Path Dependence, Technology, and Privacy

No. You didn't bother to learn about Diaspora, which was designed to solve that problem. Undermining the network effect you are talking about is comparatively simple. You can describe why it won't work in your considered opinion once you understand it: that's fair argument. But ignoring away the whole point of other peoples' thinking, whether it is expressed in words or in software, is not intellectually reponsible.

Third, I could create my own alternative, but will face the same problems that established alternatives have, which is the fact that Facebook’s value stems from the fact that so many people are already on their system. Fourth, I could complain to Facebook, but because they know my alternatives are bad, they are unlikely to make meaningful changes.

In the end, we are left with what is effectively an all or nothing choice. For now, it’s either Facebook or returning to a pre-social networking age. While people who value privacy above all else will find this an easy choice, Facebook’s popularity in the post-Snowden era illustrates that the choice is not as easy for others to make.

This is not a satisfactory form of the argument for two reasons: First, as I noted above, it's technically wrong. Looked at more closely, the network-effects path dependence of social networking is a marketing claim, and one which neither the data about the world nor the data about what the people running the networks really believe bears out. Twitter's and Facebook's history as firms both show why the "stickiness" of social networks is quite low, and the stickiness of social networks that earn their profits as ad platforms running auctions for access to eyeballs is even lower. Facebook's WhatsApp? strategy, like its "free basics" system for data-mining the packet traffic of the poor show that it knows that its own arguments about the stickiness of its network are false: it's moving as fast as it can to the post-Facebook future before the herd moves elsewhere.

Second, more generally, this form of invoking "path dependency" is an extremely cut-rate form of simple historical determinism. The future is a foreseeably-determinate collection of path dependent outcomes, which happen to add up to the indefinite prolongation of present phenomena. This is not quite as elegant as "whatever is, is right," but it is both as socially disarming, though less normatively obvious, and as completely historically false. Path dependence and complete contingency are entirely compatible, which is the pervading argument of Steven Jay Gould's masterpiece, "Wonderful Life."

It seems to me that improvement can be realized in both directions within the scope of the present inquiry. If one backs away from the use of path-dependence as denial of contingency, restoring it to its real role as a principle of historiography—that the past is not completely but is firmly prologue to the present, and direct historical analogy is therefore a weak form of argument—one can begin to ask what does shape the technological precession of modes of social communication in a situation as rapidly-changing and flexible as the present. Obviously incumbents do what they can to make incumbency itself a shaping force, investing in the creation of inertia in the guise of "product improvement" or, more generally, "innovation." But actual innovation also occurs, and sometimes for social purposes. Given the history of recent changes in the way humans make software, one might even come to the conclusion that the latter form of genuine innovation is rather powerful. How does that interact with the force of incumbency? If we really do live in your form of path dependent world, then one might be tempted to conclude that what happened to IBM, DEC and Microsoft in the last three eras of computing will necessarily happen to Facebook in this one. But that's apparently a bridge too far for you.