PoliticsOfFacebook
The politics of 'Facebook'
Trechos de The politics of 'Facebook'.
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"You can't have a workers' revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu" -- Peter Thiel, Facebook
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Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a
group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out
ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one
manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it, it is a social
experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative
libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as
long as you don't mind being bombarded by adverts for the world's biggest
brands. As with PayPal, national boundaries are a thing of the past.
[...]
Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark
Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley
venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel.
[...]
Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital
scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual
banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for
himself.
[...]
But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a
futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from
Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a
detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that
dominated Stanford. He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening of
individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing
journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux
("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an
internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack
MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls
himself "way libertarian".
[...]
This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision
for the world: "TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who
believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as
the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone,
especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies that will
"reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes its politics as
"Reaganite/Thatcherite". The chairman's message says: "Today we'll teach
MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the leftwing media some lessons
they never imagined."
[...]
What about his philosophy? [...] His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the
17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away
from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes'
famous characterisation of life as "nasty, brutish and short", and towards
a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in
imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that
you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations
between human beings.
[...]
Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money
out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries -
and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes
nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening
anyway.
Thiel's philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University,
proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard
reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another
without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in
the case of Thiel's virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all
you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence
financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook.
[...]
The internet is immensely appealing to neocons such as Thiel because it
promises a certain sort of freedom in human relations and in business,
freedom from pesky national laws, national boundaries and suchlike. The
internet opens up a world of free trade and laissez-faire expansion. Thiel
also seems to approve of offshore tax havens, and claims that 40% of the
world's wealth resides in places such as Vanuatu, the Cayman Islands, Monaco
and Barbados. I think it's fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is
against tax. He also likes the globalisation of digital culture because it
makes the banking overlords hard to attack: "You can't have a workers'
revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu," he says.
[...]
If life in the past was nasty, brutish and short, then in the future Thiel
wants to make it much longer, and to this end he has also invested in a firm
that is exploring life-extension technologies. He has pledged £3.5m to a
Cambridge-based gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey, who is searching for
the key to immortality. Thiel is also on the board of advisers of something
called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
[...]
So by his own admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he
also calls "nature", and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in
this context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is a
deliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young
thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out
techno-utopian fantasies. Not someone I want to help get any richer.
[...]
Facebook's most recent round of funding was led by a company
called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of
Greylock's senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of
the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What's In-Q-Tel? Well,
believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital
wing of the CIA. After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited
by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the
private sector, that in 1999 (sic) they set up their own venture capital fund,
In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and partners with companies developing
cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central
Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to
further their missions".
[...]
The US defence department and the CIA love technology because it makes
spying easier. "We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries," defence
secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. "We need to make the leap into the
information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation
efforts."
[...]
Now even if you don't buy the idea that Facebook is some kind of extension
of the American imperialist programme crossed with a massive
information-gathering tool, there is no way of denying that as a business,
it is pure mega-genius. Some net nerds have suggsted that its $15bn
valuation is excessive, but I would argue that if anything that is too
modest. Its scale really is dizzying, and the potential for growth is
virtually limitless. "We want everyone to be able to use Facebook," says the
impersonal voice of Big Brother on the website.
[...]
The creators of the site need do very little bar fiddle with the programme.
In the main, they simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts
voluntarily upload their ID details, photographs and lists of their
favourite consumer objects. Once in receipt of this vast database of human
beings, Facebook then simply has to sell the information back to
advertisers, or, as Zuckerberg puts it in a recent blog post, "to try to
help people share information with their friends about things they do on the
web". And indeed, this is precisely what's happening. On November 6 last
year, Facebook announced that 12 global brands had climbed on board. They
included Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, Verizon, Sony Pictures and Condé Nast. All
trained in marketing bullshit of the highest order, their representatives
made excited comments along the following lines:
[...]
Newspapers have to put up with the irksome expense of paying journalists to
provide the content. Facebook gets its content for free. The other is that
Facebook can target advertising with far greater precision than a newspaper.
Admit on Facebook that your favourite film is This Is Spinal Tap, and when
a Spinal Tap-esque movie comes out, you can be sure that they'll be sending
ads your way.
[...]
Just for fun, try substituting the words 'Big Brother' whenever you read the
word 'Facebook'
[...]
"When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior
version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior
version of that information."
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