So long, Facebook

Facebook has gone yet further down the path of exploitation of our good will, or is it our apathy? It has done this by changing its rules so that we can no longer exclude our private data from searches. So, now, rather than just mouthing off, I am this close to deactivating my dearly beloved Facebook account. The slippery slope of Facebook's gradual yet constant encroachment on our privacy is of now unacceptable, I feel, in its doomed quest to squeeze every possible drop of commercial value out of the personal data of its users. Admittedly, it is not easy to leave a system which has such a ubiquitous presence at the centre of your social life, but this is exactly the feeling that Facebook relies on for its users not to leave, however much they exploit them.

It is now a fact of life that data, and now big data, rule the roost and underpin many of our desires, our consuming habits and our social relations. The complexity of this data is far too great for most of us to process or come to terms with. However, we are not entrapped by the numbers and the logic of it all, but rather by affective issues. We identify emotionally with this social tool of ours and it marks the boundaries of our emotional range. The result is that it's simply too inconvenient to be without it. The world becomes dull, painfully boring even, and lacking in instant content. We are left with ourselves and our immediate environment. What a fate! What a place to end up in!

OK, I'll give you that social networking adds something positive to life. The question is, what are we willing to give up for that? Is there perhaps a better socio-economic model for social networking than relying on basically sociopathic corporations to provide it for us? What other choices do we have? Well, there is always WhatsApp or Twitter, or maybe even Google+. Would they be any better? In the end, all of these corporate systems have been successfully infiltrated by National Security Agency surveillance systems and so Brazil’s suggestion of a non-US Internet is interesting here, as are the timid whisperings about a democratically run DIY version, mesh-nets that would link together on a more ad-hoc basis. I’ll be writing more about that in the near future. In the meantime, I'm getting ready to say "so long, Facebook".