Tom Hodgkinson writes in The Guardian:
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.
Anecdotal evidence is not much, is it? Hodgkinson underestimates the users of Facebook. A lot of users (like me) only supply Facebook with information that they already have made public. Besides, internet - the mother of all Facebooks that connects you to your toaster - started as a doomsday DARPA project. That has not stopped the internet from becoming the information lifeline of the connected world. We've got to give some credit to the ingenuity of users and to possibilities. Facebook founders and investors may be very smart, but they cannot predict the future, let alone control it. If Facebook did some evil, it would pay dearly by mass exodus.
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A number of people whom I like and respect are Facebook members, and perhaps it's right for them and their internet use patterns and needs. To me, however, Facebook is Teh Eeevil, and like Hodgkinson, I despise it. Nonetheless, I have to accept that photos of me, and information about me, have been uploaded onto the Facebook pages of others, thanks to my real life interactions with Facebook members. There's absolutely nothing I can do about that.
I dislike the concept of Facebook, in particular the emphasis on and rewards for vapid displays of egoism and self-importance, but the article gives several even better reasons to loathe the company, and to avoid supporting it. Venture capitalist and neocon libertarian Thiel is behind several of the most compelling reasons, including his use of Girard's theories on mimetic desire:
Thiel's philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour 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.
Hmmmm...sounds like....I dunno...religion???? I thought we hatessss it, nasssty sssheeplike religionsss, precioussss.
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.
My thoughts exactly. So why would anyone opposed to global manipulation and neocon fantasies support Facebook by maintaining a page with them?