When I was a kid in the 70s I remember reading a national magazine article about another kid my age who had his own computer. Amazing! This was something I wanted.
Reading on, it described how he had built his computer from electronics and operated it from his attic. He had quite a few programs for his computer. One he liked the most allowed him to simulate buying and selling of stocks.
If you've ever read any ads from that period, the implication is clear: computers are awesome because they are going to challenge us to become better people. They will teach us at a speed we can learn, they will reward us as we progress, and the obstacles and learning will get more and more advanced.
People who don't have computers are going to be missing out -- on self development.
Contrast that to my trip the other day by commercial air travel. Everywhere I went, people were on their phones. Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?
They were not.
Instead they were playing the stupidest games imaginable. Facebooking, taking quizzes where any moron with the ability to type would get 90% correct -- and then sharing the results with their friends.
Zuck and others figured it out. Computers don't have to be computers. They have to be video games. Who gives a shit whether the guy on the other end is learning to be a better person. Challenge them with idiotic trivial tasks, then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects, and the imagined praise of their peers. They'll do that shit all day long. All they need is more batteries.
His observation is that for basically a generation after the industrial revolution began, all those folks who were forced out of a job by rising mechanization had nothing better to do but drink themselves into a stupor. It wasn't until they all died off (the essay says "woke up from that collective bender", but realistically, most drank themselves to death) that we got all the institutional structures of modernity - universities, nation-states, stable 9-5 jobs, labor unions, civic engagement, democracy, public education, etc.
And then once we did that, society went on another bender with TV and spent all the time surplus from their 40-hour work week watching MASH and Gilligan's Island. It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's Island on YouTube today, because the production quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with a YouTube webseries that a few college film students could put together with iMovie today.
People will remain people regardless of what toys you give them, and most are not going to do anything useful with those toys. But it's amazing today just how much creative output has increased, on all levels, relative to the world I entered in the 80s. I think the stat, when I was at Google, was that for every second of real-time that passes, 9 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. Even if much of that consists of unboxing videos and pirated movies and music collections and gaming streams, that's still such a huge increase over the creative output of the TV-centric world of the 70s and 80s.
I find myself in agreement and in strong disagreement at the same time. My fear is your thesis is just an extended form of whistling in the graveyard.
Yes, these patterns you mention hold true, and we'd be fools not to acknowledge them, but there's another pattern that you're missing out on: each generation of distraction devices is more engaging and more adaptive. Don't like what's playing in the symphony hall? Go down the street. Painful but doable. Don't like what's on the radio? Twist the dial. Much easier.
So it's not simply that mankind invents some cool new whizbang and then an entire generation zonks out, it's that mankind gets better and better at inventing Whizbangs that are more difficult to zonk out from. So let's assume, and I really hope you're right, that the pattern holds and 40 years from now we see some new rebirth in institutions and inventions. This round was more painful than the last. Much more painful. And the next round will be worse still. As AI slowly grows, it's going to go after the youth; the old folks are already hosed. So really it's game over once we find a way to hook new generations as they come along and keep them hooked.
Those other waves didn't work like this. I'd argue we're either already there -- or within 100 years of it happening. So yes, it's a beautiful thought and I wish you the best. I just can't find it in me to think of this as being a winning argument overall. In fact, your examples like Gilligan's Island are actually reverse examples. Cost of production of niche entertainment content means fewer people make less money targeting smaller audience segments. Doesn't take a genius to figure out that we're headed for machine-created custom content geared to the individual. Things automate. Digital things automate faster. This cyclical thing where new stuff comes along and distracts a generation will become continuous. The only question is when.
It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's
Island on YouTube today, because the production
quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with
a YouTube webseries that a few college film students
could put together with iMovie today.
Ha ha! Woah, woah, woah, there. Hold on a second. You are biting off a chunk of effort and talent there, and throwing it in the trash, without considering some of the huge, huge, huge barriers to television production back in 1960's & 1970's. (...not Gilligan's Island, but MASH, kind of)
Film making used to be so absolutely and drastically different from the way it is now, and there was a lot of sacrificed wastage both in time and material, due to the level of technology and it's reliability back then.
Just to do things like little title sequences and animation, or audio production that didn't look horribly dubbed and poorly lip-synced required careful dedication and the effort of multiple people. All because of poor technology in general, a poverty of integrated circuitry, no software at all, and most post production being performed optically, in-camera and with practical effects. Indoor lighting alone was painfully costly, and doubly so, due to the level of technology of the day. The undertaking of some examples of matte paintings and set design of the era (again, not Gilligan's Island...) are kind of mind-blowing to read about.
There were also political aspects such as centralized access to broadcast networks, which were also subject to high technological overhead, dealing with analog signals and the limited reach of syndication across geographic regions.
You can't credit today's undergrad capabilities visible on youtube, and trash what used to require an army of people doing new things for the very first time, with the boon that off-the-shelf appliances and downloadable software make possible these days. It was a drastically different world 40+ years ago.
Sorry for the rant. This was an XKCD:386 moment for me. [0]
The essay you linked is amazing. And it is a direct counter to grandparent's comment:
> And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.
I don't miss it at all. Not one bit. It amazes me how much time my wife spends mindlessly looking though stuff on it and the negative feelings that sometimes flow out from it.
I recently read a truly fantastic speech by Charlie Munger, which imparted so much clear & concise information in an easily digestible way that I could instantly relate to, it made me realise just how little I know. Specifically, he mentioned that you really need to notice when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. It's made me re-evaluate my current relationship with technology and how negative it can be at (most?) times. I hope over time, people start to question their relationship with technology a lot more. I already see hints of this with mainstream media in things like Black Mirror.
I am amazed at the quantity and quality of some of the content on something like Kahn Academy that I have no idea why I haven't made more of an effort to try and grasp topics that otherwise are completely alien to me. Many of these will probably help hugely in my day to day life as well.
Recently I listened to an interview with a UK fund manager called Terry Smith, who said they don't invest in tech shares like FB, Netflix, etc. as they are such new areas which are still open to such massive change. Long term (decades) they probably aren't safe bets i.e. Netflix is great now, but once upon a time so was Blockbuster.
I do wonder if "peak" Facebook is over. There's already a large generational shift happening in younger demographics to things like Snapchat, etc.
I do hope that whatever may or may not replace it has a better balance towards positivity.
Yup, deleted my account a while ago, haven't used it in years. Don't miss it one bit.
At home, we are starting to have a 'problem' because my wife is constantly on FB. In the car, on trips, in restaurants, at the dinner table. It's fucking ridiculous. I have said a few times "what can be more important on fb than what's going on in the present moment with your family?". Behavior hasn't changed much.
What is starting to freak me out is the generations coming up. I have two young kids - pre-fb age - and they already have some questionable habits on my wife's iPhone - as soon as it comes out, they wanna look at pictures, go on youtube and fight over it. The second they see it...
I've been programming since I was 13 - a long time ago. Back then, you sat down at a table/desk to use your computer and then when you left, you did other things. You went out to play with friends. Ride bikes around. Go swimming. Go look at bugs. Eat something.
Nowadays, things are different. Different though because we let them be that way. Most parents I know are helicopter and at meet ups I'm always hearing about some bad thing that happened to someone they don't even know or is half way around the world. I'm not saying we embrace ignorance, but unless you can do something about that - and you're willing - then I don't see the point of fb and the news cycle.
As a parent (and developer), I have to be proactive and get the family back into the world. I'm not against tech in general (I'm teaching my son Basic right now), but the pendulum has clearly swung a little too far in one direction and fb/snapchat/etc, with their addictive behaviors, in my mind, are not good things for society.
People, to me, just seem happier when they're not inundated with gossip and negative news. I'ld love to see fb lose its dominance on the people who have their faces buried in their phones constantly. But, I don't think that will happen anytime soon. As long as people are checked out of the real world around them, it will be that much easier for them to get sucked in to fb and the like.
I wrote an essay 8 or 9 years ago about how technology in general is eating us alive. I specifically mentioned Facebook.
The comments on HN at that time were quite interesting. "Oh, you don't understand. Facebook is just a fad", "I know what I'm doing, dammit!" and so forth.
ADD: Wow. It's one thing reading the usual noise in the comments today on this article. It's quite another thing to look at HN eight years ago and see the same kind of response. Doesn't reflect so well on us. I would much rather have been wrong.
> It amazes me how much time my wife spends mindlessly looking though stuff on it and the negative feelings that sometimes flow out from it.
I felt like that, so I started unfollowing things/people that made me feel negative emotions and now my feed is full of Synthesizers and Dog Memes. My own little echo chamber!
Did you actually see people playing facebook quiz games or did you just assume that? You literally don't know anything else about those people. You're just assuming they're not intellectuals because they were on their phones. Lol. I hate this uppity assumption that everyone has to be an intellectual, know 5 different languages, study quantum mechanics, and whatever else in order to be seen as worthy of being alive in this age.
Seriously. Anyone who saw me out in public on my phone would see me messing around on Twitter. They don't see me later talking bioethics in Star Trek with my friend, who does the same thing on his phone in public.
People who reduce others to what they can observe in public spaces are probably not as obnoxiously stupid as they seem, but I wouldn't know that by their public behavior.
Television went the exact same way. From 'a university in every home' to a continuous stream of entertainment.
There is some choice but how many re-runs of Discovery channel content can you watch (and most of that is infotainment, not actual stuff you'd want to learn).
The one great thing about the internet is that it is many-to-many rather than one-to-many in it's foundations so we do have a lot more choice than on TV and that university is there as long as you want to look for it.
There is some romanticisation of the past going on when you dismiss the Discovery channel as infotainment. I don't mean that it isn't infotainment, but what's wrong with that. TV has worked as an educator though it doesn't resemble University.
Ordinary TV watching people have a much broader mental scope -- spanning the globe than their ancestors did. They do better on IQ tests. The TV shows they watch are more complex than the Vauderville shows of old.
"Challenge them with idiotic trivial tasks, then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects..."
I was once speaking to a dev who worked on slot machines video 'games'. He mentioned that making such games had a lot more to do with psychology and exploiting certain 'addiction' traits and less about game and level design concepts used in mainstream video games.
But the line is getting very blurred these days when I look at mobile games. At least you have the remote possibility of making some money in slot machines, as opposed to pay-to-play mobile games.
Oh yes, so I once worked on online poker games, and as part of the training material we all learned about variable schedules [2] and operant conditioning [1].
It's hard for me to use Facebook or play Candy Crush after being exposed to that material. On the other hand, the real heroin, loot-dropping Action RPGs, for some reason I can stand to play those in short spurts before losing interest. I'm not sure why, perhaps there's something wrong with their scheduling...
Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll is an excellent book about the video slots industry in the US, its behavioral engineering principles, and the effects it has on the lives of the people it hooks into pointless and expensive dopamine grinding.
Is it a problem? If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them? It might not be the original intent, or the hopes of some (and only some), but if people are content with this outcome, there's little debate to be had.
The question presented here, though, is whether or not allowing Facebook to monopolize the industry is a threat to society. Services provided are irrelevant. This is a matter of centralization.
>If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them?
Don't mistake addiction for contentment. How many of those people would like to be doing something else, but just can't pull themselves away from the slot machine?
>If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them?
Because that happiness is an illusion. One that prevents them from seeing the seriousness of their situation. Whether it's texting-and-driving, or climate-change-denial. This "tool" is going to do us more harm than good.
Excellent point about centralisation. I can't help but feel many people either misunderstood or didn't read the article. In my view, the power Zuckerberg wields is staggering, although I've seen many postings here with contrasting views on that level of power.
The article is excellent. It's well structured and insightful. It also leads us to ask excellent questions and provides relevant content to mull over. As an example, Zuckerberg's message was fascinating in what it didn't say.
My superficial value add to truthhawk's article is as follows.
1. How much sway does Facebook actually have? Do most people seek information outside of Facebook? If they hear/see something enough, does it become truth?
2. Would Zuckerberg want to be president? I've always viewed the President as being a servant to power brokers behind the scenes. Wouldn't Zuckerberg have more influence by striking deals with potential candidates and hold leverage through Facebook profile analysis? Does Zuckerberg have the power to be more than a president?
3. Does anyone actually have the power to take on Facebook? Might that person be subjected to extra criticism (eg. during the next election) if they don't play ball?
4. Facebook exists and it is particularly powerful. If you were to decentralise the leadership (as discussed by truthhawk), would that add benefit? How? I see potential for a fragmented committee, or worse. Could Zuckerberg be like Jobs was to Apple?
5. Long term, assuming Facebook and Zuckerberg survive the test of time, who takes over? What sort of people would gravitate to that role? What might that mean for this wealth of information on many citizens of the world? Even if Zuckerberg is a benevolent dictator, the potential vacuum of power that will be created horrifies me, especially thinking about the personalities that may fight for it.
I don't believe Facebook will disappear any time soon. There are serious questions around Facebook that we desperately need to consider. This article is excellent as it helps focus us on this goal.
This is why I (mostly) love HN. It really makes me think about the world around me in so many interesting and meaningful ways. I may have given up on MSM and once-brilliant sites like Ars Technica (who now thrust biased gender and governmental politics down our throats). I hope HN can keep its secret sauce flowing.
The best aspect of social media is social cohesion, and Facebook is decent at it. Being able to maintain, develop or otherwise keep in touch with people has a huge impact on quality of life.
The tragedy of Facebook is that it has integrated my ability to connect with friends and random people with 'news' using perverse solicitous internet marketing.
Of course, most of these temptations I've requested, essentially forcing myself to scroll through a Reddit-like waste of time just to see what my cousins or friends are up to. Yet the inertia of bad decisions is hard to steer against.
I'd view more ads or pay $100/month if Facebook was purely about individuals, had no brands or influencers, and it was just a way to maximize social cohesion.
If Facebook introduced a big "No News" button as an easy way to opt out of the noise, would it make the world a better place? Zuckerburg is making the world a better place through philanthropy but in business he's in the unique position of being able to magnify human ideals and spark a type of social enlightenment and cultural renaissance.
> taking quizzes where any moron with the ability to type would get 90% correct -- and then sharing the results with their friends.
This bothers me so much for some reason. Title a kindergarden math quiz "Only people with an IQ of 150 can pass this test! 90% of people cant!" and when people get a 100% on it, they will inevitably share it, to show off. And then another person sees it and says "there's no way cousin Sally could get that good of an IQ score! I've got to try this to prove that I'm better!"
I had this realization recently. The web is undoubtedly a great thing. Computers have obviously made our lives unbelievably better. But I'm starting to seriously question if the smartphone will ultimately be seen as a positive development for humanity. To be sure, we need modern telecommunications. Late 90's MMS phones covered this use case completely. But this world where everyone has an attention stealing machine in their pocket that feeds them nonsense 24/7 is seriously starting to affect us.
Add to this the economic absurdity of having multicore 64b, HD display, wireless, Gigs of ram and 10H of battery life; just to do a high res version of the 80s television/teletext. And don't forget to upgrade with the new model, because you clearly need an octocore to swipe right.
I'm cynical but I liked that race at first. A smartphone was cool, but I agree that it's not the result I planned.
It's even a little more absurd, because it seems that society aggregates issues, and try to develop solutions, but the solution just replace the other sources of problems, so on and so forth. Moving target.
I'm sure soon some people will pay to have disconnected areas to relive how it was before.
ps: the easiest way to get smarter is to avoid relying on society, and solve problems on your own. For that reading an old book with a pencil nearby is probably more than enough. society and tech are religions somehow; distortion field.
In your opinion its a problem. The arrogance to say you know better than everyone else in such absolute terms is astounding.
I would counter that it is completely fair for someone to want to escape reality and grab simplistic rewards to avoid the absolute drudgery of being crammed into a plane with noisy, rude, and smelly strangers for an extended period of time. What kind of deep thought is possible in this environment?
Right?! They're on a plane--excuse me, commercial air traveling mass transportation vehicle--and they're expecting to see people studying Ulysses and learning Latin.
I really can't expand anymore on the article itself, so I'll just respond to your expressed sentiment. I'm interpreting you as feeling that the core problem with FB is that there is no one there "who gives a shit whether the guy on the other end is learning to be a better person."
I contend both that that is not the case, and that that concern is the precise inversion of what a developer's goals should be. FB is scrambling to ensure its users get the "correct" news on their feed, and every feature rollout has been intended to increase the social harmony among its user graphs. However, making those the focus requires the psychological manipulation you touch upon in your post. FB's product ends up not being a general purpose forum where people can express their social selves, but rather a precisely crafted echo chamber whose interface is a general purpose forum.
Don't have any contempt for the FB users you see at the airport, they're just as human as you and me. Somehow though, I've recently been able to get actual fun and satisfaction from FB. Turns out when you use it to just post links you like, or to write out and discuss ideas you have, or to check the latest Hegel memes, or show off something you've made, or to play meta games with people, or to just chat, you can have a good time without almost any of the addicting BS.
On a more serious note, I feel this is the right attitude towards the kinds of things. I've never had a problem with my feed and if something is uninteresting I just block it, period. The feed always ends up being a mirror of the users curiosities and interests so if you have a problem with it it's up to you to change it. Technology is a gateway to knowledge and self actualization, but you can't force those things into people, it's their journey.
I'll play devil's advocate. Humans are social, no way around that. It'd be much simpler if we weren't but then we wouldn't be human. Social media is what you make of it: it's a tool, or if you let it be, a game.
For Facebook, 95% of the time I only use Facebook Messenger and Events. Both of these things are only as intrusive and distracting as you choose for them to be, and are very efficient for communicating and organizing events. The other 5% I scroll through the news feed and unfollow anything non-wholesome or people that I don't keep in touch with anymore, which leads to a trimmed, much less populated feed.
Snapchat I find redeemable because it's a much more honest representation of people's lives, since they can have greater control of who sees their content and the knowledge that it is impermanent. Instagram and Facebook have both carbon copied the app's functionality in a testament to that value.
Instagram is definitely more on the side of the video game, but I use it as creative inspiration. There are some incredibly talented photographers on Instagram, and I also follow a lot of motorcycle photoblogs for build inspiration.
Reddit has helped me solve so many problems and has given me so much helpful advice that I can forgive the time I've wasted there.
tl;dr use social media productively and this vilification won't be necessary.
> tl;dr use social media productively and this vilification won't be necessary.
But that doesn't address that problem of Facebook acting as an intermediary for an increasing amount of our communication. Using Facebook "productively" still provides the company with an opportunity to aggregate and use your personal information to further its financial goals.
I agree with this. Perhaps the 'it's a problem' for me is defined more as 'This is a problem, it just goes to show how much humanity has these wonderful innovations and most people never seem to use them to better themselves'. I bet people said the same thing about books when they first showed up en masse.
In fact, there was mass hysteria around Dime Novels once:
I generally agree with the idea though. It seems as if the better we get at sharing honest to god information, learning materials, and the like, the more the technologies to deliver that inevitably get used to deliver entertainment over substance.
> Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?
I'll bet some of them were doing these things or things equally meaningful. Probably in roughly the same proportion as they would have been 40 or even 400 years ago.
Most people don't spend significant portions of their lives learning things or challenging themselves. From what I can tell this has always been true.
It speaks more to you as an individual that you believe the people around you should be pursuing things like "symbolic logic" or "global politics" rather than mindless games. Who are you to indict others for their hobbies, and on what authority can you judge their hobbies' value?
Look, HN is becoming a self-parody with this anti-Facebook circlejerk. People are allowed to have different lifestyles, and despite the inane comparisons to heroin that are being tossed around this thread, it's really not indicative of a systemic societal failure that people rather play Candy Crush on their phone than whatever noble pursuit you'd have them do while waiting to take off.
Take a look at that old photo of people reading newspapers on the train sometime. People thought the sky was falling with "new media" then, too. Every new media goes through an initial renaissance before it proceeds to mainstream appeal and accessibility. Not everyone wants to be like that kid you read about who built his own computer.
> Contrast that to my trip the other day by commercial air travel. Everywhere I went, people were on their phones. Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?
> They were not.
I am currently using my phone to learn mandarin using the "Hello Chinese" app [1]. It doesn't require internet connection for lessons that you have already downloaded, so it is perfect for long trips and such.
my first foreign language was rather obscure (Pashto) so I had to learn it in a classroom without any apps or other programs to help with self study. Learning using the hello chinese app is so much better compared to classroom learning it just boggles my mind. I can go at my own pace, it uses sound recognition to grade my pronunciation, I can study words and phrases, everything. It is a wonderful tool
Ironic the the apex of decades of some of the greatest mental achievements of the last century (Von Neumann, transistor, IC, compiler design, nuclear war survivalable networking protocols, etc) has been coopted to create a planet of Eloi. You can't make this stuff up.
Steve Jobs, tellingly, did not let his children use the Ipad.
Lmao! We get, what, around 20 years of a social networking boom and you take it to mean that thousands of years of amazing work has been coopted? Sorry, I don't know what world you're living in. The world I'm in has this Facebook crap, sure. But we're also getting into very advanced genetic engineering, we're starting to develop a yearning for space travel, we're starting to worry about advanced AI/robotics taking over our jobs, we're beginning to think about climate change and what we can do about it, etc. Kids are learning programming. Private space industry. Large Hadron Collider. Dark matter and dark energy. Exoplanets.
Some people just love overreacting and arrogant intellectualism.
The argument I made in my essay eight or nine years ago is still true, it's just gotten worse: technology continues to evolve to hack into the human brain in order to commandeer its attention, not assist it.
If you want to look at it in terms of predator-prey relationships, right now we have a predator evolving to eat the most valuable finite resource on the planet, the attention span of the apex lifeforms. So far it looks to be running the tables.
Before it was FB/Internet/Phone games, it was TV, so we're perhaps just continuing further down a well worn path.
See Roger Water's underrated Amused to Death album or the book that inspired it Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness.
Yes. Despite the potential, the most profitable/frequently used applications seem to appeal to the most basic parts of our brains, and thrive off of providing the dopamine hit. And just like heroin addicts, we've become slaves to getting that next high.
On the other end of the spectrum, my wife participates in a medical research group within Facebook, because the group creator and that community find Facebook more natural to use.
I share your concern but we can extend the problem to mobile phones.
that is such a bleak zero sum view. I can distract myself and improve myself at two different times. I've maintained and made some great relationships using facebook. I know people that still self improve using computers. I find it greatly amusing that people can have this opinion.
* One of the most addictive products the world has ever seen (Opioids, another such product, were used to overthrow countries)
* The single most important media company in the world
* Controlled by one person
Threat to free society? Jury's out. But at this point, it certainly seems worth regulating.
(Edit: The above points are not meant to paint FB/Zuck in a bad light. To their credit, they've built an incredible ecosystem and a mind-bogglingly good product. We all strive to create sticky/addictive products.
My point is: When your product is incredibly addictive to a large chunk of humanity, regulation should be considered)
> When your product is incredibly addictive to a large chunk of humanity, regulation should be considered
Yes. Let me compare FB to a phone company. When telephony was first invented, it quickly turned out to be addictive to a large chunk of humanity. Did we leave it unregulated? No, we didn't. In fact, there was regulation stating that telephone conversations may not be eavesdropped by telephone companies. Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network so people could call eachother, regardless of their operator.
But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.
This is actually a great comparison. FB has > 1 billion users, and it would be great if through gov't regulation those users could chat between whatsapp, snapchat, apple messenger, etc.
In the past this would be deemed "anti-competitive", now it's perfectly reasonable from an "innovation" standpoint.
That's a great comparison. Facebook has taken on that kind of quality for me. It's become one more communication channel. Fantastic for keeping up with my friends who use it, but not intrusive. I'd say telephones are still addictive (along with email and other forms of communication as a whole), but more in the category of food being addictive than drugs. Yes, some people used to ring up $2000 phone bills, but the more common case was legitimate communication.
>But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.
Who is the "we"? I certainly think it should apply. I'd argue that the main difference in this day and age is that the "we" now includes corporate entities as persons who, thanks to Citizens United, now hold the lions share of political influence to affect whether regulations like this come to be.
I don't think FB itself is the structural threat to free society - treating corporate persons equally with flesh and blood people under the law is the structural threat. FB is just one of the more frightening corporate mega personages at the moment. Any of them would be equally so if they were as adept at people farming.
It's safe to assume data miners won't be interested in designing a neutral ecosystem.
Consider the Open Mustard Seed project;
Open Mustard Seed (OMS) is an open-source framework for
developing and deploying secure and trusted cloud-based
and mobile applications. OMS integrates a stack of
technologies including hardware-based trusted execution
environments, blockchain 2.0, machine learning, and secure
mobile and cloud based computing. This platform enables
the managed exchange of digital assets, cryptocurrency,
and personal information. Harnessing mobile and personal
data, OMS establishes a sovereign identity, pseudonyms,
and verified attributes and provides each user with a
3-factor biometrically-secured digital wallet. This gives
individuals control over their identities and their data
and supports the formation of decentralized, responsive,
and transparent digital ecosystems.
* Sadly, the developer site is down at the moment, but the design considers a standardized set of APIs to verify identities and allow personal ownership and hosting and licensing of your social media data.
> Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network
well, this sort of thing is due (at least in part) to the physicality of infrastructure.
adding more telephone lines (and gas, electrical, etc) is welcomed for the first person to come through, but subsequent businesses/developers have a LOT more pushback if not outright blockage from local authorities.
I disagree with those saying that this is a good comparison. Telephone companies were not regulated because they were addictive, but rather because they are a public utility. Facebook possesses none of the characteristics of a public utility:
-Supplies an essential good or service
-Prohibitively expensive to replicate/enormous initial investment
I was telling people last year (before the tide shifted against FB) that there will one day (decades away) be Big Tobacco style litigation by governments against Facebook for intentionally making their service addictive when they knew the harmful effects (e.g., depression). I did not expect the sentiment to change so dramatically but I guess people are looking to blame anyone for the election.
Man I agree with you 100%.
I have been trying to get this message across whenever these topics come up in discussions with people.
We are risking the minds of people.
Take this example. So many mobile games which essentially leverage the thrill of gambling to make their games addictive. Of course, this only increases micropayment revenues. How many people get hooked and waste hundreds of hours? How many kids!?
To me this is the same as cigarettes. Why do we regulate it? Because the average person is unlikely to know its harmful effects. What about these applications? Which are profitable by tapping into our desires and impulsive tendencies.
Except it's not physically addictive. It's at most psychologically addictive and the withdrawal is not terribly painful. Just stop using it. Distract yourself with a good novel for a couple of days and it's done.
Facebook is a fad that will pass. Pretty soon people will be onto the next big digital media thing and forget all about their facebook accounts. But targeting and regulating a single enterprise just because it is too popular will set a dangerous precedent in law that will reverberate throughout the ages.
There have been other dominating monopolies before, (ma bell telecom monopoly comes to mind) which was much dangerous than a website.
Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.
Yes internet and social media addiction is bad and dangerous, but that is something that would exist with or without facebook and can be addressed in other ways besides regulating facbeook
> Facebook is a fad that will pass. Pretty soon people will be onto the next big digital media thing and forget all about their facebook accounts.
I used to think Facebook would become a passing fad as well, but we've been saying this for a while and nothing has changed other than Facebook growing larger in size.
> Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.
The Facebook brand is tenacious and it's pivoting into other things. Take for example the recent deal to stream live MLS games [1] or news outlets leveraging Facebook Live for supplementary content. Let's also not forget that, sadly, Facebook is a primary source of news and information for many people. I think the days of Facebook being only about status/friend updates are over.
I've been thinking about this, and personally, I thought Twitter was done years ago. To me, it was just a media that was designed specifically to give a few well-privileged famous celebrities a way to spew their empty garbage to the masses. It's very much a one-way "popular kids" channel.
I thought that most people would find it boring and useless and abandon it. But I think it's done the opposite. It's fed into the tabloid-news impulse of the lowbrow class, and only become more popular.
The genius of FB is that when sub-groups of people piss each other off, they can just unfriend, block, and ban, and they're in a nice comfy bubble.
The next thing that comes along will probably be both of these. With better AI-generated/sourced content.
Facebook is about talking (and texting, and instagraming) to your friends (and family, and acquaintances, and people you can't quite remember). That's not a fad, that's a general human desire.
Facebook the company might fail in the market and be replaced by someone better, just as they did to their early competitors. The desire for this kind of communication is universal though (and Facebook surely did much less to invent the idea than Graham Bell!). It's not going away.
That's fair criticism. My intent was to give an example of a hugely addictive product that shaped the course of history. Facebook is, obviously, not physically addictive like an opioid.
But it is addictive. Dopamine-hit addictive (thanks, likes and little red notification dots!). In what appears to be a very universally appealing way.
On one hand, you compare Facebook to opioid drugs in terms of addictive potential.
On the other hand, you suggest "regulation" in response.
But, if history and the nature of the state are our guides we must conclude that state intervention is unlikely to produce healthy outcomes, since the state has been unable to craft any "regulation" in the face of a century-long opiate(-iod) epidemic other than a prohibition environment, which has been disastrous for public health and dynastically enriching for drug cartels.
We are agreed that the government's response to opioids has been both awful, from a humanitarian perspective, and ineffective, from an engineering perspective.
But regulation must not be viewed as a monolith. Especially in the realm of communication tools, where many good, pro-consumer pro-competition regulations exist. e.g. number portability for mobile providers, common carrier rules, etc)
(Disclaimer: Obviously not all comm. regulations are good, cough cough cable companies in America. But clearly some regulation of these entities is needed, so let's fix the regs rather than trashing them.)
* Facebook is not "unregulated" - the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission both regulate it. The latter has taken multiple interventions, and will probably continue to do so in the future.
* Facebook is not physically addictive - there's a huge difference between addictions like gambling and drug addictions.
* Facebook is not the most important media company in the world - Facebook does not produce news, only disseminate it.
* Facebook is not controlled by one person - it is a publicly traded company.
Very interesting. Is it really controlled by one person? Or is facebook dependent on user's, well, using it?
If facebook went away tomorrow, would meatspace life materially change for any of its users?
A little peer pressure to affirm that Facebook is a giant waste of time, narcissistic and generally kind of silly is all it takes plant the seed to drop FB altogether. I have seen that work in meatspace.
The "what would happen if it went away tomorrow" question is not particularly useful to determine facebooks power, since it's not going to go away tomorrow.
I think the argument is about influence, not complete determination. Influence can be exercised independent from a services replacability.
All three of those points are hyperbolic to the extreme.
Unlike opioids facebook can not kill you if you stop using the service. And addiction rates are still being studied best I can tell. Certainly no leading papers claiming an epidemic [0]
Sources required and likely highly deterministic on how you develop a scale for such ranking
*FB is a publicly traded company with a board, it, by definition is not completely controlled by one person.
I personally am no fan of social media, don't really see the point in most contexts, but a call for government regulation into communication is the wrong step. IMO cults of ignorance, luddites, and anti-intellectualism are the threats to free society not social-networking.
And yet, you have something called: personal choice. People should be responsible for their own actions. Most of the concerns listed in the article, are things any other company or entity could do: "creating shadow profiles", 'crawling the web', etc.
If you don't want FB to have your pictures then don't go there. The parent article is over-reaching it's concern.
And it's not exactly accurate that it's controlled by 1 person. Ultimately FB can't do anything we don't want it to do. If FB does something we don't like, we're just one tab lick away from putting them out of business.
The last thing we need is more useless regulations that will stifle the already stiffled and slowing of innovation.
It's addictive if you want/need to be social. My wife does, not me. I'm not a very social guy honestly, I have a few friends in my inner circle who I text/gchat/fb messenger with but I don't use the facebook app or the web interface.
Since I deactivated my acct in Dec last year to focus on bschool apps, I've accomplished so much, and I say that not to brag, but to illustrate that it was a bit of a timesuck for me and I've been able to do a lot more since I quit.
It's not Facebook, it's the fact that we're all too happily Amusing Ourselves to Death: http://a.co/frMmE2s
“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
Exactly, Facebook is not a cause to be dealt with: it is an effect of those who are willing to use it. Very few of them can be swayed by articles such as this one. They simply have NO INTEREST in the possible consequences. This interest, or a desire to live by a higher standard, can only come from WITHIN. Until this changes there will always be Facebooks waiting to take advantage of them.
The events of the last couple of years caused me to evaluate the psychological toll that me self-induced exposure to media, of all forms, was taking. I came to the conclusion that with social media, mankind was participating in the largest social experiment of all time and just hoping that things turned out well. I decided the results, so far, have not been promising and I no longer wanted to participate. I deleted my FB and canceled cable. Now I chose what I'm exposed to. I advise more people to do the same.
“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
― Terence McKenna
it's stereotypical counterculture talk, but the dichotomy of creating vs consuming really sticks with me
Funny Story. I had to create a new FB account recently so I can give them money(advertise) but I didn't want people to friend me. So, I put a short version of my name. But somehow they figured out that I didn't give the correct name and suspended the account. So much for trying to give them money. :)
The threat is that Facebook has become too big to fail. A major leak of private data and messages of its users would be devastating to society given the scale.
What happens if/when Facebook fails as a company? What happens to the data then? It gets sold off. That's a scary prospect.
Facebook is in the fickle game of Internet advertising. When the noise overcomes the signal in what Facebook shows, when the content of the users' connections gets drowned out to advertising, people will leave in droves. When advertisers fail to see the return on their investment, the money will dry up.
> A major leak of private data and messages of its users
What's to say this isn't already happening in real-time? You don't even need to tap the trunk lines (to use a Matrix reference), you simply need to have enough "fakebook" contacts and some Persona Management Software [1].
If a major leak will be that devastating to society, we need a major leak even more urgently, so that the illusion of privacy is dispelled and people can properly calibrate to the costs and/or risks of their behavior. Otherwise we only continue to raise the stakes.
I really don't think the best deterrent to getting into a fatal car accident is to get into a fatal car accident. Also, I don't wish to experience losing a limb but surviving a car accident in order to prime myself to avoid a fatal accident.
What data can facebook possible have that would "devastating" in a leak scenario? Facebook has only what users have put on the site to share, and all data present is at least semipublic. There are no addresses, no bank accounts, no SSNs. The valuable part of facebook is already freely available: your list of "liked" pages and your social graph.
It's very reductive to claim that only addresses, bank account [numbers], and SSNs could be dangerous if leaked.
What about people who discuss private matters in chat? (e.g. sexuality, medical history, drug use, etc.) Yes, we know that's a bad idea, but most people aren't HN readers.
What about state actors using Facebook's metadata alone to quash democratic movements before they get off the ground?[1] To advertisers, most of the social graph is available only in a semi-abstracted form (e.g. target X, Y, and Z qualities and degrees of connection). A leak or sale could make that information available directly.
What about criminals using a public leak of location data and some predictive algorithms to strategically rob homes? (and maybe also using patterns of likes and connections to predict whose home is worth burgling?)
Really, to say that the valuable part of Facebook is already freely available brings to mind the words "limited imagination." Facebook keeps the valuable part to itself and meters even limited access to it. And there is extensive danger with the possibility of a leak or sale of the raw data.
Uh, it's widely known that fb buys tons of data from many 3rd party brokers. It's not hard for them to get whatever they need, including ssn's I'm sure. And they definitely do have addresses from 3rd parties.
>" Facebook has only what users have put on the site to share, and all data present is at least semipublic. There are no addresses, no bank accounts, no SSNs."
No FB buys third party/offline data about its users, I don't we know what they have:
Any kind of non-democratic for-profit organization is going to have incentives that don't align with "free society".
When one of those organizations runs the top centralized content and communications silo, use it to censor, stalk its users and promote its or its sponsors interests, it becomes a threat.
Non-democratic organizations inherently don't represent all parties and interests participating within it. If they did, they would be democratic organizations. A non-democratic organization will be influenced by, and will bend to the interests of, the few.
A for-profit organization inherently has incentives that are perverse. Historically, the profit motive has incentivized things that run contrary to the well-being, and rights enjoyed by, society. It is profitable to censor, erode privacy, erode labor protections and rights, use psychological manipulation to influence the behavior of others and push negative externalities onto others.
Yes, democratic non-profit organizations can misalign with a "free society". However, a non-democratic for-profit organization is fundamentally incompatible with the ideals expressed in the article.
> Those adjectives mean little (as does "free society") without a definition.
Merriam-Webster works for most when colloquial definitions bottom out or are hard to recall.
(Disclosure: I have accepted a job offer at Facebook, but not yet started)
Does Facebook really have a unique amount of data? Google also knows a lot about people through billions of searches a day. Apple can learn a lot through people's iDevices, and Google (again) or Samsung can do the same with Android. So can any cellular service provider, or anyone running coax or fiber into your home. The government can tap any or all of those. At least Facebook doesn't have an army, or paramilitaries like DHS or just about any sheriff's department I've ever encountered.
I'm not saying the author's concerns are invalid. I've had occasion to think about these exact issues a lot, and I'm sure many of my soon-to-be colleagues have too. The way I see it, Facebook and other social media occupy much the same position as phone companies used to, both in terms of how they facilitate interaction and in their privileged financial/infrastructural positions they occupy. There's good in that (e.g. ability to pursue the kinds of speculative projects that Bell Labs was famous for). There are also dangers, no question.
The thing is, if it wasn't Facebook it would be someone else. There's no shortage of others ready to step in if Facebook alone were targeted with laws and regulations. Instead of worrying about Facebook specifically, we need to think about what a modern "common carrier" law should look like in the social-media age. Perhaps some kinds of regulations on use of information do make sense, but that dialog isn't likely to be very constructive so long as most of the people on one side seem to be free-market fundamentalists betraying their own principles by singling out one company among many.
Facebook has the advantage that its users connect themselves with their friends, colleagues, and relatives. The users also give Facebook nearly all data about themselves (full name, phone number, date of birth, mother, father, etc.). People organize their events and talk about everything related to their lives. Facebook also provides their newsfeed and can track what they click and, most importantly, like.
Unless you have a Gmail or a Google+ account Google has to guess. Google can guess pretty well but they still have to guess instead of just know. You search for something on Google and then go there. Facebook keeps you on its site and encourages you to comment on Facebook which then incentivizes others to stay on Facebook, too.
Facebook messenger is also unencrypted, and I'm not sure if their privacy policy grants permission to read the chats, but I know they definitely do insert Uber ads into messenger whenever a car or "ride" is mentioned.
Would you rather have a Facebook with people who actually think about these kind of issues, or a Facebook without such people? At least there are debates within Facebook about such things. I've heard - publicly, long before I had any thoughts of working there myself - that they can get quite fierce. Never hear of such things at Twitter or Google. Is it better that people there just don't seem to give a damn? I don't think so.
If people rule out or discourage internal regulation with nastiness like yours, all that's left is the external kind. I'm pretty sure that's against a lot of people's principles, but I guess those who failed the coding test are willing to sacrifice principles for revenge.
> Does Facebook really have a unique amount of data? Google also knows a lot about people through billions of searches a day. Apple can learn a lot through people's iDevices, and Google (again) or Samsung can do the same with Android.
In amount it's hard to tell. Google and other big players of surveillance capitalism also collect what they can. But it does not really make it any better to have an oligopoly which has a similar huge amount of knowledge about a huge amount of the population.
> At least Facebook doesn't have an army, or paramilitaries like DHS or just about any sheriff's department I've ever encountered.
Maybe not until Zuckerberg is president of the USA ;). Also governments, esp. those who already run their own massive mass surveillance programs will use that privately collected data (at least in the long run if they do not do so already).
> The way I see it, Facebook and other social media occupy much the same position as phone companies used to, both in terms of how they facilitate interaction …
Not remotely. A far as I know they did not influence on a personal level with whom you interact, when that interaction takes place and surely not the topic of the interaction. Also Facebook today is a media company which does much more than providing infrastructure for communication of individuals.
> The thing is, if it wasn't Facebook it would be someone else.
You are aware that's probably the most lame excuse to do evil one can think of?
> You are aware that's probably the most lame excuse to do evil one can think of?
Nice assumption of doing evil there. I'm saying someone else would fill Facebook's role whether it's evil or not. Do you disagree? Do you not see the others waiting in the wings, from direct clones to Twitter and Google and Amazon? Do you deny that they lack mostly the ability to collect as much information, but have the same will? Brin and Page would be glad to step into Facebook's shoes, or Bezos, or Thiel. How is that better?
Again, whether it's evil or not, this kind of information gathering will continue and accelerate. Personifying it as Facebook or Zuckerberg just makes privacy a big game of Whack-a-Mole. Bills of attainder are both immoral and ineffectual. We need to address the what, not the who. The only lame excuse here is failing to work toward a viable long-term solution because it's easier (or more fun?) to demonize.
I find it amusing that news media outlets are stoking fear and resentment over the government hacking technology to spy on us when the information it gathers is a mere shaving of what corporations like Alphabet and Facebook have access to on the back end.
How is it preferable that a handful of incredibly talented, well-funded, private companies know more about you than your mother or your best friend (or arguably yourself)? Why are people more frightened by a bureaucratic government agency led by Donald J. Trump than the world's leading researcher in artificial intelligence, who owns the index to the entire internet, and creates things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7xvqQeoA8c? Why is Wikileaks working so hard to protect these companies?
> How is it preferable that a handful of incredibly talented, well-funded, private companies know more about you than your mother or your best friend (or arguably yourself)?
It's not preferable, but it's less worrying. It's less worrying because companies can't legally throw you in jail or take all your money or kill you.
And scary robotics promo videos aside, they aren't in command of the world's most powerful military and an enormous police force to boot.
If at any time they threaten you in a meaningful way, you can freely leave their services. If things get particularly bad -- like, worst case scenario -- you can even flee to a part of the world where they have less influence. Government does not provide you any of those options.
People are right to be more worried about government intrusion than private intrusion. (They are of course also wrong to be unworried about private intrusion.)
> Why are people more frightened by a bureaucratic government agency led by Donald J. Trump than the world's leading researcher in artificial intelligence
If it comes down to a forced choice, I'd much prefer Page or Brin over Trump. At least the former two are on IMO the correct side of existential issues -- nuclear arms, global warming, and so forth. (Of course, as indicated above, I'd prefer neither.)
It's less worrying because companies can't legally throw you in jail or take all your money or kill you.
But they do this all the time. Sometimes illegally, sometimes with full force of law.
The settlement of the Americas, through what might be considered a public-private partnership on the part of several nations (Spain, Portugal, England, France, Holland, Russia, largely), resulted in the genocide of a native population once numbering perhaps 40 - 50 millions. What this lacks in the intensity of nuclear annihilation, it greatly exceeds in magnitude.
The public-private partnership of Belgium in the Congo saw untold atrocities, including the unhanding of hundreds of thousands or millions of Congo natives. See Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.
Or of England, the East India Company, its private government and army within India, and the Opium Wars against China -- chemical, biolical, and conventional war against two entire cultures.
Labour unionisation, a concept and principle defended by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and other classical economists, say violent opposition by factory and mine owners particularly in the UK and United States. U.S. Steel, the West Virginia Mountain Wars, the Wobblies, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and more.
Industrial accidents have killed or destroyed many tens or hundreds of thousands: the Halifax, Galveston, Port Chicago, and West, Texas, explosions -- some entirely private, some public-private partnerships. Mining accidents claimed an average of greater than 2,000 lives/year for much of the first half of the 20th century, statistics tabulated by the US Department of Labour, and available online. That's on the order of 100,000 souls over the century, virtually all of their deaths preventable. The Union Carbide Bhopol disaster. Dam failures, including Johnstown, in the United States (this was the instigation of the Red Cross as a disaster releif organisation, and of significant concepts expanding liability law). For public-private parternships, the Vajont dam disaster, claiming 2500 lives. And showing that poor management, planning, engineering, and response aren't solely the remit of nominally capitalist societies, the Banqiao Dam disaster of 1975, in China, in which some 170,000 souls perished, on par with your nuclear bombing example, though it was but 25 thousands who died immediately from drowning, the others were lost due to starvation and disease in the following weeks -- as I said, exceedingly poor planning and response.
There's the US housing bubble leading up to the 2007-8 global financial crisis, and the robosigning and fraudulent documentation depriving people of their very homes.
For raw corporate aggression, I'd suggest the Johnson County War:
On April 5, 1892, 52 armed men rode a private, secret train north from Cheyenne. Just outside Casper, Wyo., they switched to horseback and continued north toward Buffalo, Wyo., the Johnson County seat. Their mission was to shoot or hang 70 men named on a list carried by Frank Canton, one of the leaders of this invading force.
There is the insidious poisoning of millions through lead, asbestos, tobacco, mercury, and dioxins, both generally and across specific sites, all whilst paid corporate shills actively and deliberately sowed confusion on the matter, knowing full well that their position was false. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway have covered much of this history excellently in Merchants of Doubt.
And there's the little matter of carbon dioxide emissions and their effects on global tempeatures and ocean chemistry, known since the 1880s, and recognised as a major threat since the 1950s, but still actively denied by numerous interests more concerned over their trillions of dollars of accumulated wealth and power than over the fate of the planet they live on and the souls they share it with.
To me, at least, there's a difference between information I willingly, if unwittingly share on a social network vs having the government unwittingly and unwillingly collect information indiscriminately. Furthermore, Facebook, Google, et al do not have SWAT teams that can be sent to smash open my door and flash bang a baby based on what they find.
I'm not saying I think it's good that private companies collect all of our data (and personally the info a CC company has creeps me out far more than FB or Google), but I can choose to stop using their service and greatly minimize the amount of data they receive. There's very few caves in the world where you can hide from the US Government.
Readit News
Reading on, it described how he had built his computer from electronics and operated it from his attic. He had quite a few programs for his computer. One he liked the most allowed him to simulate buying and selling of stocks.
If you've ever read any ads from that period, the implication is clear: computers are awesome because they are going to challenge us to become better people. They will teach us at a speed we can learn, they will reward us as we progress, and the obstacles and learning will get more and more advanced.
People who don't have computers are going to be missing out -- on self development.
Contrast that to my trip the other day by commercial air travel. Everywhere I went, people were on their phones. Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?
They were not.
Instead they were playing the stupidest games imaginable. Facebooking, taking quizzes where any moron with the ability to type would get 90% correct -- and then sharing the results with their friends.
Zuck and others figured it out. Computers don't have to be computers. They have to be video games. Who gives a shit whether the guy on the other end is learning to be a better person. Challenge them with idiotic trivial tasks, then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects, and the imagined praise of their peers. They'll do that shit all day long. All they need is more batteries.
Yes. It's a problem.
http://web.archive.org/web/20080708220257/http://www.shirky....
His observation is that for basically a generation after the industrial revolution began, all those folks who were forced out of a job by rising mechanization had nothing better to do but drink themselves into a stupor. It wasn't until they all died off (the essay says "woke up from that collective bender", but realistically, most drank themselves to death) that we got all the institutional structures of modernity - universities, nation-states, stable 9-5 jobs, labor unions, civic engagement, democracy, public education, etc.
And then once we did that, society went on another bender with TV and spent all the time surplus from their 40-hour work week watching MASH and Gilligan's Island. It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's Island on YouTube today, because the production quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with a YouTube webseries that a few college film students could put together with iMovie today.
People will remain people regardless of what toys you give them, and most are not going to do anything useful with those toys. But it's amazing today just how much creative output has increased, on all levels, relative to the world I entered in the 80s. I think the stat, when I was at Google, was that for every second of real-time that passes, 9 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. Even if much of that consists of unboxing videos and pirated movies and music collections and gaming streams, that's still such a huge increase over the creative output of the TV-centric world of the 70s and 80s.
I find myself in agreement and in strong disagreement at the same time. My fear is your thesis is just an extended form of whistling in the graveyard.
Yes, these patterns you mention hold true, and we'd be fools not to acknowledge them, but there's another pattern that you're missing out on: each generation of distraction devices is more engaging and more adaptive. Don't like what's playing in the symphony hall? Go down the street. Painful but doable. Don't like what's on the radio? Twist the dial. Much easier.
So it's not simply that mankind invents some cool new whizbang and then an entire generation zonks out, it's that mankind gets better and better at inventing Whizbangs that are more difficult to zonk out from. So let's assume, and I really hope you're right, that the pattern holds and 40 years from now we see some new rebirth in institutions and inventions. This round was more painful than the last. Much more painful. And the next round will be worse still. As AI slowly grows, it's going to go after the youth; the old folks are already hosed. So really it's game over once we find a way to hook new generations as they come along and keep them hooked.
Those other waves didn't work like this. I'd argue we're either already there -- or within 100 years of it happening. So yes, it's a beautiful thought and I wish you the best. I just can't find it in me to think of this as being a winning argument overall. In fact, your examples like Gilligan's Island are actually reverse examples. Cost of production of niche entertainment content means fewer people make less money targeting smaller audience segments. Doesn't take a genius to figure out that we're headed for machine-created custom content geared to the individual. Things automate. Digital things automate faster. This cyclical thing where new stuff comes along and distracts a generation will become continuous. The only question is when.
Film making used to be so absolutely and drastically different from the way it is now, and there was a lot of sacrificed wastage both in time and material, due to the level of technology and it's reliability back then.
Just to do things like little title sequences and animation, or audio production that didn't look horribly dubbed and poorly lip-synced required careful dedication and the effort of multiple people. All because of poor technology in general, a poverty of integrated circuitry, no software at all, and most post production being performed optically, in-camera and with practical effects. Indoor lighting alone was painfully costly, and doubly so, due to the level of technology of the day. The undertaking of some examples of matte paintings and set design of the era (again, not Gilligan's Island...) are kind of mind-blowing to read about.
There were also political aspects such as centralized access to broadcast networks, which were also subject to high technological overhead, dealing with analog signals and the limited reach of syndication across geographic regions.
You can't credit today's undergrad capabilities visible on youtube, and trash what used to require an army of people doing new things for the very first time, with the boon that off-the-shelf appliances and downloadable software make possible these days. It was a drastically different world 40+ years ago.
Sorry for the rant. This was an XKCD:386 moment for me. [0]
[0] https://www.xkcd.com/386
> And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.
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I don't miss it at all. Not one bit. It amazes me how much time my wife spends mindlessly looking though stuff on it and the negative feelings that sometimes flow out from it.
I recently read a truly fantastic speech by Charlie Munger, which imparted so much clear & concise information in an easily digestible way that I could instantly relate to, it made me realise just how little I know. Specifically, he mentioned that you really need to notice when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. It's made me re-evaluate my current relationship with technology and how negative it can be at (most?) times. I hope over time, people start to question their relationship with technology a lot more. I already see hints of this with mainstream media in things like Black Mirror.
I am amazed at the quantity and quality of some of the content on something like Kahn Academy that I have no idea why I haven't made more of an effort to try and grasp topics that otherwise are completely alien to me. Many of these will probably help hugely in my day to day life as well.
Recently I listened to an interview with a UK fund manager called Terry Smith, who said they don't invest in tech shares like FB, Netflix, etc. as they are such new areas which are still open to such massive change. Long term (decades) they probably aren't safe bets i.e. Netflix is great now, but once upon a time so was Blockbuster.
I do wonder if "peak" Facebook is over. There's already a large generational shift happening in younger demographics to things like Snapchat, etc.
I do hope that whatever may or may not replace it has a better balance towards positivity.
At home, we are starting to have a 'problem' because my wife is constantly on FB. In the car, on trips, in restaurants, at the dinner table. It's fucking ridiculous. I have said a few times "what can be more important on fb than what's going on in the present moment with your family?". Behavior hasn't changed much.
What is starting to freak me out is the generations coming up. I have two young kids - pre-fb age - and they already have some questionable habits on my wife's iPhone - as soon as it comes out, they wanna look at pictures, go on youtube and fight over it. The second they see it...
I've been programming since I was 13 - a long time ago. Back then, you sat down at a table/desk to use your computer and then when you left, you did other things. You went out to play with friends. Ride bikes around. Go swimming. Go look at bugs. Eat something.
Nowadays, things are different. Different though because we let them be that way. Most parents I know are helicopter and at meet ups I'm always hearing about some bad thing that happened to someone they don't even know or is half way around the world. I'm not saying we embrace ignorance, but unless you can do something about that - and you're willing - then I don't see the point of fb and the news cycle.
As a parent (and developer), I have to be proactive and get the family back into the world. I'm not against tech in general (I'm teaching my son Basic right now), but the pendulum has clearly swung a little too far in one direction and fb/snapchat/etc, with their addictive behaviors, in my mind, are not good things for society.
People, to me, just seem happier when they're not inundated with gossip and negative news. I'ld love to see fb lose its dominance on the people who have their faces buried in their phones constantly. But, I don't think that will happen anytime soon. As long as people are checked out of the real world around them, it will be that much easier for them to get sucked in to fb and the like.
The comments on HN at that time were quite interesting. "Oh, you don't understand. Facebook is just a fad", "I know what I'm doing, dammit!" and so forth.
Eight years later, guys. Facebook still a fad? Related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=471353
ADD: Wow. It's one thing reading the usual noise in the comments today on this article. It's quite another thing to look at HN eight years ago and see the same kind of response. Doesn't reflect so well on us. I would much rather have been wrong.
I felt like that, so I started unfollowing things/people that made me feel negative emotions and now my feed is full of Synthesizers and Dog Memes. My own little echo chamber!
People who reduce others to what they can observe in public spaces are probably not as obnoxiously stupid as they seem, but I wouldn't know that by their public behavior.
There is some choice but how many re-runs of Discovery channel content can you watch (and most of that is infotainment, not actual stuff you'd want to learn).
The one great thing about the internet is that it is many-to-many rather than one-to-many in it's foundations so we do have a lot more choice than on TV and that university is there as long as you want to look for it.
Ordinary TV watching people have a much broader mental scope -- spanning the globe than their ancestors did. They do better on IQ tests. The TV shows they watch are more complex than the Vauderville shows of old.
I was once speaking to a dev who worked on slot machines video 'games'. He mentioned that making such games had a lot more to do with psychology and exploiting certain 'addiction' traits and less about game and level design concepts used in mainstream video games.
But the line is getting very blurred these days when I look at mobile games. At least you have the remote possibility of making some money in slot machines, as opposed to pay-to-play mobile games.
It's hard for me to use Facebook or play Candy Crush after being exposed to that material. On the other hand, the real heroin, loot-dropping Action RPGs, for some reason I can stand to play those in short spurts before losing interest. I'm not sure why, perhaps there's something wrong with their scheduling...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
[2]http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Variable_ratio
The question presented here, though, is whether or not allowing Facebook to monopolize the industry is a threat to society. Services provided are irrelevant. This is a matter of centralization.
Don't mistake addiction for contentment. How many of those people would like to be doing something else, but just can't pull themselves away from the slot machine?
Engineers who have identified a systemic risk to society.
Couldn't your argument apply all the same to heroin?
If people are happy doing heroin all day, who are we to challenge them?
Because that happiness is an illusion. One that prevents them from seeing the seriousness of their situation. Whether it's texting-and-driving, or climate-change-denial. This "tool" is going to do us more harm than good.
The article is excellent. It's well structured and insightful. It also leads us to ask excellent questions and provides relevant content to mull over. As an example, Zuckerberg's message was fascinating in what it didn't say.
My superficial value add to truthhawk's article is as follows.
1. How much sway does Facebook actually have? Do most people seek information outside of Facebook? If they hear/see something enough, does it become truth?
2. Would Zuckerberg want to be president? I've always viewed the President as being a servant to power brokers behind the scenes. Wouldn't Zuckerberg have more influence by striking deals with potential candidates and hold leverage through Facebook profile analysis? Does Zuckerberg have the power to be more than a president?
3. Does anyone actually have the power to take on Facebook? Might that person be subjected to extra criticism (eg. during the next election) if they don't play ball?
4. Facebook exists and it is particularly powerful. If you were to decentralise the leadership (as discussed by truthhawk), would that add benefit? How? I see potential for a fragmented committee, or worse. Could Zuckerberg be like Jobs was to Apple?
5. Long term, assuming Facebook and Zuckerberg survive the test of time, who takes over? What sort of people would gravitate to that role? What might that mean for this wealth of information on many citizens of the world? Even if Zuckerberg is a benevolent dictator, the potential vacuum of power that will be created horrifies me, especially thinking about the personalities that may fight for it.
I don't believe Facebook will disappear any time soon. There are serious questions around Facebook that we desperately need to consider. This article is excellent as it helps focus us on this goal.
This is why I (mostly) love HN. It really makes me think about the world around me in so many interesting and meaningful ways. I may have given up on MSM and once-brilliant sites like Ars Technica (who now thrust biased gender and governmental politics down our throats). I hope HN can keep its secret sauce flowing.
Thanks truthhawk
The tragedy of Facebook is that it has integrated my ability to connect with friends and random people with 'news' using perverse solicitous internet marketing.
Of course, most of these temptations I've requested, essentially forcing myself to scroll through a Reddit-like waste of time just to see what my cousins or friends are up to. Yet the inertia of bad decisions is hard to steer against.
I'd view more ads or pay $100/month if Facebook was purely about individuals, had no brands or influencers, and it was just a way to maximize social cohesion.
If Facebook introduced a big "No News" button as an easy way to opt out of the noise, would it make the world a better place? Zuckerburg is making the world a better place through philanthropy but in business he's in the unique position of being able to magnify human ideals and spark a type of social enlightenment and cultural renaissance.
This bothers me so much for some reason. Title a kindergarden math quiz "Only people with an IQ of 150 can pass this test! 90% of people cant!" and when people get a 100% on it, they will inevitably share it, to show off. And then another person sees it and says "there's no way cousin Sally could get that good of an IQ score! I've got to try this to prove that I'm better!"
It's clickbait that appeals to pride.
I'm cynical but I liked that race at first. A smartphone was cool, but I agree that it's not the result I planned.
It's even a little more absurd, because it seems that society aggregates issues, and try to develop solutions, but the solution just replace the other sources of problems, so on and so forth. Moving target.
I'm sure soon some people will pay to have disconnected areas to relive how it was before.
ps: the easiest way to get smarter is to avoid relying on society, and solve problems on your own. For that reading an old book with a pencil nearby is probably more than enough. society and tech are religions somehow; distortion field.
I would counter that it is completely fair for someone to want to escape reality and grab simplistic rewards to avoid the absolute drudgery of being crammed into a plane with noisy, rude, and smelly strangers for an extended period of time. What kind of deep thought is possible in this environment?
I contend both that that is not the case, and that that concern is the precise inversion of what a developer's goals should be. FB is scrambling to ensure its users get the "correct" news on their feed, and every feature rollout has been intended to increase the social harmony among its user graphs. However, making those the focus requires the psychological manipulation you touch upon in your post. FB's product ends up not being a general purpose forum where people can express their social selves, but rather a precisely crafted echo chamber whose interface is a general purpose forum.
Don't have any contempt for the FB users you see at the airport, they're just as human as you and me. Somehow though, I've recently been able to get actual fun and satisfaction from FB. Turns out when you use it to just post links you like, or to write out and discuss ideas you have, or to check the latest Hegel memes, or show off something you've made, or to play meta games with people, or to just chat, you can have a good time without almost any of the addicting BS.
On a more serious note, I feel this is the right attitude towards the kinds of things. I've never had a problem with my feed and if something is uninteresting I just block it, period. The feed always ends up being a mirror of the users curiosities and interests so if you have a problem with it it's up to you to change it. Technology is a gateway to knowledge and self actualization, but you can't force those things into people, it's their journey.
For Facebook, 95% of the time I only use Facebook Messenger and Events. Both of these things are only as intrusive and distracting as you choose for them to be, and are very efficient for communicating and organizing events. The other 5% I scroll through the news feed and unfollow anything non-wholesome or people that I don't keep in touch with anymore, which leads to a trimmed, much less populated feed.
Snapchat I find redeemable because it's a much more honest representation of people's lives, since they can have greater control of who sees their content and the knowledge that it is impermanent. Instagram and Facebook have both carbon copied the app's functionality in a testament to that value.
Instagram is definitely more on the side of the video game, but I use it as creative inspiration. There are some incredibly talented photographers on Instagram, and I also follow a lot of motorcycle photoblogs for build inspiration.
Reddit has helped me solve so many problems and has given me so much helpful advice that I can forgive the time I've wasted there.
tl;dr use social media productively and this vilification won't be necessary.
But that doesn't address that problem of Facebook acting as an intermediary for an increasing amount of our communication. Using Facebook "productively" still provides the company with an opportunity to aggregate and use your personal information to further its financial goals.
In fact, there was mass hysteria around Dime Novels once:
https://timeline.com/from-comic-books-to-video-games-new-for...
I generally agree with the idea though. It seems as if the better we get at sharing honest to god information, learning materials, and the like, the more the technologies to deliver that inevitably get used to deliver entertainment over substance.
I'll bet some of them were doing these things or things equally meaningful. Probably in roughly the same proportion as they would have been 40 or even 400 years ago.
Most people don't spend significant portions of their lives learning things or challenging themselves. From what I can tell this has always been true.
Look, HN is becoming a self-parody with this anti-Facebook circlejerk. People are allowed to have different lifestyles, and despite the inane comparisons to heroin that are being tossed around this thread, it's really not indicative of a systemic societal failure that people rather play Candy Crush on their phone than whatever noble pursuit you'd have them do while waiting to take off.
Take a look at that old photo of people reading newspapers on the train sometime. People thought the sky was falling with "new media" then, too. Every new media goes through an initial renaissance before it proceeds to mainstream appeal and accessibility. Not everyone wants to be like that kid you read about who built his own computer.
> They were not.
I am currently using my phone to learn mandarin using the "Hello Chinese" app [1]. It doesn't require internet connection for lessons that you have already downloaded, so it is perfect for long trips and such.
my first foreign language was rather obscure (Pashto) so I had to learn it in a classroom without any apps or other programs to help with self study. Learning using the hello chinese app is so much better compared to classroom learning it just boggles my mind. I can go at my own pace, it uses sound recognition to grade my pronunciation, I can study words and phrases, everything. It is a wonderful tool
[1] http://www.hellochinese.cc/
Steve Jobs, tellingly, did not let his children use the Ipad.
Some people just love overreacting and arrogant intellectualism.
The argument I made in my essay eight or nine years ago is still true, it's just gotten worse: technology continues to evolve to hack into the human brain in order to commandeer its attention, not assist it.
If you want to look at it in terms of predator-prey relationships, right now we have a predator evolving to eat the most valuable finite resource on the planet, the attention span of the apex lifeforms. So far it looks to be running the tables.
http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is...
See Roger Water's underrated Amused to Death album or the book that inspired it Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness.
http://hillaryfox.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IMG_7782.jp...
Since then they've added a few more which are basically "remember not to be racist".
I share your concern but we can extend the problem to mobile phones.
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You 're talking about people, right?
Upvoted.
* One of the most addictive products the world has ever seen (Opioids, another such product, were used to overthrow countries)
* The single most important media company in the world
* Controlled by one person
Threat to free society? Jury's out. But at this point, it certainly seems worth regulating.
(Edit: The above points are not meant to paint FB/Zuck in a bad light. To their credit, they've built an incredible ecosystem and a mind-bogglingly good product. We all strive to create sticky/addictive products.
My point is: When your product is incredibly addictive to a large chunk of humanity, regulation should be considered)
Yes. Let me compare FB to a phone company. When telephony was first invented, it quickly turned out to be addictive to a large chunk of humanity. Did we leave it unregulated? No, we didn't. In fact, there was regulation stating that telephone conversations may not be eavesdropped by telephone companies. Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network so people could call eachother, regardless of their operator.
But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.
In the past this would be deemed "anti-competitive", now it's perfectly reasonable from an "innovation" standpoint.
Who is the "we"? I certainly think it should apply. I'd argue that the main difference in this day and age is that the "we" now includes corporate entities as persons who, thanks to Citizens United, now hold the lions share of political influence to affect whether regulations like this come to be.
I don't think FB itself is the structural threat to free society - treating corporate persons equally with flesh and blood people under the law is the structural threat. FB is just one of the more frightening corporate mega personages at the moment. Any of them would be equally so if they were as adept at people farming.
Consider the Open Mustard Seed project;
https://idcubed.org/open-platform/platform/https://archive.org/details/FromBitcoinToBurningManBeyond
* Sadly, the developer site is down at the moment, but the design considers a standardized set of APIs to verify identities and allow personal ownership and hosting and licensing of your social media data.
Architecture of the OMS TCC: http://i.imgur.com/HV04itY.png
well, this sort of thing is due (at least in part) to the physicality of infrastructure.
adding more telephone lines (and gas, electrical, etc) is welcomed for the first person to come through, but subsequent businesses/developers have a LOT more pushback if not outright blockage from local authorities.
-Supplies an essential good or service
-Prohibitively expensive to replicate/enormous initial investment
-Inelastic demand
-Region-specific
-Few or zero consumer alternatives
To me this is the same as cigarettes. Why do we regulate it? Because the average person is unlikely to know its harmful effects. What about these applications? Which are profitable by tapping into our desires and impulsive tendencies.
Its time we discuss this.
Google may have a chance of beating Apple at #1 but Facebook has quite a margin.
Essentially both Facebook and Google are ads businesses. Facebook seems to be optimizing for short term growth at the expense of their brand.
I know many people who joined Facebook around 2008 and absolutely were big fans of it. After 10 years none of them even use it, the novelty wore off.
There have been other dominating monopolies before, (ma bell telecom monopoly comes to mind) which was much dangerous than a website.
Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.
Yes internet and social media addiction is bad and dangerous, but that is something that would exist with or without facebook and can be addressed in other ways besides regulating facbeook
I used to think Facebook would become a passing fad as well, but we've been saying this for a while and nothing has changed other than Facebook growing larger in size.
> Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.
The Facebook brand is tenacious and it's pivoting into other things. Take for example the recent deal to stream live MLS games [1] or news outlets leveraging Facebook Live for supplementary content. Let's also not forget that, sadly, Facebook is a primary source of news and information for many people. I think the days of Facebook being only about status/friend updates are over.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/10/facebook-scores-a-deal-to-...
I thought that most people would find it boring and useless and abandon it. But I think it's done the opposite. It's fed into the tabloid-news impulse of the lowbrow class, and only become more popular.
The genius of FB is that when sub-groups of people piss each other off, they can just unfriend, block, and ban, and they're in a nice comfy bubble.
The next thing that comes along will probably be both of these. With better AI-generated/sourced content.
Facebook is about talking (and texting, and instagraming) to your friends (and family, and acquaintances, and people you can't quite remember). That's not a fad, that's a general human desire.
Facebook the company might fail in the market and be replaced by someone better, just as they did to their early competitors. The desire for this kind of communication is universal though (and Facebook surely did much less to invent the idea than Graham Bell!). It's not going away.
tell that to the millions of people who get most of their news via facebook. Zuckerburg also disagrees (https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/21/fbonc/)
It's the default communication mechanism for many people.
Telephones stink and we still use them because they are a standard.
But it is addictive. Dopamine-hit addictive (thanks, likes and little red notification dots!). In what appears to be a very universally appealing way.
On the other hand, you suggest "regulation" in response.
But, if history and the nature of the state are our guides we must conclude that state intervention is unlikely to produce healthy outcomes, since the state has been unable to craft any "regulation" in the face of a century-long opiate(-iod) epidemic other than a prohibition environment, which has been disastrous for public health and dynastically enriching for drug cartels.
But regulation must not be viewed as a monolith. Especially in the realm of communication tools, where many good, pro-consumer pro-competition regulations exist. e.g. number portability for mobile providers, common carrier rules, etc)
(Disclaimer: Obviously not all comm. regulations are good, cough cough cable companies in America. But clearly some regulation of these entities is needed, so let's fix the regs rather than trashing them.)
* Facebook is not physically addictive - there's a huge difference between addictions like gambling and drug addictions.
* Facebook is not the most important media company in the world - Facebook does not produce news, only disseminate it.
* Facebook is not controlled by one person - it is a publicly traded company.
* Experts are beginning to disagree with this http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
* Facebook workers recently admitted to filtering content they didn't agree with (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/09/fo...)
* Zuckerburg controls facebook: http://fortune.com/2016/04/27/zuckerberg-facebook-control/
If facebook went away tomorrow, would meatspace life materially change for any of its users?
A little peer pressure to affirm that Facebook is a giant waste of time, narcissistic and generally kind of silly is all it takes plant the seed to drop FB altogether. I have seen that work in meatspace.
I think the argument is about influence, not complete determination. Influence can be exercised independent from a services replacability.
Unlike opioids facebook can not kill you if you stop using the service. And addiction rates are still being studied best I can tell. Certainly no leading papers claiming an epidemic [0]
Sources required and likely highly deterministic on how you develop a scale for such ranking*FB is a publicly traded company with a board, it, by definition is not completely controlled by one person.
I personally am no fan of social media, don't really see the point in most contexts, but a call for government regulation into communication is the wrong step. IMO cults of ignorance, luddites, and anti-intellectualism are the threats to free society not social-networking.
[0]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=addictiveness+of+social...
If you don't want FB to have your pictures then don't go there. The parent article is over-reaching it's concern.
And it's not exactly accurate that it's controlled by 1 person. Ultimately FB can't do anything we don't want it to do. If FB does something we don't like, we're just one tab lick away from putting them out of business.
The last thing we need is more useless regulations that will stifle the already stiffled and slowing of innovation.
There's a trivial error in your example: I can upload the photo of you to Facebook, and there's no mechanism you can use to take it down.
Basically impossible if you have friends that use Facebook - which most people have unless you run only in very specific circles.
That's all well and good until you get to US Customs and they demand to see your Facebook before they let you back in the country.
Since I deactivated my acct in Dec last year to focus on bschool apps, I've accomplished so much, and I say that not to brag, but to illustrate that it was a bit of a timesuck for me and I've been able to do a lot more since I quit.
https://stratechery.com/2017/manifestos-and-monopolies/
Building a wall isn't going to fix climate change. Facebook is clearly a threat to a free society, but it may be the only chance we have.
Dead Comment
Regulation is the threat to free society.
Nonsense pseudo-intellectual one-liners are fun!
“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.
This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
Sounds like the audience of depressed pedants on this website will save us, then.
― Terence McKenna
it's stereotypical counterculture talk, but the dichotomy of creating vs consuming really sticks with me
Funny Story. I had to create a new FB account recently so I can give them money(advertise) but I didn't want people to friend me. So, I put a short version of my name. But somehow they figured out that I didn't give the correct name and suspended the account. So much for trying to give them money. :)
What happens if/when Facebook fails as a company? What happens to the data then? It gets sold off. That's a scary prospect.
Facebook is in the fickle game of Internet advertising. When the noise overcomes the signal in what Facebook shows, when the content of the users' connections gets drowned out to advertising, people will leave in droves. When advertisers fail to see the return on their investment, the money will dry up.
What's to say this isn't already happening in real-time? You don't even need to tap the trunk lines (to use a Matrix reference), you simply need to have enough "fakebook" contacts and some Persona Management Software [1].
[1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED:-Th...
What about people who discuss private matters in chat? (e.g. sexuality, medical history, drug use, etc.) Yes, we know that's a bad idea, but most people aren't HN readers.
What about state actors using Facebook's metadata alone to quash democratic movements before they get off the ground?[1] To advertisers, most of the social graph is available only in a semi-abstracted form (e.g. target X, Y, and Z qualities and degrees of connection). A leak or sale could make that information available directly.
What about criminals using a public leak of location data and some predictive algorithms to strategically rob homes? (and maybe also using patterns of likes and connections to predict whose home is worth burgling?)
Really, to say that the valuable part of Facebook is already freely available brings to mind the words "limited imagination." Facebook keeps the valuable part to itself and meters even limited access to it. And there is extensive danger with the possibility of a leak or sale of the raw data.
[1]: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
Their published data partners: https://www.facebook.com/help/494750870625830
No FB buys third party/offline data about its users, I don't we know what they have:
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/12/30/facebook-...
When one of those organizations runs the top centralized content and communications silo, use it to censor, stalk its users and promote its or its sponsors interests, it becomes a threat.
Those adjectives mean little (as does "free society") without a definition.
A for-profit organization inherently has incentives that are perverse. Historically, the profit motive has incentivized things that run contrary to the well-being, and rights enjoyed by, society. It is profitable to censor, erode privacy, erode labor protections and rights, use psychological manipulation to influence the behavior of others and push negative externalities onto others.
Yes, democratic non-profit organizations can misalign with a "free society". However, a non-democratic for-profit organization is fundamentally incompatible with the ideals expressed in the article.
> Those adjectives mean little (as does "free society") without a definition.
Merriam-Webster works for most when colloquial definitions bottom out or are hard to recall.
Does Facebook really have a unique amount of data? Google also knows a lot about people through billions of searches a day. Apple can learn a lot through people's iDevices, and Google (again) or Samsung can do the same with Android. So can any cellular service provider, or anyone running coax or fiber into your home. The government can tap any or all of those. At least Facebook doesn't have an army, or paramilitaries like DHS or just about any sheriff's department I've ever encountered.
I'm not saying the author's concerns are invalid. I've had occasion to think about these exact issues a lot, and I'm sure many of my soon-to-be colleagues have too. The way I see it, Facebook and other social media occupy much the same position as phone companies used to, both in terms of how they facilitate interaction and in their privileged financial/infrastructural positions they occupy. There's good in that (e.g. ability to pursue the kinds of speculative projects that Bell Labs was famous for). There are also dangers, no question.
The thing is, if it wasn't Facebook it would be someone else. There's no shortage of others ready to step in if Facebook alone were targeted with laws and regulations. Instead of worrying about Facebook specifically, we need to think about what a modern "common carrier" law should look like in the social-media age. Perhaps some kinds of regulations on use of information do make sense, but that dialog isn't likely to be very constructive so long as most of the people on one side seem to be free-market fundamentalists betraying their own principles by singling out one company among many.
Unless you have a Gmail or a Google+ account Google has to guess. Google can guess pretty well but they still have to guess instead of just know. You search for something on Google and then go there. Facebook keeps you on its site and encourages you to comment on Facebook which then incentivizes others to stay on Facebook, too.
You will make a good Facebook worker drone
If people rule out or discourage internal regulation with nastiness like yours, all that's left is the external kind. I'm pretty sure that's against a lot of people's principles, but I guess those who failed the coding test are willing to sacrifice principles for revenge.
No but they hand that data over to the surveillance state:
https://www.aclunc.org/blog/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-p...
>"The thing is, if it wasn't Facebook it would be someone else"
This is rather flimsy rationalization, see "The Futility of Illusion":
https://ethicsalarms.com/rule-book/unethical-rationalization...
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In amount it's hard to tell. Google and other big players of surveillance capitalism also collect what they can. But it does not really make it any better to have an oligopoly which has a similar huge amount of knowledge about a huge amount of the population.
> At least Facebook doesn't have an army, or paramilitaries like DHS or just about any sheriff's department I've ever encountered.
Maybe not until Zuckerberg is president of the USA ;). Also governments, esp. those who already run their own massive mass surveillance programs will use that privately collected data (at least in the long run if they do not do so already).
> The way I see it, Facebook and other social media occupy much the same position as phone companies used to, both in terms of how they facilitate interaction …
Not remotely. A far as I know they did not influence on a personal level with whom you interact, when that interaction takes place and surely not the topic of the interaction. Also Facebook today is a media company which does much more than providing infrastructure for communication of individuals.
> The thing is, if it wasn't Facebook it would be someone else.
You are aware that's probably the most lame excuse to do evil one can think of?
Nice assumption of doing evil there. I'm saying someone else would fill Facebook's role whether it's evil or not. Do you disagree? Do you not see the others waiting in the wings, from direct clones to Twitter and Google and Amazon? Do you deny that they lack mostly the ability to collect as much information, but have the same will? Brin and Page would be glad to step into Facebook's shoes, or Bezos, or Thiel. How is that better?
Again, whether it's evil or not, this kind of information gathering will continue and accelerate. Personifying it as Facebook or Zuckerberg just makes privacy a big game of Whack-a-Mole. Bills of attainder are both immoral and ineffectual. We need to address the what, not the who. The only lame excuse here is failing to work toward a viable long-term solution because it's easier (or more fun?) to demonize.
How is it preferable that a handful of incredibly talented, well-funded, private companies know more about you than your mother or your best friend (or arguably yourself)? Why are people more frightened by a bureaucratic government agency led by Donald J. Trump than the world's leading researcher in artificial intelligence, who owns the index to the entire internet, and creates things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7xvqQeoA8c? Why is Wikileaks working so hard to protect these companies?
It's not preferable, but it's less worrying. It's less worrying because companies can't legally throw you in jail or take all your money or kill you.
And scary robotics promo videos aside, they aren't in command of the world's most powerful military and an enormous police force to boot.
If at any time they threaten you in a meaningful way, you can freely leave their services. If things get particularly bad -- like, worst case scenario -- you can even flee to a part of the world where they have less influence. Government does not provide you any of those options.
People are right to be more worried about government intrusion than private intrusion. (They are of course also wrong to be unworried about private intrusion.)
> Why are people more frightened by a bureaucratic government agency led by Donald J. Trump than the world's leading researcher in artificial intelligence
If it comes down to a forced choice, I'd much prefer Page or Brin over Trump. At least the former two are on IMO the correct side of existential issues -- nuclear arms, global warming, and so forth. (Of course, as indicated above, I'd prefer neither.)
But they do this all the time. Sometimes illegally, sometimes with full force of law.
The settlement of the Americas, through what might be considered a public-private partnership on the part of several nations (Spain, Portugal, England, France, Holland, Russia, largely), resulted in the genocide of a native population once numbering perhaps 40 - 50 millions. What this lacks in the intensity of nuclear annihilation, it greatly exceeds in magnitude.
The public-private partnership of Belgium in the Congo saw untold atrocities, including the unhanding of hundreds of thousands or millions of Congo natives. See Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.
Or of England, the East India Company, its private government and army within India, and the Opium Wars against China -- chemical, biolical, and conventional war against two entire cultures.
Labour unionisation, a concept and principle defended by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and other classical economists, say violent opposition by factory and mine owners particularly in the UK and United States. U.S. Steel, the West Virginia Mountain Wars, the Wobblies, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and more.
Industrial accidents have killed or destroyed many tens or hundreds of thousands: the Halifax, Galveston, Port Chicago, and West, Texas, explosions -- some entirely private, some public-private partnerships. Mining accidents claimed an average of greater than 2,000 lives/year for much of the first half of the 20th century, statistics tabulated by the US Department of Labour, and available online. That's on the order of 100,000 souls over the century, virtually all of their deaths preventable. The Union Carbide Bhopol disaster. Dam failures, including Johnstown, in the United States (this was the instigation of the Red Cross as a disaster releif organisation, and of significant concepts expanding liability law). For public-private parternships, the Vajont dam disaster, claiming 2500 lives. And showing that poor management, planning, engineering, and response aren't solely the remit of nominally capitalist societies, the Banqiao Dam disaster of 1975, in China, in which some 170,000 souls perished, on par with your nuclear bombing example, though it was but 25 thousands who died immediately from drowning, the others were lost due to starvation and disease in the following weeks -- as I said, exceedingly poor planning and response.
There's the US housing bubble leading up to the 2007-8 global financial crisis, and the robosigning and fraudulent documentation depriving people of their very homes.
For raw corporate aggression, I'd suggest the Johnson County War:
On April 5, 1892, 52 armed men rode a private, secret train north from Cheyenne. Just outside Casper, Wyo., they switched to horseback and continued north toward Buffalo, Wyo., the Johnson County seat. Their mission was to shoot or hang 70 men named on a list carried by Frank Canton, one of the leaders of this invading force.
I've written on this previously: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/xwjjk1bh7yki6ja4lrg7ka
There is the insidious poisoning of millions through lead, asbestos, tobacco, mercury, and dioxins, both generally and across specific sites, all whilst paid corporate shills actively and deliberately sowed confusion on the matter, knowing full well that their position was false. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway have covered much of this history excellently in Merchants of Doubt.
And there's the little matter of carbon dioxide emissions and their effects on global tempeatures and ocean chemistry, known since the 1880s, and recognised as a major threat since the 1950s, but still actively denied by numerous interests more concerned over their trillions of dollars of accumulated wealth and power than over the fate of the planet they live on and the souls they share it with.
I'm not saying I think it's good that private companies collect all of our data (and personally the info a CC company has creeps me out far more than FB or Google), but I can choose to stop using their service and greatly minimize the amount of data they receive. There's very few caves in the world where you can hide from the US Government.