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DanielButrymowicz-SecondPaper 6 - 21 Apr 2008 - Main.EbenMoglen
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| | | -- DanielButrymowicz - 04 Apr 2008 | |
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< | This paper is ready to be read. | | | Introduction | | |
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- This essay is unusually clear about how to make use of Veblen in one respect: the issue is whether Facebook's popularity can be accounted for by the ease with which it adapts itself to displays of personal leisure by those who engage in a form of pecuniary competition but have decidedly more leisure than they have consumable wealth. But it would be helpful to point out that Veblen's principle of economic evolution applies also to non-economic forms of status competition, and in the case of adolescents and young adults occupying the "long youth" period characteristic of the late-marrying post-Pill generations, popularity competition isn't primarily material. Facebook, as many people are beginning to notice, is really primarily about getting laid, as many institutions of the young are. It's competitions are more primary and Darwinian: people want to look popular because popular people are the people other people want to ... oh, never mind, you don't need me to tell you about it.
- Which brings us to the second point. The CIA and Mark Zuckerberg may feel differently about the fact Facebook's turning out to be a fully-instrumented singles' bar, rather than the more comprehensive wired social network that could be data-mined to make predictive models of other kinds of people than young people with hormones to work off. Zuckerberg was supposed to be producing a dating site, after all, when he eloped with his partners' idea, while the CIA put money into his so-called business hoping that they'd be able to spy on you for the rest of your lives, and many more people than just you, rather than winding up with a system that would help them find their targets if their targets were sex- and status-obsessed twenty-somethings.
- You know that Veblen's purpose is to explain why practices last, not why practices arise. Therefore, as far as you're concerned, you're not writing about what Facebook's features are for, in any intentional sense. But this may be a serious mistake so far as the effect of the essay is concerned. You could perhaps have let your readers known that the purpose of the Facebook system is privacy invasion. Facebook-like technology could be created that would give everyone a web page that worked like the existing Facebook page, with all the same feeds and ridiculous PHP "applications" made of the computer programming equivalent of compressed-rubbish particle-board, but in which there was no centralized logging of who's doing what and to whom. Those logs, which are the artifact rather than necessary outgrowth of Facebook's existence, are a moment by moment record of everything 65 million people do with an average of 2.5 hours per week of their time: that is, a completely spied-on social world that contains 162.5 million hours a week of human behavior, the equivalent of completely bugging, in every room of every home and business, the tenth-largest city in the United States. Facebook's investors and managers believe that the effort to climb inside all those lives can be made to pay money. Those who are fools enough to use the service are getting crappy free web hosting, and a little software that is not as good as what is freely available, in return for destroying pretty much all their privacy, pretty much forever. But you don't say anything about that, being apparently uninterested.
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