Facebook is evil. Google is evil. The internet is evil. And here is why.
I have a rule I go by that if something comes in threes in a short period of time it must mean something. I’ve suddenly come smack up against the writings of Jaron Lanier, an iconoclastic thinker whose subject is this. The internet. Blogs. And doing stuff for free because it’s supposed to be cool but isn’t really.
The first Jaron Lanier encounter was from a friend emailing that he thought this Lanier guy was spot on. He provided a link which I clicked on but didn’t really read. The second was a day later when I picked up the February 2010 Harper’s Magazine and there was Jason Lanier penning an article entitled “The Serfdom of the Crowd”. Oddly, or maybe not as he probably has a very good publicist, later that very afternoon I heard him taking calls on a BBC radio program from a lot of irate web entrepreneurs. Before I go any further let me quote some stuff from the Harper’s article so as you can get a feeling for this.
People degrade themselves all the time in order to make machines seem smart.
The Facebook Kid and the Cloud Lord are serf and king of the new order.
What computerized analysis of all the country’s school test has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships.
And this whole paragraph:
If you want to know what is really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of to musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than with truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless. The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.
I work a lot with advertising. Not in advertising thank god, but in a support field. I still remember with a chill an art director at Wieden and Kennedy, a hot shit ad agency based in my home town of Portland, Oregon, telling me way back in the late nineties that “everything is becoming advertising.” I laughed at her at the time because the idea made me a bit dizzy and a bit ill.
Well, maybe she was right after all. We make less and less, do less and less and tell everybody about it more and more. And we use huge, intrusive, privacy invading systems to amplify our chatter. I’m a major offender, I admit. I’m evil too.
God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.
Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.
Thanks!
Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?
Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.
I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al. I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever. I think that that connectedness is an illusion.
For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB. I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers. I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post.
What I’ve learned is this:
1. “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.
2. The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.
3. I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more. My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites.
4. While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.” “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?” That game is gonna cost ya big, folks.
5. Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen. There’s enough risk out there as it is. Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.
6. Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer? Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is? FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info. That’s ok. I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door. Not.
7. Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.
“…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”
No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.
At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up. She seems to be cooling on FB. Some of her 221 friends are as well. Many of them do want some wheat. When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.
I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course? MySpace, anyone?
My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.
I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.
Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.
So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.
The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.
To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time. I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next. I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with. But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.
I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great. For me it has nothing to offer.
kay
Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.
To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?
I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.
Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news. If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)
However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.
I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.
@loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.
As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.
Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.
With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.
Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.
That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)
I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?
Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.
Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.
Wow, my life is already getting better!
p.s. <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.
Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.
MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.
That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.
This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!
Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…
VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!
Fraser, I really loved your following comment:
“Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”
I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever. That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it. Kudos to you!
Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.
I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.
I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.