Subverting the dominant digital paradigm
Credit to Author: Ben Kritz| Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2020 16:17:50 +0000
ABOUT a week ago, I removed my 10-year-old Facebook account. As a result of doing so, I was not suddenly rendered ignorant about the whereabouts and general circumstances of my friends and family members. I did not find myself disconnected from news of the world or the usual surfeit of ill-informed opinions about it. The sun did not rise in the West, the skies did not rain blood, and dogs and cats did not begin consorting in unholy unions.
I had several reasons for taking what to many people would seem to be a drastic and horrifying step. Part of it was simple housekeeping; over the years, I had accumulated a great deal of no longer interesting or useful content and a great many virtually unknown “friends,” and deleting my account was the most expedient way to remove all unwanted material. “Cleaning up” my account could have been accomplished by reviewing the mass of content, my friends list, and the hundreds of connections and applications that the account comprised, and that, of course, is what Facebook would prefer one does, but there are other considerations that make that tedious process unappealing.
Facebook’s pitch to prospective users is that it is a comprehensive platform that allows one to communicate and connect with existing friends and family as well as expand one’s social network; share content on both a personal or commercial basis; access various forms of entertainment such as video, music and games; buy or sell items and services; and even engage in online dating. A Facebook account hypothetically permits one to develop a personal acquaintance with more than 2 billion other people (Facebook had 2.45 billion active monthly accounts as of the end of 2019). The platform is designed to be so pervasive that it is has made itself a personal necessity — a utility no less critical to one’s civilized existence than a mobile phone or access to transportation — to almost every one of those 2-billion-plus users.
FB a marketing resource
The user experience is a great deal less rewarding than that, but that is likely immaterial to Facebook, because it does not exist to provide a rewarding user experience, nor does its design require users to be satisfied in order to retain them. Facebook is fundamentally a marketing resource, a vast collection of leads. Although it is a great deal more complex, it is essentially no different than lists of phone numbers, email addresses, or other prospect information that are commoditized and sold to businesses.
Because of its size and complexity, which allows marketing targeting to an extremely specific degree, it is a vastly superior product to those sorts of packages. It maintains its overwhelming competitive advantage in that respect by constantly growing, and constantly extracting additional data points from its users; furthermore, the platform is designed for maximum retention of users. And if any of those users do depart, as I did, their data remains behind, the property of Facebook, which is free to continue using it to improve consumer profiling and targeting — indirectly, in that case, focusing on users to whom the recently-departed was connected in some way.
As a user, I am not okay with all of this. It is not a matter of “privacy,” which is a terribly overwrought issue; if one wishes or needs to keep personal data private, then the first step in ensuring that is to keep it off the internet. The problem is rather a practical one: I do not, and because of the way Facebook is designed, cannot ever profit fairly from the data that I supply. Facebook will always extract far more value from commoditizing my data than I ever could from commoditizing my use of the platform for my own purposes –
because continuing use simply supplies additional data value-adding data to it.
There is a word for an economic relationship in which one’s persona is used without compensation for the profit of another. It’s called slavery. And the lord of the digital estate to which we have all bound ourselves is a guy with a haircut that looks like his mom put a bowl on his head, and with the personality of an alien trying unsuccessfully to disguise himself as a human.
As I said at the beginning of this piece, extracting myself from Facebook was easy; finding a way to use the platform to my tangible benefit instead of Facebook’s will be a much bigger challenge. After all, Mark Zuckerberg is only detestable, not stupid, and he has vast resources to employ many brilliant people to keep his money-extraction machine working at peak efficiency. That’s the sort of challenge I can’t resist for long, so sometime in the near future, I’ll return and draw my mental sword against the monster. I’ll let you know how it goes.
ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
Twitter: @benkritz