Kenkyuu

A.K.A. why I do not have a Facebook profile (actually, why Facebook does not have a profile on me)

The cloud means that we can’t even point in the direction of the server anymore and because we can’t even point in the direction of the server anymore we don’t have extra technical or non-technical means of reliable control over this disaster in slow motion. You can make a rule about logs or data flow or preservation or control or access or disclosure but your laws are human laws and they occupy particular territory and the server is in the cloud and that means the server is always one step ahead of any rule you make or two or three or six or poof! I just realized I’m subject to regulation, I think I’ll move to Oceana now.

Which means that in effect, we lost the ability to use either legal regulation or anything about the physical architecture of the network to interfere with the process of falling away from innocence that was now inevitable in the stage I’m talking about, what we might call late Google stage 1.

It is here, of course, that Mr. Zuckerberg enters.

The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.

Because he harnessed Friday night. That is, everybody needs to get laid and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, “I will give you free web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time”. And it works.

That’s the sad part, it works.

How could that have happened?

There was no architectural reason, really. There was no architectural reason really. Facebook is the Web with “I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?” It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts.

And it shouldn’t be allowed. It comes to that. It shouldn’t be allowed. That’s a very poor way to deliver those services. They are grossly overpriced at “spying all the time”. They are not technically innovative. They depend upon an architecture subject to misuse and the business model that supports them is misuse. There isn’t any other business model for them. This is bad.

I’m not suggesting it should be illegal. It should be obsolete. We’re technologists, we should fix it.

I’m glad I’m with you so far. When I come to how we should fix it later I hope you will still be with me because then we could get it done.

But let’s say, for now, that that’s a really good example of where we went wrong and what happened to us because. It’s trickier with gmail because of that magical untouched by human hands-iness. When I say to my students, “why do you let people read your email”, they say “but nobody is reading my email, no human being ever touched it. That would freak me out, I’d be creeped out if guys at Google were reading my email. But that’s not happening so I don’t have a problem.”

Now, this they cannot say about Facebook. Indeed, they know way too much about Facebook if they let themselves really know it. You have read the stuff and you know. Facebook workers know who’s about to have a love affair before the people do because they can see X obsessively checking the Facebook page of Y.

Like a lot of unfreedom, the real underlying social process that forces this unfreedom along is nothing more than perceived convenience.

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