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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