MarkZists

[Cain]

This is an interesting conversation:

Me: "Facebook isn't politics. People on Facebook aren't public figures, they're private citizens."

Stu: "Isn't the personal political?"

Me: "I do not think that means what you think it means."

Stu: "Anyway it's not just citizens on Facebook now. It's everything: it's corporations, civic groups, politicians. Facebook is basically the new internet. You aren't uncomfortable with the Internet being open, are you?"

Me: "It may be morphing into the new Internet, but that's not the function it was built for and it's not what individuals signed up for when they created their accounts. They signed up for exclusivity, for the ability to create walls around their communities of friends and choose who to let in. And here's what gets me: Zuckerberg knew that exclusivity is what would make Facebook popular. Yet over time he's trying to undermine that with all these little maneuvers. The news feed. The 'we own your data' announcement. Making profile pictures public. The 'Everyone' default setting. And now the 'You and X' tool."

Stu: "But you know what else is interesting. People who didn't like the news feed used the news feed to argue against it. People protesting Facebook policies benefit from those policies in forming their protest."

Me: "Just because you're exercising voice instead of exit doesn't mean you have to be loyal."

Stu: "Fine, but I also don't buy the argument that there is a "purpose" (singular) for Facebook. It stopped being for one purpose (if it ever was) a long time ago and since its graduation to a platform, the idea of The Real Purpose is even more preposterous. Facebook is a wildly popular platform for thousands of purposes. I find it interesting and worthy of study precisely for this reason."

Me: That's because you're a MarkZist.

Stu: (laughing) "It's true! I am a MarkZist. I was trained to study Karl Marx by old school Marxists. Now I study the machinations of an online world envisioned by Mark Z. To me, being a MarkZist means embracing, honoring and yes studying the distributed means of content production defined by the Internet and perfected by Facebook."

Me: "I mean more than that. I mean that Zuckerberg subscribes to an entire hacktivist information-freedom-fighting culture that values truth and transparency for its own sake. But it's not enough for him to hold and promote that ideology by striking against the powers that be in any way he can, like Julian Assange; Zuckerberg's means are more nefarious. He imposes his ideology on users, seductively, through the architecture of his tool itself. People who like this ideology and are happy to see it inflicted on others through the tyranny of architecture are MarkZists."

Stu: "I always struggle with the word 'inflict' in this context. There is no requirement to have a Facebook page. I do like that Facebook embraces architecture as a means for social change. It is hard to know in the moment what effect their 'ideology' will have on us ten years from now. After all, you're not a Marxist are you?"

Me: "No, apparently just a socialist."

Stu: (continuing) "And I wouldn't say he's fighting for information to be freed as an end in itself. I would say he imagines that freedom of information sobers people's behavior."

Me: "Who wants sobriety? People want the freedom to be human, to have secrets and different masks for different social contexts. And they don't want information to be free, except about others in power over them; they want the freedom to control information about themselves."

Stu: "Then they shouldn't be on the Internet."

Me: "I see. Anyone who doesn't get in line behind MarkZism should be excluded from the information economy and the modern age. Sounds like totalitarianism to me."

Stu: "It's not totalitarianism. It's capitalism."

Me: "This isn't about profit for Zuckerberg. He's got a social agenda that he promotes through his company."

Stu: "So does the entire green business community."

Me: "But Zuckerberg's agenda isn't to save the planet or promote the common good. It's to undermine our liberties. He has come out and said that he believes the age of privacy is over, all our identities should be public and he is planning to teach us these new social norms through his tools. And I for one think there is something rather frightening about that agenda."

Stu: "Not everyone is as hung up on that as you. And just because someone's frightened of something doesn't mean it's bad. No one should be punished simply for openly subscribing to MarkZism."

Me: "Don't dismiss me as some fear-industrial-complex mouthpiece. Yu know who else is 'hung up' on this? Congress is. Henry Farrell is."

Stu: "Who's Henry Farrell?"

Me: "A blogger who might be very concerned about the software you're building to allow people to study Facebook and Twitter feeds."

Stu: "Tell him 30 days free trial is normal, but for him, 45. (chuckling) Anyway, that's a perfect example. Our software only captures public information on Facebook feeds, whatever users share with "Everyone" using the API Open Graph. It can't see anything that's actually private. Folks could change their settings, after all."

Me: "Fine, but my whole argument is that Facebook has made it so difficult to maintain your privacy that most people don't even realize how public their information is. And now not only can anyone in the world see it who's looking for it, but people like you are incentivizing the looking by making it easy and interesting to capture, archive and study those social relations."

Stu: "But people have the responsibility to inform themselves. I mean, it's true that some people will say, are you building tools to spy on folks? Of course not, I say. People are using other tools and platforms like Facebook and Youtube to spy on themselves and we just make it a bit easier."

Me: "Spoken like a true MarkZist."

Stu: "If they don't like it, they can leave Facebook."

Me: "It's not that easy to commit a Facebook Suicide. That's like saying, 'America: Love it or Leave it.'"

Stu: "Please. You're honestly comparing relocation out of one's country to the choice of whether or not to switch software applications?"

Me: "Absolutely. In fact, I think leaving one's physical country is actually easier than leaving one's online social network, because so much of our social activity now is based on the Internet rather than on face-to-face interactions within our country. Thanks to Facebook, you can emigrate without losing your social network whom you rarely see anyway, but you can't kill your Facebook page and keep your friendships intact because they're so embedded now in social media."

Stu: "That's a tough sell."

Me: "Well, maybe if you read some of my blog posts, you would understand why you're wrong about that."

Stu: "It's cute how shocked you are that I don't read all your posts. Look, I'll prove how specious this argument is. I'll delete my FB account right now. It's not hard."

Me: "Go for it. Delete your account. It's harder than you think, and if you succeed, you'll no longer be able to promote your software or your research articles through your FB page to your network; you'll no longer have any idea what my ten brothers and sisters are saying about you; you won't receive "hi cutie-pie" notes from me anymore; and most important you'll have no way to keep track of what my friendship with Alex looks like on Facebook. Are you really going to give all that up?"

Stu: (pause) "OK, I'm going to think about it first, then delete my page. (thinking) OK, OK you have a point. But I'm making a choice to stay. And so I need to be prepared to accept whatever the Mark has in store for me."

Me: "Ah, yes. Facebook: the opiate of the masses."

Stu: "You're one of those masses. When you write up your thoughts from this conversation on your blog and post the link to Facebook, won't you be glad it goes viral precisely because of the architecture they've created? It's like you're saying that Facebook should never innovate."

Me: "No, I'm saying that companies should innovate in a way that lets consumers opt in to the new features. What they should not do is significantly change the architecture unbidden, and along with it the meaning of people's previous speech acts online. For example, FB could have announced the You and X feature, and made it possible to activate it for certain friends and not others, or made it possible to change the settings so I could see my relationships with certain friends (and they would have to agree) but others could only see those relationships if both I and my friend want them to."

Stu: "But look at it from the point of view of Zuckerberg. He needs to make money somehow. He makes money by innovating."

Me: "But he makes money with ads, and by selling those silly little FB credits in Walmart. And you don't have to be evil to make money. Even Google thinks Facebook is hypocritical. Google, Stu. Do you remember when that GoogleZon video first came out on YouTube? You were the first person to be scared of the idea that one company would dominate digital information on the web. And now Facebook is trying to turn itself into the new web, only with a very different architecture deliberately sculpted to mold society in line with one man's vision, a vision that over-writes centuries of Enlightenment norms."

Stu: "But his vision isn't about information domination. It's about a new kind of transparency. It is a belief that everyone gets to have their fifteen minutes of fame and the fifteen people who think they are the bees knees. MarkZists think you can have this everyday and that their innovations make it happen more often for more people than ever before. It's about letting people create and use data in nifty ways we cannot predict. As far as the history of capitalism goes, they are the fastest growing company ever. Those are marketplace votes; validation of a vision."

I, of course, agree more with Charli, and not just because of my academic crush on her.  In a way, I prefer what Julian Assange does, and not just for its political implications - he attacks people who use secrecy in order to commit crimes.  Zuckerberg just says no-one should have any secrecy whatsoever, and tough tits if you don't like it.  And because Facebook is a social network, it leverages that social power of conformity and fear of exile to keep people in that system - you have to stay in because all of your friends are and you will not be able to keep up with them as easily outside of that network (which is one reason I want to see Diaspora up and working ASAP).

[Death]

This is an interesting conversation:

This is true.  I was wondering what "The Social Network" was like.  I know it was about FB but don't know exactly.  Spoiler plz?

[Rumckle]

This is an interesting conversation:

This is true.  I was wondering what "The Social Network" was like.  I know it was about FB but don't know exactly.  Spoiler plz?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Network#Plot

[Reginald Ret]

Stu seems to be missing the point.

[LMNO]

I like how stu kept jumping from argument to argument, never really having a point of view other than, "FB always good."

[Reginald Ret]

He reminds me of my housemate a bit.
Except that my housemate has no consistent point of view, he just keeps jumping from argument to argument never really conceding a point or even acknowledging that you said something.

[Triple Zero]

Indeed a very interesting conversation.

One thing, a couple of times, Stu makes an argument about how people that are "opposed" to Facebook still use Facebook to spread their messages:

People who didn't like the news feed used the news feed to argue against it. People protesting Facebook policies benefit from those policies in forming their protest.

When you write up your thoughts from this conversation on your blog and post the link to Facebook, won't you be glad it goes viral precisely because of the architecture they've created?

Which makes me think, "Um.. So?"

It's very much like, when we're trolling a board, somebody would say "HAH! But you're posting on the very board that you despise so much!".

Duh, exactly, because that's where the target-audience is.

It's a like he truly believes that spreading messages via Facebook is the singular and only medium with which to spread messages so effectively. Which is stupid because you got the web, the blogosphere, Twitter, Reddit and a reaaaaaaaaally big long-tail of niche specialist communities, messageboards, less popular social networks, mailinglists, newsgroups, anything with publicly posted usercomments, oh and email.

Sure they're not all equally effective in exactly the same ways, but spreading a message far and wide without using Facebook isn't exactly difficult, let alone impossible, either.

The point is, of course, if you're gonna attack (by argument) Facebook, the single most obvious vector to put the message is of course Facebook itself.

Doing otherwise, would be kind of like if the Anonymous grievers were trying to troll Second Life by dumping three dimensional dicks in World of Warcraft.

[Placid Dingo]

He does have a point, to be devil's advocate here. FB is a product. If I don't like reading the rubbish in one newspaper, I don't buy it.

Also, you don't need to put your personal info into FB.

[Triple Zero]

But you are writing your letters of complaint to the very newspaper you despise so much!!?

[Requia ☣]

He does have a point, to be devil's advocate here. FB is a product. If I don't like reading the rubbish in one newspaper, I don't buy it.

Also, you don't need to put your personal info into FB.

Speaking as someone without FB, not using it is getting increasingly difficult.  I can really only get away with it because I don't use social networks in general.

[LMNO]

Doing otherwise, would be kind of like if the Anonymous grievers were trying to troll Second Life by dumping three dimensional dicks in World of Warcraft.

I just wanted to quote this.