by Walton Pentland

I am closing my Facebook account today. I am closing it not because I think social networking is a bad thing, or because I don’t want to connect with people in cyberspace. I don’t think being online is preventing me from having fulfilling relationships in the real world.

I have a particular problem with Facebook – mostly related to the fact that on Facebook, you are the product, not the customer.

I think social networking is a wonderful thing, and I have no problem with technology facilitating my interactions with other people. I prefer to meet in person, of course, but social networks are a fantastic way to interact with people you can’t see because of distance. I live on the other side of the world from where I grew up, so I need technology to stay in touch with people.

Facebook is a parasite

My problem is with Facebook. There is something about Facebook – best explored in the film Catfish – that I find really creepy. My relationships with other people are the most precious thing I have. The fact that they are mediated by a company that uses me as a nothing but a data source really is a problem – I keep getting that image from the Matrix in my mind, of Zuckerberg feeding on our relationships.

I am not particularly paranoid about surveillance and privacy, but it’s worth noting Julian Assange’s recent comments about Facebook being a massive spy machine for the US Government. In East Germany the Stasi went to great lengths to monitor people – we are happy to fill in databases for the security services ourselves.

The recent Facebook purge – a number of political accounts were closed by Facebook – shows it is subject to political influence. The West is in financial and existential crisis, and civil liberties are already threatened as a dying Empire clings to power. I think this will get worse, and I don’t want to be exposed more than absolutely necessary.

Recuperation

Facebook is an instrument of US, and neoliberal, soft power, and it’s a post modern space I don’t want to inhabit. Facebook recuperates humanity’s most radical expressions of liberty, and turns it into entertainment. ‘Liking’ revolution on Facebook does not change the world. Facebook reduces political activity to a lifestyle choice and politics becomes an online pose. It amazes me how many ‘radicals’ I know whose sole political activity appears to be posting radical messages on Facebook.

There’s nothing wrong with sharing political links, but if the medium is the message, you’re inviting people to participate in a post-political future where all our decisions are made by Pavlovian responses to an endless spectacle of stimulants paraded in front of us. Maybe in future we won’t have elections – just ‘like’ buttons on Facebook. The party with the most ‘likes’ can run the country.

The Net Delusion 

I also think Facebook’s organising potential is overstated. The Arab Spring is widely touted as being a Facebook and twitter revolution. Evgeny Morozov criticises the view, which he feels is dangerously utopian. If online slacktivism is mediated through Western corporations, how on earth can we be sure we’re influencing the world in the right direction, and not just promoting Facebook?

If Facebook appears to be a useful political tool, this will encourage activists to use it – and add themselves to the database. It’s bad enough if our activism is subsumed into Facebook – even worse when the Metropolitan police buy software that can track us through social networks and mobile phones.

Morozov is half right in attacking cyber-utopianism. He diagnoses the problems really astutely, but doesn’t deal with alternatives very well. Technology can bring liberation – this is the point of my cyberunions project – but only if we control it. There are some basic principles that are necessary. If the current Net isn’t appropriate for building participatory online movements, then surely the challenge is to build a better Internet, not retreat from the 21st century.

It is not just politics that is affected: humanity, in all its uncomfortable glory, is neatly framed in blue and white, and even the most extreme and fringe ideas are rendered mundane by Facebook. The chthonic power of a Black Metal band is made ridiculous. The numinous wonder of traditional belief systems is dissipated. Science sits next to conspiracy theory in a perfect equality of meaninglessness. There are no exciting new terrains to conquer.

The illusion of intimacy

Clicking on ‘like’ is not, for me, human interaction. I am more than my Facebook profile. It’s a vacuous commodification of our most intimate relationships. I don’t like what Facebook does to me, either: we are interested in The Lives of Others, and so it turns me into a voyeur (and I suspect I am not alone in this). I find myself clicking through pictures of people I don’t know very well, looking at the precious moments of their lives. It all becomes part of the spectacle, the endless parade of the human zoo.

Far healthier, I think, to actually ask people about their lives than to cyber-stalk them. I think people make less of an effort to connect in meatspace because of Facebook. It makes us lazy, and we are not really there for each other in the ways we should be.

Alternatives

I use new media as part of my job. I may have to create a Facebook account in future for work reasons. But my days of using it for personal social networking are over. Some people say that there’s no alternative to Facebook, because everyone is there. According to Metcalfe’s Law, “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system”. In other words, Facebook is valuable because everyone is on there – not because it’s any good. By leaving Facebook, I reduce its value very slightly. If the exodus grows, Facebook will become the next MySpace – a social networking graveyard. Each profile is worth about $100. I am very pleased to take that money away from Zuckerman.

There are choices and alternatives. Before Facebook, I scheduled regular Skype calls with people who were far away, or just spoke on the phone. The development of web 3.0, which embeds metadata in our online actions, means we will be less tied to individual services, as our different online identities are increasingly able to talk to each other. OStatus, an open standard for social networking, will let people on different services communicate with each other – just as some one with a Gmail account is able to email some one with a Hotmail account.

We need a system that is secure – we need to control our own data – and distributed. If all your information is stored on a central server, it is vulnerable. The owners of that server are vulnerable to political and commercial pressure, or it might simply fail due to load.

By distributing data over peer to peer networks, we avoid this problem. Hierarchical information structures benefit a hierarchical society. To create a new, transparently horizontal and networked society, we need a different information architecture. The problem is the privatisation of virtual space, not the space itself. The answer is to build and defend the digital Commons. We need to move the discussion on from the shortcomings of Facebook and on to a wider look at the role technology plays in our lives.

Facebook is a ghetto, and part of a developing splinternet where we are separated from people who use different services. We need a social network that is open source, secure, and distributed over peer to peer connections so that our data is not stored on anyone’s servers. If OStatus is adopted, and Incliq lives up to its promise, we will have this. In the meantime, email, twitter, flickr and identi.ca are fine for me.

Finally, my decision to leave Facebook is not a judgement on your decision to stay. If it works for you, stick around. If not, break out of the walled garden and I’ll see you on the other side.