‘Facebook made me do it’ is no excuse
With vast wealth and vast immaturity comes vast shallowness.
The liege lords of Silicon Valley share two properties: greed and ignorance. When you read that someone not that long out of short pants drops in personal wealth by $ 9 billion in 48 hours, it should give pause to think how he got so very much that he could lose that amount. In his early thirties!
It is surely not because he spent his teen years and every spare hour thereafter digesting St. Augustine, the Nicomachean Ethics or the subtleties of moral philosophy. The social media and internet “prophets,” as they are often delusionally referred to, are by definition obsessives — chained to a single arcane task, underdeveloped personalities with an overdeveloped drive for a very narrow band of success. They are very high-IQ monomaniacs with the cultural depth and literacy of the Housewives of Beverly Hills (or Toronto).
Nothing better illustrates this point than Google’s long-serving corporate motto of “Don’t be evil.” Most people have got to that ethical plane by the age of six, when they’ve read their first Batman comic, or chewed on their second fortune cookie from the Chinese takeout down the street. ( Google upgraded in 2015 to “Do the right thing,” a platitude equally sterile, and probably only after seeing the movie.)
I’m brought to these approaches to thought by the current fits over Facebook and the news that a Canadian crypto grammatist, Christopher Wylie, gave the full benefits of his high coding arts to the marshalling of personal information — “data” to our tech overlords — from Facebook accounts, over to the service of devilish politicians. Most particularly, and this accounts for the demonic dimension, he may have serviced the great dark lord himself, Steve Bannon.
Wylie’s eldritch delvings, it is now being argued, enabled the victory of Donald Trump and thereby brought this fragile world to the very heart of the heart of darkness.
The news is hitting Facebook, whose motto I do not know, but is probably something deep along the lines of “Always share the popcorn,” or “Drink two glasses of milk a day,” like a storm. More amazingly, it has prompted its great patriarch, Mark Zuckerberg — who’s been on The Simpsons — to statements of repentance and renewed resolve.
Wylie, I would l i ke to mention, after earning the term “whistleblower” from the Guardian, to which he first gave the story, continues to be referred to — I know not how — by that term. Do we normally give a bank robber who turns himself in this designation? Can you “whistleblow” on yourself ?
Letting that be, the bite that really takes is, naturally, the association with the Trump campaign, and how Facebook’s carelessness or indifference made it possible for people to be “manipulated” into voting for the menace now occupying the White House; for turning otherwise rational minds, who would by definition have voted for Hillary Clinton, into supporting her dread nemesis of the golden hair.
This so- called scandal is great news for Mrs. Clinton. She has recently been on a tour of India, said by some to have been almost as successful as Mr. Trudeau’s recent pilgrimage. While there, she added another entry to her great tome, The Encyclopedia of Excuses, for losing last year. The list ranges f r om t he Russians and James Comey to the invention of the reusable vacuum cleaner bag.
I don’t believe that the schemes of Wylie and his peers have had anything like the force and persuasive ability being assigned to them. Here’s “whistleblower” Wylie’s own description of his work: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”
What about you folks? Notice anything odd about your inner demons lately? A bit more rambunctious than usual are they, after you’ve logged off Facebook? Data mining and inner demons — this is the lingo of the alchemists out of the mouth of Silicon Valley.
The idea that personal information posted on a vast internet site has expectations of privacy is almost ludicrous on the — pun half intended — face of it. The master of Facebook and his fellow billionaire masters of similar enterprises lack the moral sinews to give serious care to the ethics of their productions. And, more pointedly, they have an egregious, almost primal commercial instinct to monetize every fragment of their creations. The contest between your privacy and their gain is a fixed fight from the get go.
Finally, the idea that a “targeted” bleat from a campaign basement to a functional adult will bring that person to vote a certain way can only lead to one of two conclusions: such a person should never go on the internet, or, should not be allowed to vote. “Facebook made me do it” really cannot stand as a motto for our democracies.