facebook is the greatest engine of conformity i’ve ever seen. it beats the television by a mile, which i didn’t think was possible. the network is currently designed to —
— feed its users with a constant stream of reductive, decontextualized propaganda that reinforces a cartoon version of what they already believe,
— trick them into thinking that they’re doing something by forwarding this propaganda, when really they’re just wasting time,
— get those users to volunteer oodles of personal data, connections, geographic positions, etc., to a huge corporation that works hand-in-hand with the surveillance state, in exchange for low-wattage ego strokes in the pathetic form of like-clicks,
— encourage psychological dependency on the service. how many people do you know who can’t go a hour without checking in?
if an authority figure had come to you in 1984 and asked you for a list of everybody you knew and their associations and relationships to you and each other, you would have correctly understood this as a fascist move. you would have resisted it. yet in 2016 we are all eager to volunteer those same lists. we are willing to do countless hours of unpaid labor building the database of a huge corporation that is absolutely positively monitoring everything we do online. that’s not a conspiracy theory. that’s their business model.
anybody serious about intellectual independence and reclaiming the autonomy of his or her own personality will steer clear of this poisonous service. it’s a big internet. there are alternatives.