Against Facebook 
(by Tom Hodgkinson, The Guardian, UK - 14/01/2008)
Facebook has 59 million users - and two million new subscribers every week. But among these you will not find Tom Hodgkinson who volunteer any personal information, not now that he knows the politics of people behind this social networking site.
I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as "a service that puts you in touch with the people around you." But let us pause for a moment. Why would I need a computer to get in touch with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated by the social imagination of a bunch of computer geeks in California? What's wrong with the little bar?
And then, Facebook really puts people in touch? It is not true is that separates us from each other, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as eating, talking, dancing and drinking with my friends, I send them only the ungrammatical text messages and funny photos in cyberspace, nailed to the desk? A friend of mine recently told me that she spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a depressing picture. Other than putting people in touch, Facebook us off, still in the workplace.
In addition, Facebook relies, so to speak, on our vanity and self-esteem. If you load a photo of me that shows my good side, and put together a list of things that I like, I can build an artificial representation of myself, in order to be sexually attractive and to earn the approval of others. ("I like Facebook," said another friend. "I did fuck '). It also encourages a disturbing competitiveness around friendship: it seems that today accounts in friendship quantity, and quality is not at all concerned. The more friends you have, the better you are. You are "popular" in the sense that the U.S. high school students are so fond. As evidence of this is the cover of the new magazine on Facebook publisher Dennis Publishing, "How to double your list of friends."
However, it seems that I am quite alone in my hostility. As we write, Facebook claims to have 59 million active users, including 7 million from the United Kingdom, the third nation in the number of customers after the U.S. and Canada. Fifty-nine million fools, who have voluntarily given all the information of his identity card and their own consumer choices to a U.S. company who do not know. Two million people sign up every week. If it continues to the present volume growth, Facebook will exceed 200 million active users in the same period next year. And personally I expect that, indeed, its volume growth will accelerate in the months to come. As said Facebook spokesman Chris Hughes: "[Facebook] has become so integrated that it is difficult to get rid of it."
This would be enough to make me reject Facebook for ever. But there are other reasons to hate him. Many other reasons.
Facebook is a well-bankrolled, and the people behind the funding, a group of capitalists "risk" of Silicon Valley, have well thought out ideology that they hope to spread throughout the world. Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative liberalism. On Facebook you can be free to be who they want as long as you do not bother being bombarded by advertising of the most famous brands in the world. As with PayPal, national boundaries are a thing that has become obsolete.
Although the project was originally conceived by the star on the cover Mark Zuckerberg, il vero volto che sta dietro Facebook è il quarantenne venture capitalist della Silicon Valley e filosofo "futurista" Peter Thiel. Ci sono soltanto tre consiglieri di amministrazione per Facebook, e sono Thiel, Zuckerberg e un terzo investitore che si chiama Jim Breyer, che proviene da un'azienda di venture capital, la Accel Partners (di lui parleremo più avanti). Thiel investì 500 mila dollari in Facebook quando gli studenti di Harvard Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes e Dustin Moskowitz lo incontrarono a San Francisco nel giugno del 2004, non appena fecero partire il sito.
Thiel, secondo la stampa, oggi possiede il 7 per cento di Facebook, quota che, secondo l'attuale stima del valore dell'azienda di 15 miliardi dollars, is worth more than a billion. Who exactly are the original co-founders of Facebook is controversial, but whoever they are, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, although Hughes and Moskowitz still work for the company. Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and venture capital in the world of stars and stripes as a genius of liberalism. He is the co-founder and CEO of virtual banking system PayPal, which sold to eBay for a half billion dollars, taking its own 55 million. It also runs a hedge fund of 3 billion Euros, Clarium Capital Management, a venture capital fund, Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine has recently described as "a of hedge fund manager's most successful country. " He made money betting on rising oil prices is judicious predicting that the dollar would weaken. He and his fellow super-rich Silicon Valley have recently been labeled "The PayPal Mafia" by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a McLaren supercar from $ 500,000. Thiel is also a chess champion and loves the competition. It is said that once after losing a game, in a fit of rage, had thrown down all the pieces. It does not apologize for his hyper-competitiveness, "A good loser is still a loser."
But Thiel is more than just a capitalist cunning and greedy. Indeed, it is also a philosopher "futurist" and neocon activist. Philosopher graduated from Stanford in 1998 was among the authors of the book The Diversity Myth [The Myth of Diversity, ndt], a detailed attack and liberal multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. In this book argued that multiculturalism, brought with it a decrease in personal freedoms. As a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a newspaper right-handed, which still exists, the Stanford Review, whose motto is Fiat Lux (Let there be light "). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.org, a group of internet-based neoconservative pressure, created to attack MoveOn.org, the liberal advocacy group active on the Web. Is Thiel 'Extremely libertarian. "
TheVanguard is managed by a Rod D. Martin, capitalist-philosopher much admired by Thiel. On the site, Thiel says, "Rod is one of the leading minds in our country regarding the creation of new and needed ideas on public policies. America has a more complete understanding of what your company have a lot of CEOs. "
The small sample below, taken from their website, will give you an idea of \u200b\u200btheir worldview: "TheVanguard.org is an online community that believes in conservative values, in the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and opportunity always maggiori per tutti, specie per i più poveri fra noi». Il loro scopo è quello di promuovere linee politiche che «diano nuova forma all'America e al mondo intero». TheVanguard descrive le proprie politiche come «reaganiane-thatcheriane». Il messaggio del presidente recita così: «Oggi daremo a MoveOn [il sito liberal], a Hillary e ai media di sinistra una lezione che non si aspetterebbero mai».
Non ci sono dubbi sulle idee politiche di Thiel. Ma qual è la sua filosofia? Sono andato ad ascoltarmi, in un podcast, un discorso di Thiel circa le sue idee sul futuro. La sua filosofia, in breve, è questa: fin dal XVII secolo, alcuni pensatori illuminati hanno strappato il mondo dalla sua antiquata life connected to nature - and here he cites the famous description by Thomas Hobbes of life as "miserable, brutish and short" - to bring it to a new virtual world where nature has won. The value is now assigned to the imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal is born from this belief: that we can find value not in concrete objects made by human hands, but in relations between human beings. Paypal is a way to move money around the world without restrictions. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: "For Thiel, PayPal means freedom: it allows people to avoid currency controls and move money around the world."
Clearly, Facebook is another experiment hyper-capitalism: you can make money from the friendship? You can create communities free of national boundaries, and then sell their Coca Cola? Facebook is not at all creative. Produces absolutely nothing. All he does is to mediate relationships that would be tied in any case.
The Thiel's philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, author of a theory of human behavior called mimetic desire. " Girard believes that people are essentially sheep and alignment with one another without thinking too much about. The theory seems to be also tested in the case of Thiel's virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant, only that it is sufficient humans have a tendency to move in herds. Hence financial bubbles arise. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. Girard is a regular at Thiel's intellectual evenings. Among other things, one thing that you can not find in the philosophy of Thiel's are antiquated concepts that belong to the real world, such as Art, Beauty, Love, Pleasure and Truth.
Internet is a huge attraction to the neocons such as Thiel, because it promises, in a sense, freedom in human relations and in business, freedom from the boring national laws, national boundaries and other such things. The Internet opens a world of expansion for the free market and laissez-faire. Thiel seems to approve including offshore tax havens, and claims that 40 percent of the world's wealth is in places like Vanuatu, the Cayman Islands, Monaco and Barbados. I think it's fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is against taxes. He also likes the globalization of digital culture because it makes the owners of the banks almost unassailable: "Workers can not make a revolution to seize a bank if that bank is based in Vanuatu," he says.
If the life of the past was miserable, brutish and short, Thiel wants to make life much longer in the future by investing in this company that explores technology in order to prolong life. He promised three million and a half pounds a gerontologist Cambridge, Aubrey de Grey, who is looking for the key of immortality. Thiel is also a member of the board of advisers of something like the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. In his fantastic website, are the following words: "The Singularity is the technological creation of an intelligence superior to human. There are several technologies being made in that direction [...] [...] [...] artificial intelligence and computer interfaces that connect directly to the brain [...] [...] different genetic engineering technologies , if you reach a certain threshold of complexity, allowing the creation of an intelligence superior to human. "
By his own admission, therefore, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he called "nature", and install in its place a virtual world. It is in this context that we see the success of Facebook. Facebook is an experiment which deliberately manipulating the world, and Thiel is a brilliant character in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for incredible fantasies "techno-utopian." And I do not want to help you become richer.
The third member of the board of Facebook is Jim Breyer. It is part of a venture capital firm Accel Partners, which has 12 million and $ 700,000 for the project in April 2005 for Facebook. In addition to being a member of these American giants, the same carat weight of Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, is also a former president of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). These are the people who are successful in America, why they are investing in new, young talent, as Zuckerberg. The most recent fund-raising on Facebook was carried out by a company, Greylock Venture Capital, which provided 27 million 500 thousand U.S. dollars. One of the oldest members of Greylock is Howard Cox, another former president of the NVCA, and Board Member of In-Q-Tel. What is In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (look at his site) is the branch of the CIA in venture capital. After the September Eleven, the U.S. intelligence community became so excited about the possibilities of new technology and innovations of the private sector, which in 1999 formed his own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and works with companies developing cutting-edge technologies, helping to release those found at the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) in order to promote their mission "*.
The U.S. Department of Defense and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier. "We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries," he said in 2003 the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "We must make the leap in the information age, which is the essential foundation of our efforts to change things. " The first president of In-Q-Tel was Gilman Louie, who sat in the NVCA Board of Directors along with Breyer. Another key figure in the team of In-Q-Tel is Anita K. Jones, former director of research and engineering section of the Department of Defense, and, along with Breyer, a member of the board of BBN Technologies. When he left the Defense Department, Senator Chuck Robb made her this tribute: "She has combined technology and operational military communities to create detailed plans with the aim of supporting the U.S. dominance on the battlefields of the next century."
Now, even if one accepts the idea that Facebook is a kind of American imperialist expansion of the program crossed with an instrument to collect vast amounts of information, one can not deny that in any way, such as business, is really brilliant. Some geek online has made it clear that its assessment of $ 15 billion is excessive, but I would say that if anything is too low. Its size gives the giddiness, and the growth potential is virtually infinite. "We want everyone to be able to use Facebook," says the impersonal voice of Big Brother on the site. And I really think they will. It is the enormous potential that led Microsoft to buy Facebook for 1, 6 percent to $ 240 million. Recently rumors that Asian investor Lee Ka-Shing, the ninth man rich land, has bought 0.4 percent of Facebook for $ 60 million.
The creators of the site do nothing but play around with the program. Typically, they sit with folded hands and watch millions of addicts of Facebook to voluntarily provide details of their identity card, their photos and a list of their favorite articles of consumption. Received this huge database of human beings, Facebook just sell the information to advertisers, or, as Zuckerberg said in a recent blog post, "trying to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web '. And it is precisely what happens. On 6 November last anno, Facebook annunciò che 12 marchi mondiali erano saliti a bordo. Tra essi, c'erano Coca Cola, Blockbuster, Verizon, Sony Pictures e Condé Nast. Ben allenati in stronzate da marketing di altissimo livello, i loro rappresentanti gongolavano con commenti come questo:
«Con Facebook Ads, i nostri marchi possono diventare parte del modo di comunicare e interagire degli utenti su Facebook», disse Carol Kruse vicepresidente della sezione marketing interattivo globale, gruppo Coca Cola.
«È un modo innovativo di far nascere e crescere relazioni con milioni di utenti di Facebook permettendo loro di interagire con Blockbuster in maniera conveniente, pertinente e divertente», disse Jim Keyes, presidente and CEO of Blockbuster. "This goes beyond the creation of effective advertising. It is rather the participation of Blockbuster to the community of consumers, so that, in return, consumers feel motivated to share the benefits of our brand with their friends. "
"Sharing" is the word in the language of Facebook is going to "advertise". Who signs up for Facebook becomes a drifter who talks about complaints of Blockbuster or Coke, and extols the virtues of these brands to your friends. We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendship.
Now, in comparison with Facebook, newspapers, for example, as a business model, seem hopelessly out of fashion. A newspaper sells advertising space to businesses seeking to sell their stuff to their readers. But a system that is much less complex than that of Facebook. And this for two reasons. The first is that newspapers have to endure annoying fees to pay for the journalists that provide content. Facebook, however, the contents of them free. The second is that Facebook can calibrate the advertising with an infinitely greater precision than a newspaper. If, for example, Facebook is said to love the film This Is Spinal Tap, when a movie hits theaters like, you can be sure to keep you informed. Sending you advertisements. It is true that
Facebook has lately been in the eye of the cyclone for its Beacon advertising program. Users was delivered a message that said that their friends had purchased in a store. There were 46 000 people to consider this type of advertising is too intrusive, so that they came to sign a petition titled "Facebook, stop invading my privacy." Zuckerberg apologized in the company blog, writing that the system had now changed from "opt out" [1] to "opt in" [2]. I suspect however that this little rebellion for being so ruthlessly commodified will soon be forgotten: after all, there was a wave of national protest by the freedom of movement civil debate in the United Kingdom when the idea of \u200b\u200ba police force in the mid-nineteenth century.
And most importantly, have you Facebook users ever actually read the privacy policy? It tells you that it is not that you have that much privacy. Facebook pretends to be a place of freedom, but in reality is more like a virtual totalitarian regime driven by ideology, with a population that will soon be higher than that of the United Kingdom. Thiel and others gave life to their country, a country of consumers.
Now, you, as Thiel and the other new masters of ciberuniverso, you might consider this social experiment tremendously exciting. Here at last the enlightened state desired ardently since the time when the Puritans in the seventeenth century, sailed to North America. A world where everyone is free to express themselves as they wish, depending on who is watching them. National borders are un'anticaglia. All are now tumbling together in a virtual space where you can express to freewheel. Nature has been conquered by the limitless human ingenuity. And you might then decide to send genius investor Thiel all your money, waiting impatiently for the official listing of the unstoppable Facebook.
Or, alternatively, you might think and refuse to be part of this well-bankrolled program aimed at creating a barren virtual republic, where yourself and your relationships with friends are converted into a commodity to sell to multinational giants. You may decide not to be part of this bid against the world.
For me, Facebook shy away, I will remain as unplugged as possible, and spend the time I saved by not going on Facebook doing something useful, like reading a book. Why waste my time on Facebook when I have not read the Keats' Endymion? When should I plant seeds in my garden? I will not shun the nature, indeed, I want to reconnect us. To hell with the air conditioning! And if I wanted to get in touch with the people around me, come back to use an ancient technology. It's free, easy to use e ti permette un'esperienza di condivisione di informazioni senza pari: è la parola.
L'informativa sulla privacy di Facebook
Per farvi quattro risate, provate a sostituire le parole "Grande Fratello" dove compare la parola "Facebook"
1 Ti recapiteremo pubblicità
«L'uso di Facebook ti dà la possibilità di stabilire un tuo profilo personale, instaurare relazioni, mandare messaggi, fare ricerche e domande, formare gruppi, organizzare eventi, aggiungere applicazioni e trasmettere informazioni attraverso various channels. We collect this information in order to order to provide you personalized services "
2 You can not delete anything
" When you update information, we make a backup copy of the previous version of your data, and stored for a reasonable period of time so you can return to the previous version "
3 Everybody can look at your intimate confessions
'[...] and we can not guarantee - and does not guarantee - that the content you posted on the site are not viewed by unauthorized persons. We are not responsible for avoidance of privacy preferences or security measures contained on the site. Be aware that even after the removal, copies of the content you provide may be visible in archival pages and cache memory and also from others who have copied them and put aside in your PC. "
4 Your marketing profile that we will be unbeatable
"Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users Facebook through the operations of the service we provide (eg, photo tags) in order to provide most useful information and a more personalized experience. "
5 Choose to stop receiving notifications does not mean I stop receiving notifications
"Facebook reserves the right to send you notifications about your account even if you chose not to receive notifications via email»
6 The CIA may look at your stuff when he feels like
"By choosing to use Facebook, you consent to the transfer and processing of your personal information in the United States [. ..] There could be required to disclose your information in Following legal requirements, such as subpoenas or orders by a court, or in pursuance of law. In any case do not disclose this information until we have good confidence and conviction that the request for information by the police or by the plaintiff of the case meets the standards. We may also share account or other information when we deem necessary to comply with the requirements of the law, to protect our interests and our property in order to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through Facebook or using the name of Facebook , or to prevent imminent harm. This may involve the sharing of information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies'
* Editor's Note: In the original version of the article is preceded by the following correction:
"The adjustment that following was printed in the Corrections and clarifications to the Guardian, Wednesday, January 16 2008L'entusiasmo the U.S. intelligence community for the renewal of hi-tech after the September Eleven and the creation of In-Q-Tel, its fund venture capital in 1999 were anachronistically linked in below. Since the attack on the Twin Towers was in 2001, non può essere stato ciò che ha portato alla fondazione dell'In-Q-Tel due anni prima."
NOTE DEL TRADUTTORE
[1] Con il termine inglese opt-out (in cui opt è l'abbreviazione di option, opzione) ci si riferisce ad un concetto della comunicazione commerciale diretta (direct marketing), secondo cui il destinatario della comunicazione commerciale non desiderata ha la possibilità di opporsi ad ulteriori invii per il futuro. (fonte: Wikipedia)
[2] Si definisce opt-in il concetto inverso, ovvero la comunicazione commerciale può essere indirizzata soltanto a chi abbia preventivamente expressed consent to receive it. (Source: Wikipedia)
Tom Hodgkinson is a British writer. He has worked with publications such as 'The Sunday Telegraph', 'The Guardian' and 'The Sunday Times' and is editor of the magazine 'The Idler'. Hodgkinson is the author of two books: 'How To Be Idle' ('The leisure as a way of life', Rizzoli, 2005) and 'How To Be Free' ('Freedom as a way of life', Rizzoli, 2007).
Original title: "With Friends Like These ..."
Source: The Guardian (taken from http://www.comedonchisciotte.org/site/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=5266 )
