Somebody tell me i’m wrong about all this!
I finally broke down and started using my facebook
pages.
Like my friend Bert the Butcher says, “If you want
bacon, you gotta go where the pigs are.”
Okay. Okay.
So I ask myself, why do I so dislike facebook &
facebook-culture?
First, because on its front page, facebook projects
a do-good image of threading all of humanity
peacefully together. Well, what could be wrong
with that? Because it does it—even up front—
with an in-your-face and disgusting ugly American
metaphysics, which I’m quite sure facebook as a
corporation both is unaware of and doesn’t care about—
playing powerfully on one’s worst impulses of fear
and doubt. (Ads for background checks, etc.) (I went
to and suffered an American high school. I thought
the culture in the locker-rooms and hallways and
cafeteria and football games and proms was as
disgusting and repulsive then as I do now.)
But worse is the insidious backside of every page.
The data mining. The tracking. The incessant counting.
And turning what users do in a blissful and innocent way
into obscene amounts of hard cash.
For years, I have witnessed young and old, highly
educated to the just barely literate, use the web
and truly think that the Yahoo start-page their browser
defaults to—the Bill Gates of the world have always
lusted after such complete control of your
machine—is the web and the internet. They have never
seen or known anything else. Good for Yahoo! Bad
for us.
And now, the same is happening with facebook.
It has become a gated community. Dominating search.
Dominating content. Dominating what users think is
relevant and important. It is easy to see how soon,
just like the Yahoo homepage people really DO think
is the web, people will never look over the fence
and start to feel facebook IS the web.
My friend Bert the Butcher always likes to repeat
the saw about, “Don’t look at how we make the
sausage.”
Well now it gets serious. I just last week tweeted:
Facebook Fun powered by #DirtyCoal Data in depressed
Prineville OR (380 k west of here) Enviro #ethics not
a part of Zuckerberg’s worldview
#Time4Outrage!
Appalling. Stupid. Yet typical for the hi-tech
Ugly American Nouveau.
A company about to go public for $60,000,000,000 can
afford to demonstrate to the world that their server farms
can run entirely sustainably on Sun and Wind and Biochar.
But no. The corporate contradiction of the best return
for investors puts the ethical imperative concerning
energy generation squarely in the backseat of a car
accelerating head-on into collapse.
So facebook, in my book, is not beautiful. Is not progressive.
Is not—Time Magazine notwithstanding—going to save
the world.
The problem is that, like it or not, we’re all passengers
in the vehicles of the powerful.
So I want out. But I just said I want in. Good god, I started
using facebook. There’s the contradiction.
Somebody tell me I’m wrong.
This is not to make an enemy of facebook, mind you.
After all, I get along fine with my friend Bert the Butcher,
and I’m a vegetarian. It is only to cry out in total outrage
that there is no dialogue, no democratic discourse on
matters of such gravamen and concern.
So for the time being, I’ll be eating Zuckerberg’s dirtycoal
dust here in the High Wallowas—how pollution reveals
the wholeness of the world—with everything happy click
and new friend we make.
[For healing balm to Zuckerberg’s vision of the web,
read Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: I tweeted:
READING: WEAVING THE WEB, by Tim Berners-Lee 1st
webpage 20 years ago http://bit.ly/hr3Nmb Clear.
Brilliant. Ethical. Refreshingly humble.
See: http://picture-poems.com/links/index_1-17-11.html
And also a relief to tweet:
READING: Time for Outrage! / Indignez-Vous! / Empört
Euch! / A manifesto for our time, by Stéphane Hessel
http://picture-poems.com/links
We shape the world and the world shapes us.
The online newspaper with flashing ads today
will report tomorrow about the remarkable yet
seemingly inexplainable rise of eye problems
and attention deficit disorder.
The meta-online newspaper today, like a sly
turkey buzzard, goes straight for the roadkill
of somebody else’s hard-won stories and
photographs, but tomorrow, when all the
easy pickings are gone, what will sustain them?
The clever algorithm that harvests the number
of links to a page today will certainly fail tomorrow
once it is discovered that we link only to the known
universe, and then link in brain-numbing repetition
over and over again, while the best pages remain
undiscovered floating in the nirgendwo of
non-hyperlinked cyberspace.
It is still possible that I.F. Stone’s , van Gogh’s
and Charles Ives’s are out there somewhere.
Let us hope so.