by one Rod D Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel greatly admires. On the site, Thiel says: "Rod is one of our nation's leading minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. He possesses a more complete understanding of America than most executives have of their own businesses."
This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision for the world: "TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies that will "reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes its politics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite". The chairman's message says: "Today we'll teach MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the leftwing media some lessons they never imagined."
So, Thiel's politics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes' famous characterization of life as "nasty, brutish and short", and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: "For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe."
Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.
Thiel's philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behavior called mimetic desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel's virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. Girard is a regular at Thiel's intellectual soirees. What you don't hear about in Thiel's philosophy, by the way, are old-fashioned real-world concepts such as art, beauty, love, pleasure and truth.
The internet is immensely appealing to neocons such as Thiel because it promises a certain sort of freedom in human relations and in business, freedom from pesky national laws, national boundaries and suchlike. The internet opens up a world of free trade and laissez-faire expansion. Thiel also seems to approve of offshore tax havens, and claims that 40% of the world's wealth resides in places such as Vanuatu, the Cayman Islands, Monaco and Barbados. I think it's fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is against tax. He also likes the globalization of digital culture because it makes the banking overlords hard to attack: "You can't have a workers' revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu," he says.
If life in the past was nasty, brutish and short, then in the future Thiel wants to make it much longer, and to this end he has also invested in a firm that is exploring life-extension technologies. He has pledged £3.5m to a Cambridge-based gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey, who is searching for the key to immortality. Thiel is also on the board of advisers of something called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. From its fantastical website, the following: "The Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies ... heading in this direction ... Artificial Intelligence ... direct brain-computer interfaces ... genetic engineering ... different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence."
So by his own admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he also calls "nature", and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in this context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out techno-utopian fantasies. Not someone I want to help get any richer.
The third board member of Facebook is Jim Breyer. He is a partner in the venture capital firm Accel Partners, who put $12.7m into Facebook in April 2005. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Now these are the people who are really making things happen in America, because they invest in the new young talent, the Zuckerbergs and the like. Facebook's most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock's senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What's In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA. After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions".
The US defense department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier. "We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries," defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. "We need to make the leap into the information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation efforts." In-Q-Tel's first chairman was Gilman Louie, who served on the board of the NVCA with Breyer. Another key figure in the In-Q-Tel team is Anita K Jones, former director of defence research and engineering for the US department of defence, and - with Breyer - board member of BBN Technologies. When she left the US department of defence, Senator Chuck Robb paid her the following tribute: "She brought the technology and operational military communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next century."
Now even if you don't buy the idea that Facebook is some kind of extension of the American imperialist program crossed with a massive information-gathering tool, there is no way of denying that as a business, it is pure mega-genius. Some net nerds have suggested that its $15bn valuation is excessive, but I would argue that if anything that is too modest. Its scale really is dizzying, and the potential for growth is virtually limitless. "We want everyone to be able to use Facebook," says the impersonal voice of Big Brother on the website. I'll bet they do. It is Facebook's enormous potential that led Microsoft to buy 1.6% for $240m. A recent rumor says that Asian investor Lee Ka-Shing, said to be the ninth richest man in the world, has bought 0.4% of Facebook for $60m.
The creators of the site need do very little bar fiddle with the program. In the main, they simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts voluntarily upload their ID details, photographs and lists of their favorite consumer objects. Once in receipt of this vast database of human beings, Facebook then simply has to sell the information back to advertisers, or, as Zuckerberg puts it in a recent blog post, "to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web". And indeed, this is precisely what's happening. On November 6 last year, Facebook announced that 12 global brands had climbed on board. They included Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, Verizon, Sony Pictures and Condé Nast. All trained in marketing bullshit of the highest order, their representatives made excited comments along the following lines:
"With Facebook Ads, our brands can become a part of the way users communicate and interact on Facebook," said Carol Kruse, vice president, global interactive marketing, the Coca-Cola Company.
"We view this as an innovative way to cultivate relationships with millions of Facebook users by enabling them to interact with Blockbuster in convenient, relevant and entertaining ways," said Jim Keyes, Blockbuster chairman and CEO. "This is beyond creating advertising impressions. This is about Blockbuster participating in the community of the consumer so that, in return, consumers feel motivated to share the benefits of our brand with their friends."
"Share" is Facebookspeak for "advertise". Sign up to Facebook and you become a free walking, talking advert for Blockbuster or Coke, extolling the virtues of these brands to your friends. We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships.
Now, by comparision with Facebook, newspapers, for example, begin to look hopelessly outdated as a business model. A newspaper sells advertising space to businesses looking to sell stuff to their readers. But the system is far less sophisticated than Facebook for two reasons. One is that newspapers have to put up with the irksome expense of paying journalists to provide the content. Facebook gets its content for free. The other is that Facebook can target advertising with far greater precision than a newspaper. Admit on Facebook that your favorite film is This Is Spinal Tap, and when a Spinal Tap-esque movie comes out, you can be sure that they'll be sending ads your way.
It's true that Facebook recently got into hot water with its Beacon advertising program. Users were notified that one of their friends had made a purchase at certain online shops; 46,000 users felt that this level of advertising was intrusive, and signed a petition called "Facebook! Stop invading my privacy!" to say so. Zuckerberg apologized on his company blog. He has written that they have now changed the system from "opt-out" to "opt-in". But I suspect that this little rebellion about being so ruthlessly commodified will soon be forgotten: after all, there was a national outcry by the civil liberties movement when the idea of a police force was mooted in the UK in the mid 19th century.
Futhermore, have you Facebook users ever actually read the privacy policy? It tells you that you don't have much privacy. Facebook pretends to be about freedom, but isn't it really more like an ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed the UK's? Thiel and the rest have created their own country, a country of consumers.
Now, you may, like Thiel and the other new masters of the cyberverse, find this social experiment tremendously exciting. Here at last is the Enlightenment state longed for since the Puritans of the 17th century sailed away to North America, a world where everyone is free to express themselves as they please, according to who is watching. National boundaries are a thing of the past and everyone cavorts together in freewheeling virtual space. Nature has been conquered through man's boundless ingenuity. Yes, and you may decide to send genius investor Thiel all your money, and certainly you'll be waiting impatiently for the public flotation of the unstoppable Facebook.
Or you might reflect that you don't really want to be part of this heavily-funded program to create an arid global virtual republic, where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodities on sale to giant global brands. You may decide that you don't want to be part of this takeover bid for the world.
For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook doing something useful, such as reading books. Why would I want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven't read Keats' Endymion? And when there are seeds to be sown in my own back yard? I don't want to retreat from nature, I want to reconnect with it. Damn air-conditioning! And if I want to connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece of technology. It's free, it's easy and it delivers a uniquely individual experience in sharing information: it's called talking.
Facebook's privacy policy
Just for fun, try substituting the words 'Big Brother' whenever you read the word 'Facebook'
1 We will advertise at you
"When you use Facebook, you may set up your personal profile, form relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set up events, add applications, and transmit information through various channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service and offer personalized features."
2 You can't delete anything
"When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior version of that information."
3 Anyone can glance at your intimate confessions
"... we cannot and do not guarantee that user content you post on the site will not be viewed by unauthorized persons. We are not responsible for circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of user content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other users have copied or stored your user content."
4 Our marketing profile of you will be unbeatable
"Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg, photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience."
5 Opting out doesn't mean opting out
"Facebook reserves the right to send you notices about your account even if you opt out of all voluntary email notifications."
6 The CIA may look at the stuff when they feel like it
"By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States ... We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We do not reveal information until we have a good faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets applicable legal standards. Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies."
© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday January 16 2008 The US intelligence community's enthusiasm for hi-tech innovation after 9/11 and the creation of In-Q-Tel, its venture capital fund, in 1999 were anachronistically linked in the article above. Since 9/11 happened in 2001 it could not have led to the setting up of In-Q-Tel two years earlier.
53 Comments so far
Show AllGreat article!
For sure, all the technology the tekkies of Silicon Valley have so naively developed are being turned against us, one by one.
E-commerce, relational database management systems, cell phones, the Internet, and on you go. They are all being harnessed by the government and global corporations, often working in collaboration, to track, database, profile, predict and modify our behavior. We are rats in the maze to them, the subject of their experimentation and manipulation.
Time to wake up and break out of cyberPrison. Check out www.sillyConValley.net for more!
For as horrifying as Thiel's politics appear to be (although there is some real murkiness around the language used to describe them--I, for example, detect shades of Ayn Rand in his politics--scary, but not exactly neoconservative), I wonder if we aren't missing something significant here, namely, that Facebook can, indeed, be put to the service of leftist causes as well as right--and as well as the promotion of rampant consumerism. No one's forced to participate in the purchasing of "today's gift," and you can, like I did, receive posts from Moveon.org as readily as from any other source. Moreover, Facebook IS an invaluable tool for my students to be able to reach me (I'm a college professor), and one they will use just because they're already "there." Why not use its however fake, but nonetheless perceived, "coolness" factor to good ends? My thinking here is not mercenary or merely utilitarian; it's aims are subversive. I can (and do) use Facebook to try to "speak truth to power." I put my picture next to my words not because I'm vain, but because I'm honest and willing to be held publicly accountable for what I say.
I don't doubt for a moment that Facebook makes me just that much easier to track by my government--but it's foolish to think that we aren't--thanks to the Patriot Act--already pretty easy to track. And I can use Facebook to protest THIS as well, and I can reach people with this protest among a host of others.
The issue here, as I see it, is not as much about lost privacy, but about how we are going to control the information our government ALREADY has access to...and Facebook can be used to misdirect, mislead, confuse those who'd act to diminish our freedoms. ANY avenue of communication with as much power as Facebook can be used to laudable ends--however subversive from the crass capitalist's point of view--as readily as to exploitive ones. The key is to be savvy. In any case, there is no mere opting out of the world as it's represented via utilities like Facebook. We can either learn to what good we can put the Internet--in all of its guises--or we can play the proverbial Ostrich....but there's no going back from the future represented by globalized cyberspace.
"...perhaps I'll find a suitable networking site for us to use. Are there any sites for 'creative lost souls with a passion for progressive causes and baseball'?"
Hospices?
Seems 'Goner' strikes the best chord in response to this well researched article.
While I have limited experience with these networking sites they do seem preoccupied with superficial material experience. I confess that I would be interested in this kind of networking if I was younger and well versed in it's attributes. My nephew is an avide user of Facebook and is a well rounded person... very physically active, thoughtful and good humored, intelligent and responsible. My only concern for the many who use these sites is...
How does this change the quality of conversation and relationship?
I still prefer Face Time to Facebook, and the others; and I suspect most of the users of these sites feel the same way. I have some very good friends across the country whom I would enjoy more regular communications from... perhaps I'll find a suitable networking site for us to use. Are there any sites for 'creative lost souls with a passion for progressive causes and baseball'?
"Or you might reflect that you don't really want to be part of this heavily-funded program to create an arid global virtual republic, where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodities on sale to giant global brands. You may decide that you don't want to be part of this takeover bid for the world."
If so, you'd then be about 150-years too-late (if you don't think so or believe-Me, then find a loupe or good magnifying-glass, and examine the Line upon which you sign 'your' cheques/mortgages -- the 'fine-print' it is actually composed-of informs you that Theil's intellectual-Forefathers' 'virtualized' both You and your precious-America into a "fictitious/Incorporated-Reality" shortly-after engineering our 'Civil-War/outcome' -- and every-War and financial-Fiasco since, or century Prior-to).
Does Theil also 'hang-out' with Al Gore and young Nathanial DeRothschild -- of the British-Rothschild's -- the way ex-Rhodes Clinton hangs with ex-Skull/CIA Bush-41?
They have long-since 'succeeded', to be Sure -- today they are only 'seeing to the Details' and dividing their Spoils amongst their Houses...
[Did you still think you had any 'Choice/Chance'?!]
It sounds to me like most of you haters have never looked at FaceBook and merely hate it on principle. As a grad student, I don't always have time to actually go hang out with my friends - I've got crushing deadlines to get piles of original research and reading done. So FaceBook does help stay connected.
Like anything else, it's all in how you use it. There's no need to list any more information about yourself than you want to. One of my friends doesn't even list her last name. You don't have to buy anything advertised (and in truth, the advertising on FaceBook is less intrusive than that on Yahoo.) And just like gambling, drinking, drugs, etc. there will always be people who abuse it and substitute it for a real social life. I don't.
I'm glad to know what the politics are behind the creators of FaceBook - but the site itself is free so my money isn't going into their pockets anyway. They're free to think what they want; the First Amendment still (somewhat) stands.
Anyway, the article was extremely paranoid and one-sided and should have been listed as an opinion rather than a news piece. Which also makes me concerned about the quality of readership on Common Dreams; can you people not do basic critical analysis anymore?
Those grocery store "tracking cards" bother me enough. I'm not interested in being tracked as sites like this promise to do. I haven't ever logged on to one of these sites, but then again I must be a luddite since I don't even have a cell phone.
There are other ways to meet people with internet help like joining clubs and meet ups these clubs sponsor. The pixel based society does seem a pretty bleak substitute for genuine interaction.
"Just as you can watch television and not go out and buy medicine for restless leg syndrome, you can participate on social networks without buying Coke."
Ah yes, but can you stay up all night posting on all these trendy social networking sites with out snorting Coke?
These venture capitalists and technology billionaires seem to be obsessed with immortality through science. It must depress them that one day they are going to be dust, as they usually dont adhere to the Christian world view and believe they will get into a Heaven. Instead they believe humans will turn themselves into gods.
Yeah, right.
Fear and Loathing on Facebook:
Gonzo reporting on the Facebook phenomena with excerpts and inspiration from the late Hunter S. Thompson
"Facebook was what the whole hip world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war . . ."
http://www.progressivewebdesign.ca/hst.html
Hodgkinson writes: "For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook doing something useful, such as reading books."
Watch out for those books. Time once was we got our stories and information sitting around a fire listening to our elders. We knew who could be trusted, who was wise and who was a fool. We saw their body language and we could hold them accountable if they spread untruths. These books separate us from the source of information and create the possiblity of irresponsible, unaccountable communication.
My point is that having been well and appropriately warned about the dangers posed by the changes that are happening we need to appreciate the benefits too. We need to assess our ability to stop what's happening and/or change it. And we'll need to organize. Towards that end I suppose we'll need to communicate. Campfires alone won't be effective our discussions will likely be largely online. Where the CIA can gather information about us and store it forever.
Lucky me, I ain't got nothing to do with Facebook, Assbook, MySpace and YourSpace 'cause all my friends are dead. If you know of a good medium that can make ghosts talk to me, let me know.
Kivals,
Thanks for putting it more succinctly than I could.
Peasants are made, not born: No History; No critical thinking skills; Little or no Science/Math; No economics; No Civics. Less than 30% ever attend any college and fewer graduate. I believe somewhere around 60% think humans were made "as is" less than 10000 years ago and dinosaurs are a religous test of faith. When matched to a Nazi regime and total Corporate ownership of our economic and political lives, Facebook is the least of our concerns.
Watch Judgement at Nuremburg with Spencer Tracy and Maximillian Schell. This time, we're the Germans.
Peace.
Twister22,
Thiel apparently spends all of his energy on his business enterprises, and none on his simplistic, contradictory, and self-serving philosophy. Of course the Internet Thiel profits from was created from government research and investment (computers themselves were developed from a government WWII project), and so he could not have made a dime if he had grown up in a libertarian world. And without government regulation, funding of infrastructure, and provision of security, the high tech world we have now, including his business enterprises, would crumble in a heartbeat. The structures he creates and profits from are built upon nature and dependent on it, and it is shocking he can become so prominent while being unable to see something so obvious.
Thiel is a moron in philosophy, but a genius at exploiting technology for personal gain.
Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace can be used as tools by either side. I blog regularly on MySpace, sometimes revealing my liberal political and social leanings. Yes, I know that somebody is probably filing that away, just as I am sure they file it away every time I post here on Common Dreams or write a letter to my local newspaper or Congressman. Honestly, I get a kick out of using the corporate tools to rail against corporations.
Just as you can watch television and not go out and buy medicine for restless leg syndrome, you can participate on social networks without buying Coke. I appreciate this article and the background on the owners of Facebook (it's good to know who you're dealing with), but I would just take it as a cautionary note to be careful about what you reveal on social sites, not an actual reason to never use them.
Funny how these "libertarians" who want "small government", yet they are always going to the government for contracts, and working in collusion with them to gain more advantages (read: power, influence) for themselves and their "libertarian" companies.
I had a facebook account also, and as the article mentions you cannot delete anything once it is there. There is a certain amount of information you MUST give to even have an account in the first place and if/when you decide to leave like I did, you cannot delete your info, only "deactivate" (which will always be at the ready to "reactivate" whenever you so choose).
The high level of trust that people unthinkingly place in social networking sites indicates a blissful ignorance of how this world of corporate governance really works.
Nor should one expect that government/corporate controlled educational policies will ever aim to enlighten us about their methods of ensuring citizen compliance with the System's extraction of maximum power and profit.
There remain three quite satisfactory, if apparently outdated, ways to keep up with distant friends and relations: One is called a telephone (even the old kind with wires and cords works), another is the E-mail (not so old) and the last is a quaint remnant from centuries past called a Letter - written with a pen on a piece of paper, stamped and posted through what is called 'snail mail'.
While these methods are not, and have never been, protected from determined surveillance, the privacy level is far higher than the global exposure of a Facebook or MySpace.
Worth remembering:
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty—power is ever stealing from the many to the few…. The hand entrusted with power becomes … the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot: only by unintermitted Agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity."
WENDELL PHILLIPS, speech in Boston, Massachusetts, January 28, 1852.—Speeches Before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, p. 13 (1853).
I think Hodgkinson has done good work uncovering the ideology behind the founders of this Facebook phenomena..I briefly had a myspace account when my family and friends back in the states asked me to make one to stay connected...I quickly realized how banal and uber-capitalist the whole cyber community was and quickly removed my info...I have never been to the facebook site but am sufficiently frightened now after having read this article to stay far away...I would just question Hodgkinson's inclusion of Rene Girard in all of this...just because Thiel has had contacts with a professor of theology at Stanford (where he studied philosophy) does not necessarily implicate him in this disgusting debacle. I have read some of Girard's work and in fact he is quite an interesting theologian...he attempts to overcome the violent tendencies in the Biblical tradition and focus instead on the peaceful revelations of Christ..."mimetic desire" is exactly what Girard is attacking in his creative Biblical hermeneutics...if Thiel has misread/abused Girard's thought it is surely no fault of his own...But an otherwise good piece...
I joined Facebook last week as a friend of mine asked me to do so and I wanted to appease his act. I regret having done that after reading this article. I don't buy no stinking right wing products if I can help it. So I cancelled tonight immediately after reading this article. Like the only right wing product I buy is gas and as little as possible. I bike or train or foot it whenever possible. food I get from farmers markets. but I don't buy no neoconservative stuff. like i don't go to no safeway stores and buy coke or kraft or multi national foods. they can't make good food, they must be filled with chemicals and preservatives and be cloned or something. i don't shop in no big stores. never go to a mall. i only buy from small mom n' pop stores for my clothing. like a great army navy store here in Frisco-Kaplans on Market. As for bread, I go to local bakeries. no white bread. cheese- I go to the cheese collective here. I don't argue that neo conservatives have a right to live or say what they want, but i don't like 'em and they can rot in hell as far as i'm concerned like that wolfowitz and that pearle and that editorialist for the ny times, that wimpy chicken hawk, bill kristol. Just my two cents.
Remember once you have put you info into the SYSTEM it will be able to track you down to give or sell you or your info off. With a name and a face to go along with it, the SYSTEM will be able to track all your electronic transactions, banking, email ect. and be able to keep you in the cluches of the SYSTEM forever. Your medical history and you persona can be used against you. Media brainwashing is only illegal if the SYSTEM is caught. Are you ready for a good fight with the SYSTEM? It might be for your life and your freedom. If you are dumb enough to sign on to all the venture capitalists SYSTEMS you might find yourself on the wrong side of the SUB-PRIME. They are watching you and you like it, adding up every purchase to identify every way to get the ads suited to your taste to you, so you will be sold before you know it. Why are you so broke? Do you remember? The SYSTEM knows everything and owns your info. Once it is all digitized, there is no escape! Sounds like a Utopian nightmare doesn't it? At you desk!
I hate Myspace and Facebook. I am on LJ and I like LJ... I only got on MYSPACE and FACEBOOK because my friends were there and of course that is how they suck you in.. you want to remain connected to your friends.. right????? I use these tools to promote and send out articles about Left Wing things...
OTHER BETTER Networking sites
Zaadz.com
and
For any knitters out there : RAVELRY.com
What's Facebook? Sounds like something for lonely losers.
I'd much rather spend my time reading the depressing news and views on CD, and adding my $0.02 of pointless comments.
I'm glad I have a life away from my computer.
Liberalism isn't the same as multiculturalism. Liberalism is the defense of one's natural liberties, especially freedom of thought. Multiculturalism is a defense of the status quo. "You must let us beat our wives or own slaves or mutilate our daughters or torture suspects or make inferiors sit on their side of the bus...it's our culture. 'Human rights' are a figment of your Western, imperialist, hegemonic imagination."
"Culture" can defend anything.
It's way too easy for these types of muggers to get away with their excesses. How many folks can this world "afford" that have these kinds of attitudes. They buy (take) all the resources that they want and believe everyone else should just suck it up. His talk of "losers" really takes the cake. There is a part of this guys brain that is truly "puny". For all the "capabilities?" he seems to have accuired, all he seems to have for it is more crap than the rest of us. Half a million for a car; is his dick small?
What's worse...wasting time using facebook or wasting time writing and complaining about it...or posting a comment about an editorial about it? I guess I'm guilty of both number 1 and number 3. If people didn't like it or if it wasn't useful to catch up with old friends, then it wouldn't be so popular. This is just like the people who say "Kill Your Television." Why, am I going to suddenly become a mindless consumer and sit around watching it all day and buying stuff?
You might think I am a republican, right-wing neocon because I say this stuff but the truth is I am quite the opposite. Just because there are corporations out there that make money from advertising and selling stuff, doesn't mean people can't think for themselves and buy or do what they want.
Dear Tom Hodgkinson this piece is wonderful in revealing another problem that people can stop but they keep on joining in.
Thank you and I wish you could post this on the facebook itself.
Cannot you create a fake profile and then contact everyone to send them the reality behind the "consumer country" built by ideologs who want to destroy humanity and nature, creating indifference and false friendships.
Thank you for exposing the new face of the global capitalist colonialist mess! Global is the latest name on the list of facades of the free-market.
This article has inspired me.
Someone out there seems to get it.
Take heart my brothers and sisters!
Their false world requires electricity and infrastructure that the True World can live without.
We'll see which one wins out.
The combination of creating a false world/destroying Nature and funding "immortality" research is just to damned funny!
Afraid of Reality much?
Wonder what he did that makes him such a chicken shit coward?
-matti.
Good article and thanks for exposing the truth about Facebook.
I suppose this also explains why there is no "social democrat", "green" or "socialist" political options at Facebook. You can only describe yourself politically as: "Very Conservative", "Conservative", "Moderate", "Liberal", "Very Liberal", "Libertarian" and "Other."
This seems to me to be a bit extreme. It feels personal, like he has a bone to pick. I use facebook and I connect with friends I wouldn't otherwise. Fools are fools whatever they do. I am no more used for my consumer potential on facebook than I am on the street or listening to the radio or watching tv. And once again, anyone who gives personal details other than the pure basics is likely to do many other very stupid things so you can't blame facebook for that.
www.uvme.biz/428292
Check this out. It's fun and the CIA are not interested in it.
:)
Psych-ops strategies from Stanford's Hoover institute, last home of late capitalist godfather Milton Friedman, will be used in military-industrial Silicon Valley to iCorral you and iContain you. Any iChallenge to the Microsoft Monster from Silicon Valley was merely to iSteal some of its pie. The bay area is home to a large number of social idealists but they iPlant their roots in the soil of capitalist exploitation/control and iCall it "balance". It's a good place for a capitalist to go and iGet some superficial guilt relief while iBuilding one's exploitation empire. We are grateful for apparently free services from Google, et al, but how free are they when our neighborhoods are divided by gentrification, when the judge rules disputes in favor of the rich?
to check out a brief video that outlines what is being said in this article, go to
http://www.albumoftheday.com/facebook/ OR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMWz3G_gPhU&eurl=http://i-am-bored.com/bored_link.cfm?link_id=26478
i hope you'll agree this video should continue to be sent around after viewing it.
peacecoup.com is a peaceful social network : )
There is a significant difference between loading a profile on Facebook or MySpace, and posting a comment on an article here. Here we are all strangers, independent thinkers who are here because we enjoy reading liberal commentary on public affairs. Maybe I am too old to care, but I would rather read and comment occasionally on what I read, or in this case, on the comments themselves, than engage in social networking. But to each their own. It was a good piece, well researched, and from what I have read, those who take umbrage are themselves users of Facebook and I get the impression they are feeling somehow attacked. Too bad. I don't believe that the article was written as a diatribe against social (virtual) networking, friendmaking etc. Although it does raise some interesting observations.
someone once wrote that people in love with money and power are usually very afraid of dying. . .i bet he thinks he's the one to beat the reaper.
Brilliant article. People who have sucked up all the cyber-innovation without caution or consideration have invited very dubious guests not only into their lives, but their minds. Perhaps that is why protest and dissent have vanished from the streets: they have been safely stitched into a cyber-free-speech zone, where they can't bother the real powers that be.
TRB: Theil's way old enough to have spent his formative years living with the threat of nuclear war, have watched the Yuppie revolution (sacking of national treasuries) blossom and perhaps bought into that f*ck-you-all-mindset-as-a-virtue, etc.
Those times scared and scarred the hell out of me and i'm only 39. He has an opinion, the question why is it the polar opposite of mine/ours?
jdr: Issac Asimov.
Support Common Dreams.
i guess i can't really comnt on this artcle cuz im doing sumthin similr in this forum. OMG! they're right...
Excuse me if this looks like advertising, but I think this information is useful for the discussion at hand. There is an alternative to companies like Facebook or MySpace, where the idea of being a SOCIAL network is taken seriously, while offering the same networking capabilities as Facebook et al do. I am talking about kaioo.com. Here's some information about the project:
"As an accredited non-profit foundation, Kaioo donates all the money that the user generates while surfing on the site to charity. Plus, the user increases Kaioo's donating power by spending more time on the platform. In short: users have a good time and at the same time do good"
"Users can suggest charity projects and decide by voting which projects should be supported by Kaioo"
"As a Germany-based and federally accredited non-profit organization, Kaioo is subject to Germany's data protection rules, which are among the most restrictive in the world."
The Facebook-inspired network is not yet fully functional; it's been there for 8 weeks, and has 25.000 users as of 01/16/08, mostly Germans. It's growing fast, and is currently available in German and English. I sincerely hope that charitable projects like this can grow to be viable alternatives to reckless information/advertising empires like Facebook.
[By the way, I am not in any way affiliated with the project. I admit to being a user, and to enjoying it.]
Kids now "know" that online self-promotion is a "must-do" in order to "be somebody". With these guys who are descibed above running FACEBOOK and Rupert Murdoch now controlling MYSPACE, the political outlook long-term may be bleaker than we imagine. Perhaps (in reluctant admission that one thing Rumsfeld said was poignant) because "We don't know what we don't know."
This guy, Hodgkinson, is pleading for us to wake up, but we collectively won't.
Information is power.
I feel empowered after reading the article.
I am guessing Valsmith is a little older, like me.
She is not one of the millions who just had to join Facebook/Myspace/Wayn due to the atmoshpere around her/him.
These websites are accumulating tons of information about the people that have joined.
They can use these in currently benign ways, like advertising coke to you.
The CIA can later connect some dots and see whether you have inadvertently been included in AL-Qaida's recruiting book, and you have replied, not knowing what it really was.
Well now you are Screwed.
And there may be a hundred unforseen instances that your networking with unkown can really cost you later.
I find this article an eyeopener.
Science is progressing in ways we dont know about, and information that you have put our there and really condemn you, in the hands of nut jobs like Thiel
It is sad that most of the corporations you buy stuff or services from are lead by right wingers who donate a percentage of the money you give them to right wing politicians. The right wing politicians provide them with payback that exceeds their donations.
It is sadder that so many people living paycheck to paycheck support the same right wing politicians who use the money they pay in taxes to fund the paybacks for corporate leaders.
Facebook, myspace, and all those stupid pages are for blind morons who have nothing better to do on line (like reading common dreams, i guess)
http://mybloc.net
How can BLOC help you make change?
People from around the country are using MyBLOC as a tool for movement building. Explore the profiles, circles and organization sections to get new ideas about what you can do!
Join the BLOC Network by registering and setting up your profile today. As a member of BLOC, you can join with thousands of other organizers, artists and activists across the country working to transform our world.
If you don't care for their policies, don't join. Myself, I find it a fine way to keep up with friends and acquaintances from college now scatterred across the country and beyond.
As for Thiel's politics, I expect conservatives to deal with me, sell to me, or otherwise do business with me even though I'm a liberal. I therefore cannot in justice refuse to deal or do business with others because they're conservative. It's not like we're buying a neoconservative product or giving money to a neoconservative cause by joining facebook.
I understand Hodgkinson's disinterest in "connecting" over a computer, favoring face to face connection. And I agree- it's better to see people face to face that through a screen. But I do not regard as wasted time spent catching up online with school chums hundreds of miles away. But it seems his bigger concern is privacy and the politics of Facebook's founder.
As to privacy, I put up this information for lots of people (my school chums) to see. If I were worried about it getting out, I wouldn't put it up. And as for the fact that facebook was founded, in part, by a person with political beliefs different than mine, I say, so what? With all the actually terrible things in the world to be concerned about, the alarmist tone of this article is just silly.
And, picking nits, the Foundation Trilogy was written by Asimov.
If, or should I say when, the Feds decide to do a warrantless search of your activities, it wouldn't be all that hard to determine who you associate with, just check your friends on myspace or facebook. History has taught us that they pressure a person to name names and point fingers at alleged co-conspirators, (McCarthy hearings of the 1950's, yeah that's the one that Reagan sold out his peers at). Now with facebook and myspace your friends, groups, and networks are listed and available to all. The feds can just type in a radical group name and come up with several hundred (or thousands) of names to keep them busy for years.
This "mimetic desire" stuff and all the social manipulation based on statstical understanding of groups reminds me a lot of the core ideas in Arthur Clark's science fiction classic "Foundation trillogy". Makes me wonder if they are so inovative as they think they are....
Why is Hodgkinson calling Thiel a neoconservative? It sounds like Thiel was never a liberal or a Trotskyite, and was probably too young to have had an opinion about Cold War policy in the 1960's and 1970's.
Or is this another example of the erosion of the word's meaning?
I always suspected Facebook and MySpace sites were some kind of popularity contest for those trying to reclaim their high school glory days ... I saw an editorial cartoon where a kid was telling her mother about her friends on MySpace: "It's quantity over quality." This article verifies my impression and more...great piece, especially the research on the political ideology behind its founders/investors!
But aside from political ideology, I find it disturbing why anyone would want to have all that information out there for unknowns/strangers to have - even if via network. Aren't mommy and daddy supposed to teach kids not to talk to strangers on the street? The same still applies here, although now it's not just the neighborhood street anymore, it's "the world". Such sites leave kids vulnerable to sexual predators anywhere (witness the recent child molestation/rape cases where predators have traveled across state lines).
The same should be true for adults -- most guard their business contacts carefully. You wouldn't give out your references to just anyone!!!!
This is a nasty boy. No doubt about it.
I admire his business savvy and forethought. America is set up for guys with his drive and business sense to thrive.
No one should criticize him for being a success and thinking of ways to exploit conformity in young people.
State lotteries are like a tax on the poor and stupid, aren't they? Is this state-sanctioned tax on morons any less cynical?
No, all that said, if this article is correct -- it seems this man's world view is rather grotesque.
Is it necessary to have such a grotesque world view to achieve such extraordinary success in the US as currently formulated?
I don't know. Warren Buffett sure seems like a decent person.
This guy Thiel does not sound like a balanced person. I'm quite sure he's not losing any sleep over it.
Let's just keep him away from the red buttons in the Pentagon War Room.