I recently quit Facebook. Aside from the liberation of several hours of my life (Facebook is what they call a “time suck”), it has also liberated me from all manner of inanity, by which I mean the countless posts about puppies and kitties, crude jokes, people wearing sunglasses, and the assorted political wisecracking that left me cringing. But there was one other reason: By my mere presence as a Facebook subscriber I was helping to enhance Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth. He is laughing at suckers like me all the way to the bank.
I am a capitalist, so wealth is not by itself a four-letter-word to me. I am certainly a beneficiary of the technology and information boom of the past 40 years, especially through my association with Microsoft and other information technology firms, both as an employee and as an investor. Indeed, somewhere buried in my mutual funds and those of my wife’s, will surely be some basket of shares in Facebook. Consequently, I hope like hell that he is successful. But that doesn’t mean I have to like him. Right? I hope so.
Liking someone in our day and age has descended into a kind of inanity all by itself. It is meaningless when one considers the definition of Like on Facebook. I mean, what do we really know about someone such that we would raise our hands and tell the world that we “like” them? In the end, those people I count in my own social network ought to be people I really and truly like (by the way, they are). And “like” is multi-faceted, isn’t it? My best friend, Dean, is someone whom I admire and respect, but he is not without flaws. It’s just that the flaws, insofar as I know them, are minimal when compared against the many superior aspects of his character. The ratio is huge. It helps that I have known him, through thick and thin, for 52 years. I have seen him in action.
I have seen Mark Zuckerberg in action, in a manner of speaking, and I do not like what I see. I do not like his politics. I do not like how he spends his money (come on, $5 million dollars a year for personal security?). I have seen the movie, The Social Network, and I did not like the Zuckerberg I saw portrayed there either. I do not like the culture of his company – one which is seemingly hyper-focused on leveraging my existence on Facebook to sell me things I do not want or need and to connect me to products, services, political viewpoints, and a multitude of people that I most assuredly would never like. A series of recent stories have tended to confirm my worst suspicions. Gizmodo recently had this to say:
Facebook’s stranglehold over the traffic pipe has pushed digital publishers into an uneasy alliance with the $350 billion behemoth, and the news business has been caught up in a jittery debate about what, precisely, the company’s intentions are. Will it swallow the business whole, or does it really just want publishers to put neat things in users’ news feeds? For its part, Facebook—which has recently begun paying publishers including Buzzfeed and the New York Times to post a quota of Facebook Live videos every week—bills its relationship with the media as a mutually beneficial landlord-tenant partnership.
Zuckerberg, for his part, has been quite forthcoming about wanting to monopolize digital news distribution, and that by itself ought to worry anyone. Well, maybe not worry, per se, but certainly give rise to a kind of critical thinking that asks, “what if what he thinks is news, is not what I consider news?” That kind of control concerns me. More than that, it turns out that his company has a rather dim view of journalism altogether. Again, from Gizmodo:
But if you really want to know what Facebook thinks of journalists and their craft, all you need to do is look at what happened when the company quietly assembled some to work on its secretive “trending news” project. The results aren’t pretty: According to five former members of Facebook’s trending news team—“news curators” as they’re known internally—Zuckerberg & Co. take a downright dim view of the industry and its talent. In interviews with Gizmodo, these former curators described grueling work conditions, humiliating treatment, and a secretive, imperious culture in which they were treated as disposable outsiders. After doing a tour in Facebook’s news trenches, almost all of them came to believe that they were there not to work, but to serve as training modules for Facebook’s algorithm.
The selection of what qualifies to be showcased on Facebook as “trending news” is left to a very small cadre of people:
According to former team members interviewed by Gizmodo, this small group has the power to choose what stories make it onto the trending bar and, more importantly, what news sites each topic links out to. “We choose what’s trending,” said one. “There was no real standard for measuring what qualified as news and what didn’t. It was up to the news curator to decide.”
You might say, “Joe, there is nothing new here. Editors at all newspapers decide what gets published every day.” Very true, but I get to decide what newspaper to buy and if I do not care for their survey of what is newsworthy, I will decide not to buy their newspaper again. Or, I will supplement it with other news sources. My selection criteria will include the extent to which I perceive an inability to check one’s bias in one’s reporting. I want reporting that is as free from bias as it can be (and, yes, I recognize that the elimination of bias altogether is impossible, but it can be checked). Facebook has more or less declared that it will not check its own biases. That concerns me. And it is a bias that will, no matter how hard the news curators may try, emulate what Mr. Zuckerberg wants out there.
So it comes back to how he conducts himself and how he spends his money. This is a proxy for his belief system, in my view, and I do not like what I see. So, why would I continue to support, again by my mere presence, a company with such bias? From all that I can discern, he is an extreme leftist. I am not. He is an internationalist. I am not. He might even be anti-American. I am not (although I have come to a rather dim view of the plutocracy that defines my country these days). His seeming flaws are legion when compared to his positive character attributes (he has some, yes?). He would not be a friend of mine. And since he runs Facebook with an iron fist, I cannot by definition like his company. I, therefore, quit.
Steal This Book was written and published when I was but a child growing up in the paradise that was Southern California in the 1960s, notwithstanding the domestic tumult occurring everywhere outside of my tidy little suburb of Woodland Hills. It was more or less a handbook on how to be a counter-culturist. For its time, it was about as left-wing as you could get, if not downright immoral. Even its publisher said that he would not let his own children read it. I wonder if Zukerberg has read it? His actions, to me, suggest that he has. And that saddens me.
I could not run away fast enough.
(all of this is my opinion, pure and simple. I do hope that in the American of this day, I am still entitled to that.)
