Facebook Will Kill You, Your Children, Your Children's Children
Who here uses Facebook? Uh huh, that's what I thought, pretty much all of you. Guess what? You're all going to fucking die. Or that's what The Nation says in an article they just posted , and kudos to them for getting a whole issue to press the night of their Christmas party. Double kudos for showing me such a good time and not skimping on the booze. As a result, I almost feel bad about what I'm about to do. But, hey, my people did kill Christ so that really says something about my Christmas spirit. Anywho, we'll take a look at The Nation's paranoid schizophrenic Facebook-as-Fascism story and explain why it's, well, retarded, right after the jump.
It starts like this:
"When one of America's largest electronic surveillance systems was launched in Palo Alto a year ago, it sparked an immediate national uproar. The new system tracked roughly 9 million Americans, broadcasting their photographs and personal information on the Internet; 700,000 web-savvy young people organized online protests in just days. Time declared it "Gen Y's first official revolution," while a Nation blogger lauded students for taking privacy activism to "a mass scale." Yet today, the activism has waned, and the surveillance continues largely unabated."
If you think writer Ari Melber is refering to the NSA, you'd be wrong. He's referring to Facebook, the popular social networking web site,! The events referenced in this first paragraph are the launch of the Facebook news feed a year ago and all the college freshman who joined a group called something like "Fuck the Facebook News Feed", forcing Mark Zuckerburg to add privacy controls. Victory for privacy, democracy, but the kids lost interest. Final conclusion: Facebook is eroding Americans' basic conceptions of privacy and America is doomed.
I don't mean to get all Nation -y myself, but, uh, yeah, America does seem to be doomed, but I can't say that Facebook has all that much to do with it. Not to split hairs here, man, but it sure as shit wasn't Zuckerberg, Facebook or even that douche Tom from MySpace that rounded up all the Arab bodega-operators willy-nilly after 911 or suspended habeus corpus or started recording our phone calls or logging into our Gmail. Facebook exists to sell things, and yeah, they're pretty good at getting us to buy them. But things being as they are, doesn't it seem like focusing on Facebook, Facebook , is sort of putting good energy after bad?
Call me a Paultard if you have to, but being overly concerned about what I'm buying from Amazon being broadcast over the interwebs or having my picture used to sell Coca-Cola seems to fall a bit lower on the privacy-importance hierarchy than, say, the right to know what charges are being brought against me ('cause there have got to be some, right?) or, i don't know, why I'm being searched randomly on the subway for having a backpack, or being able to get on a plane without taking off my motherfucking shoes as I don't always remember to cut my toenails. Isn't that really what our Constitutional right to privacy is really all about?
About Facebook [The Nation]
