Facebook is evil and everyone knows it
facebook is evil, as demonstrated by these animated gifs. that's right. i just used animated gifs.
Facebook is evil. Everyone knows it. Everyone feels it. It is undeniable. It is the most widely used website out there, even more used then Google. Think about it; more people are posting meaningless one liners and reading other people's one liners then are searching for something, anything, on Google.
What is Facebook? In case right now I am talking to a future audience in the year 2015 or later, and this is a future where Facebook has become obsolete, I will explain. It is terrible. It is a place where over 500 million people (according to Facebook in August, 2010) go to post short status updates, generally about nothing. 700 billion minutes are spend on Facebook by it's users every single day. Users also post photos, and "tag" these photos with user identifications. Users also post links, to articles which they think might interest other people. I do it, pretty much anyone who uses the internet regularly uses it.
That is the service. They collect your full name (no fake names allowed) and your photographs, and many people voluntarily give their religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, address, phone number, educational and work history, and anything else over to this site. I also have done this.
The site is controlled by a Randian Libertarian douche bag (no offense to Randian Libertarians who are not douche bags (this is only a certain type of douche bag)) who came up with the idea while attending Harvard. Harvard is a college which cost 22 - 25 thousand dollars in 2001, not counting dorm or the other extremely costly fees. I lived in Boston my whole life, and lived out side of Harvard Square in Cambridge MA for three years, fuck I even worked for Harvard for three years. I know these people. There are plenty of great people from Harvard, but there are just some who are slimy little pieces of shit, and everything I have ever heard about Zuckerberg (the guy I've been talking about) leads me to believe that he was one of those slimy piece of shit Harvard undergrads.
Right, anyway, so that guy started Facebook. Except, he didn't do it alone, he had a partner, which he basically stole the whole thing from. In fact, recently there has been buzz that actually, through a lawsuit, Zuckerberg's partner may be owning 84% of Facebook very soon.
Zuckerberg hates privacy. Facebook started as a Harvard only social networking site. IN an AIM conversation, he had this to say about his users:
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Well then. Alright. It could easily be argued that he was only 19 during this conversation, plenty of things change with age, and I would agree. No reason to hold some Harvard douche bag accountable for something he said in 2002, right?
But he still hates privacy. He loves all of our information. In January 2010, he gave a whole spiel about how the age of privacy was over, how nobody even wanted privacy anymore, and in some ways it's true. For a long time now people have cared less and less with what they share on the internet, and now it seems as Facebook has become the premiere catalog of human beings on this planet. Only 500 million of them, but it is the most complete. Whether or not it's true, I think everyone on the internet should be concerned that Facebook is some sort of Federal Human Data Mining Program. With over 1 million people in the United States working under top secret conditions, who knows what the fuck is going on anymore.
Facebook, right now, is suing anyone who uses the word "book" at the end of their domain name, and is attempting to trademark the word "face.
But like it or not, Facebook is where all of the people are. What are we to do? Everyone wants to be where the people are, I'm pretty sure there is a natural urge, or even a goal of the collective minds of the internet to connect itself into one body. Wikipedia is a beautiful example of what is possible when the internet is able to reach out and unify itself, and it's knowledge. Facebook is not.
Have you ever even tried deleting your Facebook account? You can't. You can only disable it. I have deleted it several times after becoming disgusted with Facebook. But like I said, it's where the people are, and all it takes to reinstate your account to it's previous exact glory, is a simple click of the enable button.
What we need is something to connect us all together as we desire, but something where we are not being used simply to profit a large corporation's deep pockets. We need something that allows us to create uninhibited by censorship, and show our individuality. Right now you could take any status update on Facebook and switch it with somebody else's, and I probably wouldn't know the difference. We need more then just concessions of privacy. We need something create by us, for us.
We need this social networking, but we need it to allow us to fully use the internet for our own (as individuals and a whole) advancement.
In my next post, I believe I will write a short history of the evolution of social networking on the internet.
