Like it or not, Facebook now owns you
Why are people on Facebook? The question is personal — the massive online spiderweb swallows up leisure time — but it’s also industrial. Facebook is actively destroying journalism and thus democracy.
As founder Mark Zuckerberg boasts, the network has two billion active monthly users. Why do people paste themselves into this structure that spies on them, pesters them and distorts their vision of the way we live now?
Even Twitter is getting easier to monitor and control — it will now alert you to online swarming and let you head it off at the pass — but Facebook forces itself on its users.
It starts with your Aunt Fanny, moves on to co-workers then and now, then everyone you’ve ever met or mentioned and confronts you with a ribbon of photos of “People You May Know,” in my case, “People I Forgot But Can’t Now.” This morning it includes a photo of myself (do I not resemble me?), the worst editor and human I’ve ever worked for, a stalker’s ex-wife and more.
My complaints are minor. But British novelist and financial journalist John Lanchester, at his brilliant best in the London Review of Books this month, has taken an axe to the very premise on which Facebook was built, that the world should be “connected.”
Only connect, E.M. Forster said. But why is connection inherently good, Lanchester asks. “Flaubert was skeptical about trains,” Lanchester writes, “because he thought (in Julian Barnes’s paraphrase) that ‘the railway could merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid.’ ”
“You Are the Product” is the headline of his LRB review. It’s a great catchphrase, a reminder of Facebook’s deep shoals. I’m not sure people quite grasp how their per- sonal lives, quiet links and the faces of their babies are being monetized not just for profit but for unseeable purposes.
Zuckerberg will run for the U.S. presidency. The world’s richest man doesn’t visit Iowa and Nebraska in June for no reason. No one does.
It makes sense. Zuckerberg has global power. As Lanchester lists, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram have 1.2 billion, 1.2 billion and 700 million users respectively. Facebook owns them all.
If you don’t mind Facebook having a piece of your soul, you should worry that it has your data. For instance, it has more data on Americans than their voting system does, and it’s free to sell/use it as it pleases.
Americans who think things can’t get worse should consider President Pence as the more-acceptable face of authoritarianism. Try President Zuckerberg as the prize for digitizing your life from stem to stern, from birth to expiry.
Lanchester calls Facebook, with its tiny staff, the purest example of a company whose business is “the capture and sale of attention.” It started out as the equivalent of the “Hi, My Name Is . . .” badge at a convention.
Now it’s the equivalent of the apparat worn by New Yorkers in Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story, that lets everyone know your net worth, hotness rating, medical history and political affiliation. And you know theirs. Facebook is a constant comparison service.
The notorious Peter Thiel, one of Facebook’s original investors in 2004, was drawn to the philosopher René Girard’s idea of “mimetic desire.” We copy other people the way a baby copies adults holding a spoon, saying a word or drinking from a glass. Lanchester says Thiel’s conclusion was that “imitation is at the root of all behaviour.”
And this is why “fake news” became a problem, amplified by Donald Trump’s constant allegation of same. News — actual verified news — took a beating. Today for example, people are taking as real a fake Onion photo of Steve Bannon with hideous facial blood welts. It’s tamer than the Onion photo of him slurping a still-twitching rat tail into his mouth, but still.
We donate to the Guardian to keep it free for everyone, but remember that we do this because former editor Alan Rusbridger made the numbers clear. In 2016, Facebook “sucked up $27 million (U.S.) of the newspaper’s projected ad revenue that year.”
Facebook was the interlocutor, the middleman who slipped between readers and journalists and siphoned off the money. When I step onto the thing for even a moment, I make money for Zuckerberg. I work for him, not the Toronto Star.
I wouldn’t mind being followed for weeks by ads for the hand vacuum (designed in England, made in Malaysia, which is why I despise Dyson) I ordered five minutes ago from an online retailer with no discernible connection to Facebook.
But I do mind that my salary was effectively lower this year because Facebook knew this, its targeting having destroyed the print and online ads on which the Star itself relied.
I take a dim view. With less money, I’ll buy fewer things advertised on Facebook, but it doesn’t care. It’s in the business of attention, not retailing. Its hands are clean.
Of course they’re not. They’re loaded with lucre, and they’re taunting people individually and en masse, damaging quality of life and eating freedom. You are owned.
In Alabama — where else? — deranged hunters can prepay to have their cremation ashes packed into bullets to shoot living things after they’re dead.
In a sense, Facebook does this with your personal data. It shoots you with bullets made of you.
Facebook was the interlocutor, the middleman who slipped between readers and journalists and siphoned off the money