Some foundational thoughts on Facebook

Back in the pre-Facebook days of the early 2000s, I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts. It’s one of those dingy mid-20th century looking towns set on the edge of a more important city, that being the educational hotbed of Cambridge.

I was well out of college, but I had some friends at the time who were Harvard students — crazy smart, down-to-earth people who, refreshingly, socialized outside the usual Ivy League enclaves. At some point, in passing, they happened to mention this fun website they were using to share vacation photos with each other, The Facebook. I was intrigued, so I continued asking them about it as the platform started expanding to other colleges. By the time it was available to the general public, I was familiar with what it looked like and how it functioned.

In the wake of the cascading controversies this year—around Cambridge Analytica, data privacy, ideological bubbles, and the increasing censorship of dissident ideas across the political spectrum—I’ve been thinking of a couple bigger-picture issues that have made Facebook at the very least, lame and at most, toxic. And like many realities in life, they’re mixed up with each other.

The first thing that made Facebook lame is frankly, us.

I know that’s a shitty thing to say, so let me explain. The original way people were using Facebook was actually pretty cool. Groups of people who knew each other relatively well used it to stay connected with each other. They’d coordinate meet-ups, share ideas, photos, funny memes, update each other on trips they’d taken, and things like that.

But as Facebook jumped the college fence, broke wide and started gaining caché, it became common for even people you’d meet on the fly, at work, or went to high school with eons ago to send you a friend request. Of course you’d accept them, why not? You certainly didn’t want to hurt someone’s feelings by excluding them. So these little groups on Facebook started expanding, but now not everyone knew each other that well.

Compounding this, another phenomenon started to crop up — the often unspoken belief that the more Facebook friends you had, the more worthwhile a person you were. Late western capitalism is a lonely, alienated time in history to live. Feelings of isolation become more acute for a lot of people after college, when the natural camaraderie of youth starts to recede. Amassing a large group of virtual “friends” became a kind of cultural palliative, a buffer against loneliness, or worse, a substitute for genuine human connection, a simulation of community.

Maybe we didn’t mean to, but gradually we shifted Facebook from a way to maintain a select set of personal connections we’d formed in the physical world (what felt like private groups, essentially) to an ever-widening collection of tangentially connected people operating in the same virtual space (doesn’t that sound more and more like being in public?), many of whom you never saw in person at all, ever.

This shift in the nature of the Facebook experience coupled with the alienation of modern living (and compounded by the company’s shady approach to our privacy) contributed to another set of dynamics that quickly became norms. One, an unleashing of id on Facebook that we would never allow ourselves when dealing with people face to face. Just as happens on news sites and blogs that permit comments between disembodied strangers, there’s a tendency to forget that the people in your Facebook feed are real, that they have histories, struggles, vulnerabilities, emotions. When you forget someone else’s essential humanity, shit gets ugly fast.

The other dynamic, scoped out by science fiction writers like William Gibson who anticipated the advanced Internet back in the 80s, is the digital version of what we tend to do when interacting with groups of people we may not know well or trust. We protect ourselves with a persona. Black Americans know this dynamic intrinsically as a form self-protection in an inherently untrustworthy white supremacist society: “We wear the mask” (credit to poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar for this phrase).

In the context of Facebook this simply means that people started performing a manufactured identity on the platform, an avatar. In business terms, to which this behavior is connected, they began, I suspect without fully realizing it, marketing themselves to their peers as “brands”. By simply omitting the parts of your life you don’t want others to see, it became almost natural to flatten yourself, in some cases present yourself like an idealized you, which is, of course, nonexistent but totally in keeping with one of the most ubiquitous aspects of life in late capitalism that does something similar — advertising.

Oh dear. See how preexisting issues in our culture simply transplant themselves into the social media petri dish? As I learned in middle school science class, matter is neither created nor destroyed. It just changes form.

(Caveat: these dynamics are in no way monolithic. Everybody uses Facebook a bit differently. But these trends were and are real and definitely significant)

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The second thing that made Facebook lame is the great American pastime. That is, making a buck.

So many of the most interesting and engaging aspects of the Internet don’t mesh easily with what comedian Chris Rock has famously called our religion: money.

Sure, maybe Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts could have simply charged a small subscription fee for use of the platform and then figured out the rest later. But his investors — and I suspect he, himself — were looking for a lot bigger return than that. How do you make real money, billionaire money, off of friends sharing photos and comments and funny memes?

The answer is the same answer that newspapers, radio and TV networks arrived at in the 20th century. Advertising. Bring in the brands!! Bring in the publishers!! Give them their own pages. Give them access to everyone on Facebook (for a price). Shit, people are treating it like a public space already, right?

And here’s the horrible symmetry of it all. It makes perfect sense. We’ve got these expanding networks of people who are increasingly behaving like commodities. They’re wonderfully primed to be sold to. Remember back in 2012 when Mitt Romney told a group of voters “corporations are people, my friend”? Well on Facebook, corporations get to do just that. They get to be people, or at least kind of seem like them.

With this topsy-turvy dynamic, genuine flesh-and-blood people on Facebook become flattened, less three-dimensional and messily human while fictions like corporations gain an illusion of depth and humanity they don’t actually possess. It also makes the process of sharing content more inorganic (read, less human).

No longer does a friend you know — through their own interests and research — share an article, a video, a recommendation, or an idea. Now everyone’s got advertising-driven, algorithmically determined content being shoved in their face every day. So that’s what they share. And that’s what they react to. In public. With groups of people they don’t see often, don’t know very well and don’t trust that much. It’s a recipe for non-constructive conflict. And that’s what we get.

It’s in this environment, built on this foundation, that all of today’s controversies are occurring. And invariably, in terms of solutions it’s not the real people connecting on Facebook that Mr. Zuckerberg is beholden to. It’s the manufactured institutions that now drive the business (corporations) and government entities that set the parameters of acceptability with the content (the police, Congress, the NSA, the Pentagon, The Atlantic Council, etc.) In turn, all of these groups are beholden to Facebook because they want access to our brains and our data—and we’re on the platform in massive numbers. Finally, Facebook itself collects, slices and dices our data and shares it with these bastards.

To be sure,the power dynamic between Facebook, corporations and the government is constantly shifting like windswept sand in the desert but, ultimately, this is who Facebook has ended up belonging to: Them.

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There’s not much Facebook’s users can do about it. Except, of course, the obvious and arguably best course of action. Starve them of the one product they (Facebook, corporations and the government) absolutely need. Us. We’re the product. We let our need, our narcissism, our loneliness turn us into the product. And, while astute writers like Caitlin Johnstone have argued that we should raise a free-thinking ruckus on Facebook until they metaphorically drag us out of the building, I’m not sure it’s the kind of public square we need to accomplish anything worthwhile. After all, can addicts take down a system that deals the drugs?

But truly, we can and should check ourselves into Facebook rehab. Then walk out the door and, unlike Orpheus in the old Greek myth, don’t look back.

It’s not that big a deal. Can I tell you? There’s grace in just being a messy old imperfect beautiful alienated human. Let yourself be that. Chuck your avatar self. Go all Lloyd Dobler. Refuse to be bought, sold or processed. Refuse to buy, sell or process yourself. Go spend time with your friends. Like, in person and shit.

Thanks for reading.

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