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Posted on 15-1-08 Face(book)less
By Tom Hodgkinson, The Guardian, January 14 2008
I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes
itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you".
But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with
the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the
imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with
the pub?
And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us,
since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and
dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little
ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my
desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night
at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far
from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.
Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I
put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things,
I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get
sex or approval. ("I like Facebook," said another friend. "I got a shag
out of it.") It also encourages a disturbing competitivness around
friendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts for nothing
and quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better you are. You
are "popular", in the sense much loved in American high schools. Witness
the cover line on Dennis Publishing's new Facebook magazine: "How To
Double Your Friends List."
It seems, though, that I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time
of writing Facebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in
the UK, Facebook's third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That's
59 million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information
and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about.
Right now, 2 million new people join each week. At the present rate of
growth, Facebook will have more than 200 million active users by this time
next year. And I would predict that, if anything, its rate of growth will
accelerate over the coming months. As its spokesman Chris Hughes says:
"It's embedded itself to an extent where it's hard to get rid of."
All of the above would have been enough to make me reject Facebook for
ever. But there are more reasons to hate it. Many more.
Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a
group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out
ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one
manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social
experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative
libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as
long as you don't mind being bombarded by adverts for the world's biggest
brands. As with PayPal, national boundaries are a thing of the past.
Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark
Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon
Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are
only three board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a
third investor called Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel
Partners (more on him later). Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook when
Harvard students Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to
meet him in San Francisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the
site. Thiel now reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook's
current valuation of $15bn, would be worth more than $1bn. There is much
debate on who exactly were the original co-founders of Facebook, but
whoever they were, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, although
Hughes and Moskowitz still work for the company.
Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital
scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual
banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for
himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management
and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets
magazine recently called him "one of the most successful hedge fund
managers in the country". He has made money by betting on rising oil
prices and by correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken. He and
his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been labelled "The
PayPal Mafia" by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel
has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLaren supercar. Thiel is also a
chess master and intensely competitive. He has been known to sweep the
chessmen off the table in a fury when losing. And he does not apologise
for this hyper-competitveness, saying: "Show me a good loser and I'll show
you a loser."
But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a
futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from
Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a
detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that
dominated Stanford. He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening
of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a
rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review -
motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of
TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was
set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the
web. Thiel calls himself "way libertarian".
TheVanguard is run by one Rod D Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom
Thiel greatly admires. On the site, Thiel says: "Rod is one of our
nation's leading minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public
policy. He possesses a more complete understanding of America than most
executives have of their own businesses."
This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their
vision for the world: "TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans
who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government
as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to
everyone, especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote
policies that will "reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes
its politics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite". The chairman's message says:
"Today we'll teach MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the leftwing
media some lessons they never imagined."
So, Thiel's politics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I
listened to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the
future. His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain
enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the
old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes' famous
characterisation of life as "nasty, brutish and short", and towards a new
virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in
imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief:
that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the
relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around
the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: "For
Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt
currency controls and move money around the globe."
Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make
money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national
boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly
uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships
that were happening anyway.
Thiel's philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University,
proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard
reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another
without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct
in the case of Thiel's virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant;
all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks.
Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. Girard
is a regular at Thiel's intellectual soirees. What you don't hear about in
Thiel's philosophy, by the way, are old-fashioned real-world concepts such
as art, beauty, love, pleasure and truth.
The internet is immensely appealing to neocons such as Thiel because it
promises a certain sort of freedom in human relations and in business,
freedom from pesky national laws, national boundaries and suchlike. The
internet opens up a world of free trade and laissez-faire expansion. Thiel
also seems to approve of offshore tax havens, and claims that 40% of the
world's wealth resides in places such as Vanuatu, the Cayman Islands,
Monaco and Barbados. I think it's fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert
Murdoch, is against tax. He also likes the globalisation of digital
culture because it makes the banking overlords hard to attack: "You can't
have a workers' revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu,"
he says.
If life in the past was nasty, brutish and short, then in the future Thiel
wants to make it much longer, and to this end he has also invested in a
firm that is exploring life-extension technologies. He has pledged £3.5m
to a Cambridge-based gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey, who is searching
for the key to immortality. Thiel is also on the board of advisers of
something called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
>From its fantastical website, the following: "The Singularity is the
technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are
several technologies ... heading in this direction ... Artificial
Intelligence ... direct brain-computer interfaces ... genetic engineering
.... different technologies which, if they reached a threshold level of
sophistication, would enable the creation of smarter-than-human
intelligence."
So by his own admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which
he also calls "nature", and install a virtual world in its place, and it
is in this context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is a
deliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young
thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out
techno-utopian fantasies. Not someone I want to help get any richer.
The third board member of Facebook is Jim Breyer. He is a partner in the
venture capital firm Accel Partners, who put $12.7m into Facebook in April
2005. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment,
he is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association
(NVCA). Now these are the people who are really making things happen in
America, because they invest in the new young talent, the Zuckerbergs and
the like. Facebook's most recent round of funding was led by a company
called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of
Greylock's senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman
of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What's In-Q-Tel? Well,
believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the
venture-capital wing of the CIA. After 9/11, the US intelligence community
became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the
innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up
their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and partners
with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these
solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US
Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions".
The US defence department and the CIA love technology because it makes
spying easier. "We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries,"
defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. "We need to make the leap
into the information age, which is the critical foundation of our
transformation efforts." In-Q-Tel's first chairman was Gilman Louie, who
served on the board of the NVCA with Breyer. Another key figure in the
In-Q-Tel team is Anita K Jones, former director of defence research and
engineering for the US department of defence, and - with Breyer - board
member of BBN Technologies. When she left the US department of defence,
Senator Chuck Robb paid her the following tribute: "She brought the
technology and operational military communities together to design
detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next
century."
Now even if you don't buy the idea that Facebook is some kind of extension
of the American imperialist programme crossed with a massive
information-gathering tool, there is no way of denying that as a business,
it is pure mega-genius. Some net nerds have suggested that its $15bn
valuation is excessive, but I would argue that if anything that is too
modest. Its scale really is dizzying, and the potential for growth is
virtually limitless. "We want everyone to be able to use Facebook," says
the impersonal voice of Big Brother on the website. I'll bet they do. It
is Facebook's enormous potential that led Microsoft to buy 1.6% for $240m.
A recent rumour says that Asian investor Lee Ka-Shing, said to be the
ninth richest man in the world, has bought 0.4% of Facebook for $60m.
The creators of the site need do very little bar fiddle with the
programme. In the main, they simply sit back and watch as millions of
Facebook addicts voluntarily upload their ID details, photographs and
lists of their favourite consumer objects. Once in receipt of this vast
database of human beings, Facebook then simply has to sell the information
back to advertisers, or, as Zuckerberg puts it in a recent blog post, "to
try to help people share information with their friends about things they
do on the web". And indeed, this is precisely what's happening. On
November 6 last year, Facebook announced that 12 global brands had climbed
on board. They included Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, Verizon, Sony Pictures and
Condé Nast. All trained in marketing bullshit of the highest order, their
representatives made excited comments along the following lines:
"With Facebook Ads, our brands can become a part of the way users
communicate and interact on Facebook," said Carol Kruse, vice president,
global interactive marketing, the Coca-Cola Company.
"We view this as an innovative way to cultivate relationships with
millions of Facebook users by enabling them to interact with Blockbuster
in convenient, relevant and entertaining ways," said Jim Keyes,
Blockbuster chairman and CEO. "This is beyond creating advertising
impressions. This is about Blockbuster participating in the community of
the consumer so that, in return, consumers feel motivated to share the
benefits of our brand with their friends."
"Share" is Facebookspeak for "advertise". Sign up to Facebook and you
become a free walking, talking advert for Blockbuster or Coke, extolling
the virtues of these brands to your friends. We are seeing the
commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic
value from friendships.
Now, by comparision with Facebook, newspapers, for example, begin to look
hopelessly outdated as a business model. A newspaper sells advertising
space to businesses looking to sell stuff to their readers. But the system
is far less sophisticated than Facebook for two reasons. One is that
newspapers have to put up with the irksome expense of paying journalists
to provide the content. Facebook gets its content for free. The other is
that Facebook can target advertising with far greater precision than a
newspaper. Admit on Facebook that your favourite film is This Is Spinal
Tap, and when a Spinal Tap-esque movie comes out, you can be sure that
they'll be sending ads your way.
It's true that Facebook recently got into hot water with its Beacon
advertising programme. Users were notified that one of their friends had
made a purchase at certain online shops; 46,000 users felt that this level
of advertising was intrusive, and signed a petition called "Facebook! Stop
invading my privacy!" to say so. Zuckerberg apologised on his company
blog. He has written that they have now changed the system from "opt-out"
to "opt-in". But I suspect that this little rebellion about being so
ruthlessly commodified will soon be forgotten: after all, there was a
national outcry by the civil liberties movement when the idea of a police
force was mooted in the UK in the mid 19th century.
Futhermore, have you Facebook users ever actually read the privacy policy?
It tells you that you don't have much privacy. Facebook pretends to be
about freedom, but isn't it really more like an ideologically motivated
virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed
the UK's? Thiel and the rest have created their own country, a country of
consumers.
Now, you may, like Thiel and the other new masters of the cyberverse, find
this social experiment tremendously exciting. Here at last is the
Enlightenment state longed for since the Puritans of the 17th century
sailed away to North America, a world where everyone is free to express
themselves as they please, according to who is watching. National
boundaries are a thing of the past and everyone cavorts together in
freewheeling virtual space. Nature has been conquered through man's
boundless ingenuity. Yes, and you may decide to send genius investor Thiel
all your money, and certainly you'll be waiting impatiently for the public
flotation of the unstoppable Facebook.
Or you might reflect that you don't really want to be part of this
heavily-funded programme to create an arid global virtual republic, where
your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into
commodites on sale to giant global brands. You may decide that you don't
want to be part of this takeover bid for the world.
For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as
unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook
doing something useful, such as reading books. Why would I want to waste
my time on Facebook when I still haven't read Keats' Endymion? And when
there are seeds to be sown in my own back yard? I don't want to retreat
from nature, I want to reconnect with it. Damn air-conditioning! And if I
want to connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece
of technology. It's free, it's easy and it delivers a uniquely individual
experience in sharing information: it's called talking.
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