Keep kicking Facebook while it’s down
This is a tough time to be a pimple-faced little Ivy League puke of a social networking CEO. (At least, as tough as it gets when you’re young, famous and have more money than any dozen normal people could even know what to do with.)
In what is rapidly becoming one of those parables about success that we Americans eat up with a spoon–if there’s anything we love more than a winner it’s watching a winner crash and burn–the company that achieved almost overnight fame and fortune is now discovering that discontent and suspicion can materialize just as fast. Mere weeks after a smug Facebook announced plans for a takeover of the entire internet, a backlash is growing, and getting media attention. This morning the BBC reports denials from Facebook that it is holding a crisis meeting, always a sign that you’re in complete control of your message. Mm-hmm.
Of course I hesitate to gloat too much, too soon, about being proven right in seeing Facebook as a stupid fad that I could wait out. If only because, as a nonparticipant, there may be things that I just don’t get. I do feel like I have a pretty fair concept of Facebook, though; users and former users are welcome to correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t the walls and the games and all the other widgets basically amount to this?
Am I wrong?
Now, while I’m unashamedly writing a “kick them while they’re down” post, two other particularly appalling things that have struck me about Facebook. First is the amazing pace of their transformation from little startup to big success to 800-lb. gorilla. I’m aware of suggestions that Zuckerberg was playing fast and loose with some people from day one. But what interests me is the transformation of the public image.
Microsoft was founded in 1975 and on balance it took, what, 20 years or more for them to be broadly exposed as arrogant, power-mad jerks on a mission to put all computing under their thumb? Google, founded in 1998, is probably still in the process of establishing themselves as bullies (though they’ve convinced me, “don’t be evil,” indeed). Facebook, meanwhile, is a whole four years old and already neck and neck in the race to be complete assholes. I guess that’s progress?
What I feel is arguably the real travesty of Facebook, though, is what it represents in a larger sense. And believe it or not I don’t mean some form of degradation of human interaction; it’s possible that such is a legitimate concern but as I am essentially an urban hermit who tends to communicate more through electronic means in one day than face to face in a typical week, or sometimes weeks, this pot is actually untroubled by that particular kettle’s blackness.
No. The real loss that I think Facebook, Twitter, a zillion iPhone apps and counting, etc., represent is the loss of what our society might have been creating, instead. While we dazzle ourselves with shiny technotoys, we sleepwalk into a future likely to be increasingly constrained by competition for energy resources which power said technotoys right along with everything else we rely on. To say nothing of the frittering away of natural resources in a broader sense, through climate change, biodiversity loss, etc.
Couldn’t some of this innovation, energy and capital have gone into solving problems like that, instead of creating Farmville? I realize that government policy can’t simply turn programmers and UI designers into chemical engineers and environmental management PhDs. But even if we assume no one would be persuaded to follow a different course of study (which might pay dividends remarkably fast, given the short years between a typical entrepreneur enrolling in college and starting that big project which strikes gold), there are other “inputs” that drive innovative businesses and products.
Capital, for one. And in addition to gadgetry, America has sunk money into other “innovations” in real estate and financial wizardry which make the iPad look like penicillin. And why? Because that’s what produced big returns (usual disclaimers applying).
And I feel it’s a shame, to say the least. I don’t think it’s entirely woolly-headed liberal dreaming to suggest that significant, real innovations in energy and transport and anything that preserves the biosphere as a thriving resource should produce big returns, if one has the right perspective and accounting methods. But we don’t.
So the world goes to crap, but at least we can exult in new means of sharing humorously recaptioned videos with people in other time zones while we stand in line for coffee. “Yaaaay capitalism.”
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i can’t fundamentally dispute any of your points about misplaced values and misallocated resources, other than to note that the same could be said of any other time-wasting diversion human beings have created, now or at any point in our history. sure, maybe we’re fiddling while rome burns, but that’s hardly a new thing, and in terms of exacerbating the problem by squandering resources, i can think of a lot more harmful pastimes than farmville (though i’m hard pressed to think of anything on the internet that annoys me more — maybe mafia wars). i take it as a reflection of where we’re at as a civilization: the internet is where we live and work now, so it’s also where we waste our time and carry out our social bullshit. i haven’t seen any hard evidence that the rate of masturbatory indolence is significant up over the last ten years, relative to the previous 50 — it’s just more visible now.
as for the waste of intellectual labor, it’s true that we could probably be employing our collective brainpower more productively toward pressing material problems, though i also think we tend to overestimate the capabilities of our web geniuses, and expect too much of our technocratic heroes. apart from the fact that the ability to write code is not equivalent to the ability to contain oil spills and build safe drinking water systems, the distance between a zuckerberg and a borlaug is greater than the distance between a society of infantile technofetishists and one that has its priorities straight. supposing you could persuade every app developer out there to pursue more technoscientifically worthy projects — assuming there’s somebody willing to pay them to do them — they’re going to go work for monsanto, or haliburton, or the state department. even the most purely humanitarian and socially responsible technoscientific efforts have a way of getting coopted and spawning disastrous unintended consequences.
anyway, and this is really my point, i wouldn’t be so quick to assume that the whole enterprise of social networking is without value, even if its most commercially successful application to date has been done in a dumb and sleazy way. leisure is important, and trivial social interaction matters. i’m generally a fan of democracy, and i try (not always successfully) to maintain a healthy degree of populist optimism about cultural behavior, so if i’m true to my convictions i have to be glad that these needs are being addressed in a way that’s widely accessible and helps to draw more people into the network culture that the more privileged socioeconomic tiers of our planet’s population already inhabit. and if it can be done in a way that generates economic as well as social value, i’m fine with that — if it’s done openly, ethically, and responsibly.
I don’t completely dispute anything you say, here. I readily own up to engaging in some degree of woolly-headed liberal dreaming. (Perhaps 80 – 90%. But something short of 100%.)
For what it’s worth, if Facebook is emblematic of diversion of resources to virtual gadgetry in general, I also see that entire phenomenon as emblematic of a larger issue.
I’ll have to ask your indulgence on this, but I really see a parallel with something in Civilization II. (My generational-border peers all remember Civ2, right?) Late in the game, once you discovered the “advance” of consumer capitalism or whatever it was called, you could assign cities to “build” capitalization.
This essentially represented things like Sharper Image products, 100s of cable channels and, I submit, Facebook. It produced a healthy stream of revenue, but absolutely nothing else. No infrastructure improvements, no increases to the city’s science output or even its overall trade multiplier. In fact in what was perhaps a remarkable if unintentional insight, I don’t believe it even increased the number of happy citizens in a city.
I honestly see this as a good model for the direction our society has been taking over the past few decades, in an even larger sense than just our feting of Silicon Valley geek toys. Some time ago it struck me that, at the risk of indulging in a ludicrous extreme of self-pitying narcissism, one could argue that America kind of gave up right around the time I arrived in the world.
Consider that during the 1970s, the US went through a drastic oil shock… then made just enough adjustments to get by, at which point Reagan had the solar panels removed from the White House and we went back to building big cars. The 70s also saw our society pull the plug on an ambitious space program and, for that matter, get all set to adopt the metric system only to walk away at the last moment. (Does anyone else remember those transparencies they used in grade school to teach us metric, which had obviously been prepared for a planned national switchover?) It kind of seems like everyone walked away from the future itself, and never looked back.
Really, what can I say. I own up to being relatively pessimistic. And to some extent this certainly does conflict with belief in liberal democracy. But of course study of history and current events provides plentiful incentives to even greater pessimism about the alternatives.
UPDATE: 5/17 http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/ A bookmarklet that you click on once you’re logged into facebook that audits your settings.
How to quit facebook without really quitting:
http://lifehacker.com/5538697/
How BP = Facebook:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-mcquaid/why-bp-facebook_b_575212.html
Weekend here I come!
Allow me to pluck the detritus from my navel, roll it into little balls, flick them across the room, ponder the void that remains, and wander aimlessly through this topic.
To expand a bit on a point Josh made at the end of his comment, I think it’s worth noting just how shitty it is to be a human being right now. Not to get all paleo-Marxist here, but the pre-division of labor hunter/gatherer lifestyle looks better and better to me lately. Granted, material conditions are better in some ways than in any previous period of human history (though only for a relatively small number of people), but the emotional toll that late capitalism takes is pretty astounding. To the extent that shiny things like facebook and iPads give us some amount of emotional release, I think they’re a necessary evil, or maybe even a net good. The Western middle-class psyche has gotten extremely brittle, and if gadgetry and social networking tools are helping to ward off a great shattering, hooray for them. (I’ll leave it to someone more ideologically self-assured than me to argue that the world would be better off if the Western middle class melted down.) I think we need to be careful not to discount the volume of joy things like facebook have created, even if the fallout is less than ideal.
Of course, it’s not as if we can ever expect unanimity from a single culture, let alone all of humanity. We are unpredictable, illogical creatures who habitually act against our own self-interest for a myriad of complicated reasons. Nothing short of rigid, worldwide totalitarianism could actually harness the full technological and creative potential of humanity, and even then only momentarily, to be followed by chaos and backsliding. Another way of looking at this is that our inability to control our own destiny is our only hope of redemption, or, to put it less pessimistically, the source of our greatest potential and the defining characteristic of our species. We are and always will be stumbling blindly throughout existence, but holy shit the amazing things we make and do amidst all the flailing!
[...] from history” I have to confess that people had probably earned one by that point. I made a comment recently about a theory that America kind of “gave up” sometime in the late 1970s, and after [...]