In another exchange leaked to Silicon Alley Insider, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained to a friend that his control of Facebook gave him access to any information he wanted on any Harvard student:

ZUCK: "yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard, just ask.  i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns"

FRIEND: "what!? how’d you manage that one?"

ZUCK: "people just submitted it.  i don’t know why.  they “trust me”.  dumb fucks."

Barely a week goes by these days without some other revelation about Facebook. Facebook founder Zuckerberg, a smart man, smarter than his cult members at any rate, reckons that privacy is dead, or near as damnit. His business model depends on your lack of self respect; on your willingness to trade your dignity for a new app ... this cartoon is already ceasing to be funny:























I recall years ago at college one bloke wanted to have a class (paper) yearbook wherein everyone in our finals class would paste in a mug shot and add some personal details. The idea being that everyone would have a copy and could keep in touch. Bless him ... The idea foundered. Everyone thought he was a cissy; nobody cared and there was a general studied ignoring of what was seen to be a very naff idea for any self-respecting adult.

That's all changed. When Facebook started, I reckoned it would be a fad for insecure kids with acne who couldn't hold down a normal social life. How wrong could you be? Within weeks, otherwise sensible adults were falling over themselves to document their uninteresting lives and derivative opinions on the Net. Suddenly, geek-dom had taken over a tabloid world where talentless publicity-whore celebrities and millions of formerly private citizens sought to out-chav each other.

Try to imagine how much of a clown you'd feel if you blew up giant posters of your passport photo and pasted them to your garden fence alongside a laminated poster listing your personal information and likes and dislikes, as if you were some sort of deranged narcissist or that you were too cheap to join a proper dating agency. Too naff for words, right? Then how does doing it on the web make it any better?





















It's sad beyond measure.  People with nothing to say about anything are falling over themselves to have a website - about themselves.  What sort of navel-gazer needs a website about him or herself?  It's one thing to have a site about an external interest, e.g., travel, photography, music, business, sport, politics etc; but FB's bread and butter is sites where the semi-literate site owner's dull life is the main focus of attention.       
       
There may be a backlash, and we may see a future generation of re-born outdoors and real world types who will despise the hollow tyranny of the "social" Web 2.0 and all it doesn't stand for in much the same way as people growing up in the 1960s despised short haircuts and unthinking obedience to authority, but I doubt it. As with literacy, the art of conversation is dying, and a gimmicky world based on smug ignorance of anything better soon adjusts, without awareness or reason, to a reduced form of existence.

Yet the justifications for social networking sites are legion:

"I need to be on Facebook to share photos."

How often have you heard otherwise intelligent people dusting off this one? Facebook and the rest of them are portal sites (of the kind that fell out of favour in about 1999) that "bundle" a few unremarkable services (IM, file sharing, online games, e-mail) most of which constituent services are available in far superior stand-alone versions by other providers who, unlike the social networking sites, do not require you to join what amounts to an online cult before using their second rate services. Take photos - if you want to host pictures and movies, no social networking site's services come within an ass' roar of the facilities offered by eg Smugmug. For a few quid a year (about the cost of a night out), Smugmug gives you access to ad free hosting; no limitations on file size whatsoever; the ability to watermark your photos and sell them online; your privacy - you can opt for as much or as little personal privacy as you want (unlike Facebook et al, where your "privacy" is an illusion kept alive by the fact that the majority of users are technically naive "third wave" users who seem to know little about how networks actually work); the ability to send selected photos to your mates while keeping the rest of your galleries private; the ability to order professionally bound albums if you wish; standard storage across multiple servers to preserve your photos; backup DVDs; unlimited storage; customisable galleries; and viewer privacy - your friends can see selected photos without having to give out their personal information to a poxy portal site. On personal privacy - what sort of person puts family pictures on a social networking site? Do they understand nothing about how the Net works; or do they just put no value on anything, or do they just not read the papers? No, positing social networking sites' services as a reason for joining them is about as sensible as arguing that you need to join a golf club in order to go for a walk.

"We use technology to "network" online for business purposes."

This is codology. In reality, I have more contacts (literally thousands), all garnered over years in real life, face to face, than I'll ever need. I can't do social or even commercial justice to the ones I have; why would I wish to add to the pile by accumulating a list of names of people I have mostly never met and certainly do not trust? Why cheapen yourself by random associations with every Tom, Dick and Harry who may know someone who knew someone who once knew someone you once met at a conference somewhere? It's about as useful as collecting milk bottle tops.

"We use technology to enhance our relationships."

Fair enough if you're paraplegic, maybe, or if you suffer panic attacks in crowds. But for most closet computer browser "daters", all that's going on here is a ducking out of growing up. Growing up to a point where we learn the value of commitment in relationships was a challenge even in real social circles, where, fortunately, outside of big cities at any rate, there is but a finite supply of tempting fuck-ups, chancers and losers for us to waste time on, and a circle of "earned friends" who can be relied upon to tell us to wise up when this is necessary. However, the "social" Net is our newest mirage. Behind the hype, it's a solitary fantasy world [IT AIN'T THE REAL WORLD FOLKS! COP ON TO YOURSELVES! BAKE A CAKE! – Ed.] and its central illusion is that of choices without consequences. Further, the checks and balances provided by our real world friends are absent in a context where we act (literally) alone and in secret and where we are "free" to invent new "attributes" and "histories" and "identities" for ourselves. It's a crutch for the weakly mendacious; a cold haven for timid fantasists. Anyone who is struggling to grow out of character flaws such as selfishness, control-freakery, habitual lying, fear, narcissism or laziness; or anyone who is scared or broken will find in the "social" Net a world of tempting easy seeming options that can be as destructive as alcoholism, workaholicism, drugs, gambling or any other addiction of the powerless.

"We use technology to create new communities."

In fact, we use it to fake a sense of community. In an atomised world of increasing displacement and transience, the trend is to fall into transient college and work place "communities". Both are an illusion. College communities work for two reasons: (i) lack of money creates an artificial, short-lived equality; and (ii) there is a mutual vested interest in pack behaviour whereby inexperienced and often pampered people have a finite licence to sponge off their families and off society and to treat partners as commodities, as part of a growing up process. Once into the real world for a few years, the whole delusional edifice betrays its lack of solid foundations, and fractures once some people start to earn more or achieve more than others, or when they cease slumming for kicks and revert to class type. Work place communities are a contradiction in terms; the dominant reason for being in them is money and self interest; motivations that are antithetical to a genuine community. The kind of people that are most active in "social committees" in workplaces are naïve or alcoholic people who don't have a life and who are too far down the pecking order to have any visceral apprehension of the dog-eat-dog reality of workplaces and/or who are trying in vain to recreate an older boozing network to perpetuate the protracted adolescence of their college days. The uselessness of these fake communities, and the general decline in real communities, has cleared the stage for the Net's most pervasive illusion, that of "social networking" sites.

We're living in the age of assisted-autism and rampant self-delusion, folks. In a recent edition of the Sunday Times, Roger Scruton summed up the whole farrago of creeping deceptions (of self and others) and the commodification of personality that are central to the Web 2.0 "social networking" addiction:

"But it would be naive to think people can live their lives this way, with their eyes on the screen and their minds on themselves, without affecting their capacity for real human relationships. Some might argue that we are witnessing a new kind of addiction. For addiction arises when something good but hard — in this case, friendship — is provided with a cost-free substitute, obtainable at the flick of a switch.

In real life, friendship involves risk. The reward is great: help in times of need, joy in times of celebration. But the cost is also great: self-sacrifice, accountability, the risk of embarrassment and anger, and the effort of winning another's trust. Hence I can become friends with you only by seeking your company. I must attend to your words, gestures and body language, and win the trust of the person revealed in them, and this is risky business. I can avoid the risk and
still obtain pleasure; but I will never obtain friendship or love.

There grows between us a reduced-risk encounter, in which each is aware that the other is fundamentally withheld, sovereign within his impregnable cyber-castle. I "click on" you, as I might click on a news item or a video. You are one of the products on display; but this does not make you an object of trust, with whom my life is mingled.

Does this matter? I think it does. For trust, accountability and risk-taking are dispositions on which the future of society depends. And these things are learnt by accepting the real cost of them. They are not learnt by playing with their virtual substitutes, any more than real courage is learnt by playing with violent computer games.

As people habituate themselves to living in virtual worlds where all is permitted and nothing is paid for, virtues like courage and justice will disappear, since nobody will have a need for them. Without those virtues, however, people will be unable to risk themselves in real encounters, and will hide instead in their narcissistic dreams. Some people look forward to this, hoping for a brave new world of virtual relationships; but surely the best thing about such a world is that no real person will be born there."

Increasingly, as with the breathtaking rudeness of ignoring people in company to respond, like Pavlov's dog, to witless texts from bored fools, the real world is becoming increasingly subordinate to, and interpreted by, the online so-called world. Some have suggested that this will affect the way we think.

In an amusing minor instance of this, even the control pedals on Renault's new Twingo hot hatchback are marked with "pause", "stop" and "play" symbols on the clutch, brake and throttle pedals. Funny, in one sense, but pathetic in another.

Apart from the reasons noted above, there is one other – the Net is a colossal waste of time. Increasingly, this is the clincher for me. In the time I'm taking to write this, I could have gone for a swim, bantered with a real person or wrote a few paragraphs of something worthwhile.

Of course, I could mention the kind of people and vested interests that you're propping up by being a Facebook user; but you knew about that already didn't you? Sure you did, seeing as you're "into technology, or so you think ;) But lest you didn't, why don't you try researching the kind of people and vested interests all the Facebook innocents are propping up; with the CIA's venture capital fund indirectly keeping an eye on you. Peter Thiel, one of Facebook’s founders, favours a theory of human behaviour called “mimetic desire”; or in other words that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. So far, he’s right. As Tom Hodgkinson of The Guardian puts it:

“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.”

To paraphrase Timothy Leary, do yourself a favour and "log off, tune out, drop in".

There is no "second life" folks, and for anyone addicted to "social networking" sites, it's debatable if there's even a first life.