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M o n a x,
Yet another blog.
Tony Adams
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tony at atoms.net
web: atoms.net
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Fri, 05 Mar 2010
Forgive the impersonal email, but I've been getting a few invitations to join facebook, and each time I get one I intend to write back to the sender explaining why I won't be accepting their invitation but I've had a hard time getting around to it. So rather than pretend that this screed is a personal email to you I'm just sending you this mass rant. You might be getting this because you actually invited me to join facebook, or you might be getting it because I've been directed to look at some photo or video or something you posted on facebook, only to find that I don't have access because I am not a member. That membership thing right there is the core of my main complaint about facebook.
Facebook is a walled garden. The internet is supposed to be free and open. Walled gardens are excusable for private land, but Facebook is a walled garden pretending to be a park. I'd probably enjoy seeing the video of your dog applying for his first job, but posting it on Facebook does not make it available to me since I am not a member of Facebook. When you invite people to your home to watch a slideshow from your recent trip to Antigua do you make them fill out a form first? Do you ask them to list their favorite movies and their cat's IQ? You could suggest that I could solve this problem by simply joining facebook. You would be correct, but what I object to is the principle of a private internet. I join facebook today to look at the adorable video of your four year old niece doing Henry V's speech at Agincourt. Fine. What about tomorrow? Do I then need to join MySpace to listen to my best friend from elementary school's nephew recite Homeric epics? And the day after? Do need to sign up on Linktdin to download your scratch and sniff resume? When does it end? I'll tell you when it ends. It ends yesterday. I'm not signing up for any of it.
And then there is the financial problem - facebook continues to lose money.Why does this matter to us as users? Well it may not matter for a while, but eventually facebook will have to do something to earn a profit. They have nothing of value now but an immense store of personal data and hundreds of millions of users. Unless they figure out some other way to make money, eventually they will have to sell that data somehow since they can't sell their users. There have been several occasions over the years where facebook has decided to try some new way to make money by compromising user privacy. Who knows what they'll try next? Will it be your grandson's DNA sequence that "accidentally" gets revealed to Martian terrorists next time? I'm not willing to risk it.
And finally, (for now anyway) the founder and current head of facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is a bad person. Whenever possible I try not to contribute to enterprises which pay bad people large sums of money. I'm basing my judgment on one event, which may be harsh, but it was the only time I got to experience Zuckerberg without the filter of the media. I was at the SXSW conference in Austin in 2008. One of the keynote events featured Zuckerberg being interviewed by a young blogger/journalist. She started picking on him a bit about something - I can't recall what it was. Instead of exhibiting the least bit of grace, instead of taking the opportunity to help a youngster learn how to conduct a civil disagreement in public, he turned vicious - mocking and berating his interviewer. Now that was bad enough, and one could argue that she had it coming given that she started down the path of conflict. But sensing the audience's willingness to take his side, Zuckerberg egged on crowd to join in on his taunts and in the end completely humiliated his interviewer to the roaring glee of much of the attendees. It was sickening. Certainly his ability to do such a thing, to get a crowed riled up is a sign of leadership chops and great personal power - but to use that power to hurt a person and stir up a mob to magnify that hurt is inexcusable and unforgivable.I'm not telling you what to do, but rather what I refuse to do and why.