Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society? | Hacker News Reader

Is Facebook a Structural Threat to Free Society?

truthhawk.com

733 pointsjonstokes399 comments

When I was a kid in the 70s I remember reading a national magazine article about another kid my age who had his own computer. Amazing! This was something I wanted.

Reading on, it described how he had built his computer from electronics and operated it from his attic. He had quite a few programs for his computer. One he liked the most allowed him to simulate buying and selling of stocks.

If you've ever read any ads from that period, the implication is clear: computers are awesome because they are going to challenge us to become better people. They will teach us at a speed we can learn, they will reward us as we progress, and the obstacles and learning will get more and more advanced.

People who don't have computers are going to be missing out -- on self development.

Contrast that to my trip the other day by commercial air travel. Everywhere I went, people were on their phones. Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?

They were not.

Instead they were playing the stupidest games imaginable. Facebooking, taking quizzes where any moron with the ability to type would get 90% correct -- and then sharing the results with their friends.

Zuck and others figured it out. Computers don't have to be computers. They have to be video games. Who gives a shit whether the guy on the other end is learning to be a better person. Challenge them with idiotic trivial tasks, then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects, and the imagined praise of their peers. They'll do that shit all day long. All they need is more batteries.

Yes. It's a problem.

Facebook is the only tech company I feel very reluctant to work for. It feels so dystopian.

As opposed to Google that does the same? I am kinda surprised facebook has not given out free email ids yet.

they tried. It failed.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/24/5443454/facebook-retires-i...

Open your eyes, if you dare.

The propaganda posters all over their walls are impressive.

http://hillaryfox.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/IMG_7782.jp...

Since then they've added a few more which are basically "remember not to be racist".

Is it a problem? If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them? It might not be the original intent, or the hopes of some (and only some), but if people are content with this outcome, there's little debate to be had.

The question presented here, though, is whether or not allowing Facebook to monopolize the industry is a threat to society. Services provided are irrelevant. This is a matter of centralization.

>If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them?

Don't mistake addiction for contentment. How many of those people would like to be doing something else, but just can't pull themselves away from the slot machine?

and how many people tell themselves they'd like to do something else (say, learn a language or instrument) as a form of ego-protection because it's "what sophisticated people do"? The underlying assumption that we should all want to learn Latin and to play the Cello seems to have been roundly invalidated, despite continuing to be played out in the public sphere.

Probably not very many people tell themselves that. Seems more like something cynical and judgmental people assume other people tell themselves.

But I can tell you almost anything creative / productive / self-developmental feels more rewarding than the time I fritter away doing nothing on the internet, like idly scrolling Reddit.

I'm not content that my default mode is to do things that never feel rewarding. So any minute I can reclaim for something more self-developmental, like a Duolingo Spanish exercise, makes my life a little better and satisfying in my own eyes.

But _why_ do you want to learn Spanish? Is it because you are planning an extended stay in a Spanish-speaking country, or have Spanish-speaking friends, or is it because you have a romantic conception of multilingualism?

My point was that people often seem to romanticise fairly arbitrary personal development goals as being a lofty intent, but when push comes to shove you'll find them in front of the TV or playing a game. What does that say about our internal reward system and the value of forcing yourself to do something that you tell yourself you'll enjoy over something you genuinely enjoy? The idea that entertainment is a "lower pursuit" and learning arbitrary skills is a "higher pursuit" smacks of social construction.

Could you substitute "eating healthy" and "exercise" into this line of thinking? Or other alternatives that you yourself might agree are "better" while maybe being difficult to choose to do, and not as "enjoyable" as some less ideal alternative action?

That something is "enjoyable" in the short-term does not mean that it is beneficial in the long term.

Doing drugs, getting high, gambling, any other short-term dopamine hit is easy, and feels good in the moment, yet can pretty easily be characterized as bad in the long term, and objectively worse than alternative actions that in the short term are not as pleasurable and enjoyable. I use obviously extreme examples to illustrate the logic.

Figuring out which pursuits and behaviors fit into which bucket certainly is not quite so straight forward. But I think the OP you are responding to has something right when they describe it challenging to escape the easy/addictive and replace it with the difficult/beneficial.

If you only characterized exercise as "practicing picking up a heavy weight and putting it over there. Why do you need to do this? etc." then certainly the benefits can seem ridiculous.

That there is no direct practical need to learn Spanish, doesn't mean learning to speak it doesn't garner ancillary benefits.

There's a balance to be had here. I've tried to "be creative" all the time and it just doesn't work. You need those moments idly scrolling Reddit or HN (or going for a walk outside, or vegging out with TV or videogames) for your brain to a.) have new stimulus to process and b.) have time to process it.

I'd be terribly unhappy if all I did was surf Reddit, but I was also equally unhappy when I just tried to work, produce, and learn all the time.

>If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them?

Because that happiness is an illusion. One that prevents them from seeing the seriousness of their situation. Whether it's texting-and-driving, or climate-change-denial. This "tool" is going to do us more harm than good.

Can you qualify that real quick by providing evidence that you are more capable than others at identifying degrees of reality vs illusion in activities?

Children are generally not happy at school, yet we force them to attend.

It is mandatory. Maybe they don't need that much schooling.

what is "needed" seems more like a post-facto rationalization for each individual. everyone's future is uncertain. extra education generally provides more options and flexibility, while the same doesn't really apply to a more limited education.

I think that says more about how we run our school systems than the schooling kids being a problem.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-sc...

Great example of this.

> If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them?

Engineers who have identified a systemic risk to society.

Couldn't your argument apply all the same to heroin?

And why shouldn't it?

You seem to be suggesting that a heroin epidemic would be in no way problematic and that no one should take any steps against it.

I believe the word you're looking for is technocrats.

> Is it a problem? If people are happy with that status quo, who are we to challenge them?

If people are happy doing heroin all day, who are we to challenge them?

I mean, if you really want to take it to that extreme, why is the argument against facebook videogames and not videogame culture as a whole? Seems like in this case, Facebook is just a scapegoat.

I think most of those who've responded to you recognize the argument is against Facebook, videogames, tv, etc and in general all vapid time sucks designed to keep the user in an unenlightened state

I'm not sure I agree there. I think most of the responses were in the same vein as "look at these mindless sheep who can't lift their heads from their phones".

I completely disagree that videogames are bad (in moderation, of course, as all things). Games often involve problem solving, learning systems, practice and continual improvement. Compare this to other forms of entertainment media and games look good. There are vapid videogames on mobile and social which are little more than slot machines, but that doesn't mean all or most games are fruitless wastes of time. And even in mobile, if you get deeply into many of the top performing games, there is a lot of thinking and strategy involved. It's far from idle, passive, worthless entertainment.

What's more, games often help people connect to others, sometimes from around the world, in a shared interest. For people who are socially stressed or are going through a rough time without enough support in real life, this can be extremely helpful. And even for those who have plenty of social life, it's often fun to meet people in game.

Thank you! I very much agree with this. Most claims I see made against video games (as a whole or phone-based) tend to be made from atop a pedestal, and usually with very little willingness to open one's mind to the plausible benefits (visible or otherwise).

Yeah, I find I enjoy video games for many of the same reasons I enjoy programming.

In my opinion, this is the most dangerous aspect of games, though - they can fulfill that feeling of achievement that would otherwise belong to creative work, and satiate the need for that kind of work. The problem is that the achievements aren't helpful in the same way that eg building a company/invention/coffee table are.

I say this as a lifelong game player, and it's not to discount their positive effects - I think I'm a much better strategist and planner as a result of playing games as a kid.

My brother has health problems that prevent him from finding fulfillment in the same ways that an entrepreneur might.

It's precisely this property of videogames that allows so many people with similar problems to feel achievement.

> Games often involve problem solving, learning systems, practice and continual improvement.

A lot of videogames focus on instant gratification and variable time rewards. There have been some games focused on problem solving - games where instead of simply playing you'd find yourself spending 20 minutes looking over your handwritten notes trying to puzzle something out - but they're a minority.

Video games covers a very broad market, but the race to the bottom in price in some segments seems to have been followed by unproductive time sink mechanics made by people who didn't realise (or perhaps didn't care) that Cow Clicker was a parody.

I've had to put the kongregate minigames site into my own /etc/hosts file as 0.0.0.0 to stop myself playing the "Idle"/"Clicker" genre.

Positive games do exist, but they are thinner on the ground than they used to be. I think.

Many things that are harmful in large doses but beneficial in moderation. Alcohol has many beneficial effects when used in moderation, but too much is both immediately a problem and can cause systemic problems. Drugs (of the legal/medical sort) are specifically used because of their beneficial nature, but most of them cause harm when used in excess.

The problems come when something has a feedback loop which promotes more usage beyond normal usage. Alcohol has this, and so does heroin. Different games have this to different degrees. Like most things I've mentioned, different people are susceptible to this to different degrees, which complicates the issue.

Who indeed? Can you judge how people should live their lives better than they can? Most heroin addicts are far from happy though

(btw what you have said is basically the Godwin's Law of talking about happiness)

> Can you judge how people should live their lives better than they can?

Me personally? No. We as a society in which that person lives? Yes, to the degree that it affects us. That's why we have public education and vaccination.

If you want to retire to a remote cabin in the woods with a ton of heroin and finish out your days, I have no complaints. If you want to do it such that others need to clean up after you (whether that be garbage on the street or an unpaid hospital bill from an emergency room visit), then you are subject to their desires to a greater or lesser degree. You aren't allowed to have the benefits of society without the drawbacks. That's what civilization is.

Oddly, most of the garbage that accumulates on the streets where I live consists of empty cigarette packs/butts, coffee cups, beer and soda cans, junk food and fast food wrappers, etc. And the hospitals are full of people suffering the consequences of recklessly consuming those things.

It's not all that odd. What society deems is beneficial as a whole is not necessarily what is beneficial for an individual. It's not necessarily beneficial even, it's just what's been decided is. A society without caffeine might be better off, but we've decided we don't believe so for a multitude of reasons. That doesn't mean we are correct, it just means we've made a choice.

Cogs that don't fit get ground down. That's not meant as some dig against modern society, all human groups feature this to some degree. Your prototypical small native american tribe is no different.

Why would I? They are probably happy.

Excellent point about centralisation. I can't help but feel many people either misunderstood or didn't read the article. In my view, the power Zuckerberg wields is staggering, although I've seen many postings here with contrasting views on that level of power.

The article is excellent. It's well structured and insightful. It also leads us to ask excellent questions and provides relevant content to mull over. As an example, Zuckerberg's message was fascinating in what it didn't say.

My superficial value add to truthhawk's article is as follows.

1. How much sway does Facebook actually have? Do most people seek information outside of Facebook? If they hear/see something enough, does it become truth?

2. Would Zuckerberg want to be president? I've always viewed the President as being a servant to power brokers behind the scenes. Wouldn't Zuckerberg have more influence by striking deals with potential candidates and hold leverage through Facebook profile analysis? Does Zuckerberg have the power to be more than a president?

3. Does anyone actually have the power to take on Facebook? Might that person be subjected to extra criticism (eg. during the next election) if they don't play ball?

4. Facebook exists and it is particularly powerful. If you were to decentralise the leadership (as discussed by truthhawk), would that add benefit? How? I see potential for a fragmented committee, or worse. Could Zuckerberg be like Jobs was to Apple?

5. Long term, assuming Facebook and Zuckerberg survive the test of time, who takes over? What sort of people would gravitate to that role? What might that mean for this wealth of information on many citizens of the world? Even if Zuckerberg is a benevolent dictator, the potential vacuum of power that will be created horrifies me, especially thinking about the personalities that may fight for it.

I don't believe Facebook will disappear any time soon. There are serious questions around Facebook that we desperately need to consider. This article is excellent as it helps focus us on this goal.

This is why I (mostly) love HN. It really makes me think about the world around me in so many interesting and meaningful ways. I may have given up on MSM and once-brilliant sites like Ars Technica (who now thrust biased gender and governmental politics down our throats). I hope HN can keep its secret sauce flowing.

Thanks truthhawk

Thank you, rustynails! Happy to see the post prompting thought. Great questions, and ones we will have to keep an eye on in the coming months/years.

Side note: the user who submitted this to HN is an Ars Technica co-founder!

Television went the exact same way. From 'a university in every home' to a continuous stream of entertainment.

There is some choice but how many re-runs of Discovery channel content can you watch (and most of that is infotainment, not actual stuff you'd want to learn).

The one great thing about the internet is that it is many-to-many rather than one-to-many in it's foundations so we do have a lot more choice than on TV and that university is there as long as you want to look for it.

There is some romanticisation of the past going on when you dismiss the Discovery channel as infotainment. I don't mean that it isn't infotainment, but what's wrong with that. TV has worked as an educator though it doesn't resemble University.

Ordinary TV watching people have a much broader mental scope -- spanning the globe than their ancestors did. They do better on IQ tests. The TV shows they watch are more complex than the Vauderville shows of old.

> There is some romanticisation of the past going on when you dismiss the Discovery channel as infotainment.

Today's Discovery Channel (and History Channel, and TLC, etc) - are vastly different than what they were when they started. All have definitely "dumbed down" to the LCD.

I understand that this is normal change for a business, especially one centered around TV entertainment. I also know that even in their prime, these channels were never as educational as, say, PBS and the like. But compared to today's programming, their earlier incarnation was vastly superior.

But that is just my (probably biased) opinion...

> Today's Discovery Channel (and History Channel, and TLC, etc) - are vastly different than what they were when they started. All have definitely "dumbed down" to the LCD.

While with "educational" channels it.comes off as dumbing down, there's a broader effect of appealing to narrow groups that drive popularity and then moving on to appeal to the masses. Outside of TLC/Discovery/History you can see this in Food Network (where the cooking slowly migrated to the Cooking Channel -- typically on more expensive cable tiers) while Food Network was taken over by food tourism shows, advertorial series, and reality/competition shows; MTV, where the music keot migrating to subordinate channels while the main channel was taken over by non-music reality/competition programming, and lots of other outlets.

Is this a pessimistic view of Facebook or of people?

The answer is "yes". It's both.

The argument I made in my essay eight or nine years ago is still true, it's just gotten worse: technology continues to evolve to hack into the human brain in order to commandeer its attention, not assist it.

If you want to look at it in terms of predator-prey relationships, right now we have a predator evolving to eat the most valuable finite resource on the planet, the attention span of the apex lifeforms. So far it looks to be running the tables.

http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is...

The computers are programming the humans.

Humans are using computers to program other humans. Used to be humans using TV to program other humans.

Awww so optimistic. Haven't you seen that tshirt with the caveman nobley striding followed by the hunched computer programmer?

> It's a problem.

You 're talking about people, right?

In your opinion its a problem. The arrogance to say you know better than everyone else in such absolute terms is astounding.

I would counter that it is completely fair for someone to want to escape reality and grab simplistic rewards to avoid the absolute drudgery of being crammed into a plane with noisy, rude, and smelly strangers for an extended period of time. What kind of deep thought is possible in this environment?

Right?! They're on a plane--excuse me, commercial air traveling mass transportation vehicle--and they're expecting to see people studying Ulysses and learning Latin.

Did you actually see people playing facebook quiz games or did you just assume that? You literally don't know anything else about those people. You're just assuming they're not intellectuals because they were on their phones. Lol. I hate this uppity assumption that everyone has to be an intellectual, know 5 different languages, study quantum mechanics, and whatever else in order to be seen as worthy of being alive in this age.

Seriously. Anyone who saw me out in public on my phone would see me messing around on Twitter. They don't see me later talking bioethics in Star Trek with my friend, who does the same thing on his phone in public.

People who reduce others to what they can observe in public spaces are probably not as obnoxiously stupid as they seem, but I wouldn't know that by their public behavior.

"Bioethics in Star Trek" is not a high bar.

look at you, judging other people for using science fiction as a vessel for discussing deeper philosophical topics.

Relevant early xkcd: https://xkcd.com/610/

"Challenge them with idiotic trivial tasks, then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects..."

I was once speaking to a dev who worked on slot machines video 'games'. He mentioned that making such games had a lot more to do with psychology and exploiting certain 'addiction' traits and less about game and level design concepts used in mainstream video games.

But the line is getting very blurred these days when I look at mobile games. At least you have the remote possibility of making some money in slot machines, as opposed to pay-to-play mobile games.

Oh yes, so I once worked on online poker games, and as part of the training material we all learned about variable schedules [2] and operant conditioning [1].

It's hard for me to use Facebook or play Candy Crush after being exposed to that material. On the other hand, the real heroin, loot-dropping Action RPGs, for some reason I can stand to play those in short spurts before losing interest. I'm not sure why, perhaps there's something wrong with their scheduling...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

[2]http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Variable_ratio

Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll is an excellent book about the video slots industry in the US, its behavioral engineering principles, and the effects it has on the lives of the people it hooks into pointless and expensive dopamine grinding.

Second this rec! I only play poker/blackjack at casinos but after reading Addiction by Design I'm almost scared of even trying a slot machine. The addiction extends to the casinos and politicians who become addicted to the profits generated by the addicts and it swallows the entire industry.

I agree with this. Perhaps the 'it's a problem' for me is defined more as 'This is a problem, it just goes to show how much humanity has these wonderful innovations and most people never seem to use them to better themselves'. I bet people said the same thing about books when they first showed up en masse.

In fact, there was mass hysteria around Dime Novels once:

https://timeline.com/from-comic-books-to-video-games-new-for...

I generally agree with the idea though. It seems as if the better we get at sharing honest to god information, learning materials, and the like, the more the technologies to deliver that inevitably get used to deliver entertainment over substance.

Long time deleted FB account holder here.

I don't miss it at all. Not one bit. It amazes me how much time my wife spends mindlessly looking though stuff on it and the negative feelings that sometimes flow out from it.

I recently read a truly fantastic speech by Charlie Munger, which imparted so much clear & concise information in an easily digestible way that I could instantly relate to, it made me realise just how little I know. Specifically, he mentioned that you really need to notice when technology is going to help you and when it's going to kill you. It's made me re-evaluate my current relationship with technology and how negative it can be at (most?) times. I hope over time, people start to question their relationship with technology a lot more. I already see hints of this with mainstream media in things like Black Mirror.

I am amazed at the quantity and quality of some of the content on something like Kahn Academy that I have no idea why I haven't made more of an effort to try and grasp topics that otherwise are completely alien to me. Many of these will probably help hugely in my day to day life as well.

Recently I listened to an interview with a UK fund manager called Terry Smith, who said they don't invest in tech shares like FB, Netflix, etc. as they are such new areas which are still open to such massive change. Long term (decades) they probably aren't safe bets i.e. Netflix is great now, but once upon a time so was Blockbuster.

I do wonder if "peak" Facebook is over. There's already a large generational shift happening in younger demographics to things like Snapchat, etc.

I do hope that whatever may or may not replace it has a better balance towards positivity.

Got a link to the munger speech?

Not OP, but:

Recently, this: https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/02/charlie-munger-wisd... (posted to HN)

There's a very long (~250 pages) collection of wisdom here: http://www.valueplays.net/wp-content/uploads/The-Best-of-Cha...

I've run across a shorter (~15 - 45 pages or so) compilation or speech a ways back, but it's not turning up. He covers a certain set of ground fairly frequently though.

It was this one:

http://ritholtz.com/2012/02/a-lesson-on-elementary-worldly-w...

I can really see myself starting to try and get deeper into his mindset, especially building up a lattice of mental models.

I wrote an essay 8 or 9 years ago about how technology in general is eating us alive. I specifically mentioned Facebook.

The comments on HN at that time were quite interesting. "Oh, you don't understand. Facebook is just a fad", "I know what I'm doing, dammit!" and so forth.

Eight years later, guys. Facebook still a fad? Related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=471353

ADD: Wow. It's one thing reading the usual noise in the comments today on this article. It's quite another thing to look at HN eight years ago and see the same kind of response. Doesn't reflect so well on us. I would much rather have been wrong.

Enlightenment is a curse.

Make no mistake about it -- enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or becoming happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true.

-- Adyashanti

(An ancient^WCupertino mystic.)

In alternative phrasing: the truth hurts.

Your paraphrasing still misses the point: enlightenment is not a curse, and enlightenment does not hurt. But nobody actually wants to be enlightened.

I'd argue it that does hurt (a lot) to let go of what you belive in, and that is why people do not desire englightenment.

As far as I can tell, the thing about enlightenment is that once it's happpened, it causes this very strange change in you...

There's a very strong similarity in the meanings and origins of the words "enlightenment", "catastrophe", "revelation", and "apocalypse". Most of them have a sense of an overturning or of a revealing. There's the similar terms and expressions "the scales fell from my eyes", "I saw clearly", "flash of insight". They're not unrelated to concepts of creativity, genius, or intelligence. And there's the sense of the world "prophet" as "one who receives a message" (usually with a connotation of divinity).

In almost all of these, you might substitute a modern psychological concept: that of a dramatically changed world-view. The things you once believed, they are no longer true.

I watched the 1950s version of the RMS Titanic story some months back (I've not seen Cameron's remake), A Night to Remember. One lens through which to view that film is of the gradual revealing, the enlightenment, if you will, or lack of same, of various characters to the plight and fate of the ship, including that of several of those not aboard (and ultimately the world via headlines and news reports).

The first to clearly grasp the situation (as portrayed in the film) was the ship's designer, aboard for final adjustments as a shake-down. Then the captain and members of the crew. The contrast between the observers on the Californian and Carpathia, remote to the Titanic, struck me particularly (the first being utterly ublivious, the latter understanding, and also understanding that despite their own best efforts, there was no way to reach the ship in time).

Some passengers responded with denial, some with anger, some with outrage, some, assessing the situation and recognising their fate, with equanimity.

It's quite the film.

Enlightenment can be devastating.

That's a big part of it, yes,

I don't know about "enlightenment" as that means different things to different people, but there are models of the world you can arrive at that appear more truthful to you than the models of other people that can be... very, very painful.

And that's another big part of it.

Enlightenment is basically just being woke on a much larger scale.

Really good piece. I've touched on a similar theme, a couple of years ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/240xss/the_dop...

NB: the direct blog link to yours appears dead, though I turned up the essay at the Internet Archive.

The url for the essay appears to have changed. It's now at http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2009/02/technology-is...

Yup, deleted my account a while ago, haven't used it in years. Don't miss it one bit.

At home, we are starting to have a 'problem' because my wife is constantly on FB. In the car, on trips, in restaurants, at the dinner table. It's fucking ridiculous. I have said a few times "what can be more important on fb than what's going on in the present moment with your family?". Behavior hasn't changed much.

What is starting to freak me out is the generations coming up. I have two young kids - pre-fb age - and they already have some questionable habits on my wife's iPhone - as soon as it comes out, they wanna look at pictures, go on youtube and fight over it. The second they see it...

I've been programming since I was 13 - a long time ago. Back then, you sat down at a table/desk to use your computer and then when you left, you did other things. You went out to play with friends. Ride bikes around. Go swimming. Go look at bugs. Eat something.

Nowadays, things are different. Different though because we let them be that way. Most parents I know are helicopter and at meet ups I'm always hearing about some bad thing that happened to someone they don't even know or is half way around the world. I'm not saying we embrace ignorance, but unless you can do something about that - and you're willing - then I don't see the point of fb and the news cycle.

As a parent (and developer), I have to be proactive and get the family back into the world. I'm not against tech in general (I'm teaching my son Basic right now), but the pendulum has clearly swung a little too far in one direction and fb/snapchat/etc, with their addictive behaviors, in my mind, are not good things for society.

People, to me, just seem happier when they're not inundated with gossip and negative news. I'ld love to see fb lose its dominance on the people who have their faces buried in their phones constantly. But, I don't think that will happen anytime soon. As long as people are checked out of the real world around them, it will be that much easier for them to get sucked in to fb and the like.

> I have two young kids - pre-fb age - and they already have some questionable habits on my wife's iPhone - as soon as it comes out, they wanna look at pictures, go on youtube and fight over it. The second they see it...

This is also 100% true of my dogs. As soon as there's a new dog toy in the house and one shows interest the other will begin to fight over it. There are some deeply-ingrained mammalian social behaviors that have nothing to do with technology, and won't change anytime soon. I'd be wary of blaming a phone ahead of instinct (though blaming businesses for exploiting those instincts is a bit different).

That said, I commend your efforts to try to maintain a happy medium for your family, that's really the best way to address these sorts of issues.

I'd be careful of making any conclusions of behavior if you remove the animals from the natural environment.

I've semi-wild street dogs in that really are not that interested in any new toys that are around the house, but they are clearly following and learning from each other on other things. I'd say this is one of the traits they have in common with us.

What they are mostly concerned is food, sex and fighting over territory with other dogs. When the puppies play the main function of it seems very clear to me (future battles). The dogs belonging to the same pack do not often fight each other since the established hierarchy is rather clear.

a) The biggest instigator by far is a dog we adopted at the age of 3 who was abandoned in the street and then spent another 9 months in the dog shelter. Each dog's mileage will vary.

b) I've worked with kids for years, and many display the exact same behavior, regardless of the particulars of the "shiny object". Fighting does not necessarily mean a physical altercation.

c) I've studied animal behavioral psychology, and have yet to find anything I learned that fails to apply to humans. We vary by degree, not kind.

Long time facebook addict. I was the kinda person that would check FB every 10 minutes -- yeah, it was a huge issue for me. I could tell it was effecting my work and job.

6 weeks ago I had my wife change my facebook password and log me out of everything. There was a genuine feeling of loss and withdrawal for the first 2 weeks. I felt very disconnected and felt like I was missing out. I asked my wife to sign me in on Sunday. I had 100+ notifications and a few messages. Only 1 direct message and 1 direct post - both from the same person about the same topic. Everything else was just junk.

It turns out that Facebook was providing nothing of value to me. It wasn't even connecting me to friends in a meaningful way. 2 messages relevant to me in 6 weeks. It is mind blowing how much time I was spending reading status and linked articles and looking at photos. Just wasting time and energy.

I am the same way with HN, Reddit, or news sites. Every day I don't check the site, I feel like I am missing out on some important indispensable news and information.

If I may ask, have you stopped using Facebook / changed how you use it now? Asked your wife to keep you logged out maybe?

I know what you mean with the irrelevant notifications. Lots of tweaking which notifications I get--still more than I'd like but it's an improvement. No games, no groups, no pages.

I've mostly stopped using Facebook. Besides that last check on Sunday, I haven't used it since. I still have an account, but I don't know the password. I could easily reset it myself, but its just enough friction to make it a pain. I also now have someone accountable to (my wife) and that helps a lot as well.

I'm not on FB, and haven't been for years. My problems are Netflix/Prime and news (Google News feed and Hacker News primarily). I'd literally LOVE a smartphone which limited me to maps/navigation, camera, minimal search (for looking up crucial info on the go), email, SMS, and Slack. Oh, and Kindle. I HATE that my damn smartphone makes it so easy to fritter my life away. And that the only alternative seems to be completely dumb phones and carrying around a separate camera and GPS device. Ugh. I don't want a dumb phone, or a feature phone, I just want a dumber smartphone. And hell, I'd pay what I paid for my Pixel (unlocked) for one. I want something which values my time, privacy, and life as much as I objectively do...But am, apparently, too weak to govern myself.

My issues suck because I can't simply have my wife reset my password. I can't remove the Google News feed. And as long as I have a browser I can see Hacker News. Sigh.

I have a love-hate relationship with the crappy smartphone i do have. Like you, i often read HN in dead moments but don't have FB, but find the smartphone useful for directions or quick picture snapping. I'm however still strongly considering going back to a dumb phone (although i've been saying that for about the full 1.5 years i've owned this smartphone) and to hell with the random pictures. Our grandparents seemed perfectly happy and could only capture a 24 roll of family photos every now and then (unless they were journalists or whatever, but you get my drift). I don't know. Part of me does fear i'd miss out on social events or get lost or not be able to take that one picture or...

Probably i should just have more self-control...

Maybe something like FocusMe to dumb your phone down by blocking things? It says the app is free. I haven't used this particular blocker but I've used a different one and it's great. No willpower needed.

https://focusme.com/

My grandfather was a waterman on the Chesapeake Bay. Didn't graduate high school, didn't go to college. Worked on the water until a few months before he died.

After his death, my family went through his belongings to sort out what people wanted and what should be included in the estate sale.

In the living room, there was the obligatory wall-sized, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. You probably know the one from your grandparent's house. Filled with the kind of books you'd expect: encyclopedia, book of the month, condensed versions of great books, random novels, et cetera.

Rifling through the first book, I noticed there were notes written in the margins. About every 5-20 pages. Sometimes short, sometimes longer. I smiled and carefully set the book aside.

But the next one had notes too. And the next. And the next. Almost every book in the entire bookshelf.

My grandfather was a quiet man by the time I knew him. Of the ten words over dinner sort. But whenever I find myself reflexively going through Facebook or whatever other quick fix the internet affords me, I imagine him coming in after a long day of physical work, opening a book to his bookmark, and reading and noting a few more pages. Every day.

Then I try to be more like that person.

This is nice story but how is this any different than looking at wikipedia for a bit, reading and making notes on a kindle, etc. Your grandpa sounds like the type to use tools for personal enrichment so shouldn't the tools not matter?

Wikipedia is a mile wide and an inch deep. Most of the world's useful knowledge isn't online (IMO.)

So where do you suggest this most useful knowledge lies?

These days most books have a copy online.

Most misses out on an enormous number (at least half the books on my shelves, and I'm no bibliophile.) Google's got them, even though they can't let us see them.

Check out Library Genesis [1]. Personally, the only thing I've trouble finding online are books written in other languages than English.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

IMHO, Wikipedia is mile wide and half a mile deep. Apart from knowledge special to a particular thing, it contains pretty much everything. If you ever think it is not the case, it is certainly the place to put your additions to instead of your private bookmark.

I'll grant that Wikipedia has certainly gotten better. (And continues to do so!)

But it still tends to have large blind spots where the source is (a) pre-digital or (b) of interest to a relatively small total number of people.

Try heading to your local library or a used book store (Goodwill works in the US), find a technical or history book older than ~1980, then attempt to find the content in Wikipedia. Especially in history, the hit rate isn't good.

> the place to put your additions to instead of your private bookmark

My private bookmarks won't get deleted by a zealous reviewer five minutes later.

It can be hard to contribute to Wikipedia without enmeshing yourself in the politics of it to protect your contributions from deletionists. This gets covered every few months on HN.

I really value Wikipedia but I have to agree. Also I agree that most of the world's useful knowledge isn't directly accessible online - though most of it may now be said to exist in some digital format, somewhere.

In the late 19th century there was a strong drive in academic history towards the idea of "total history": comprehensive accounts of everything that mattered from the beginning of recorded history to the current day. All these incredibly well educated German historians started outputting 20 volume world histories.

And no-one except a historiographical specialist would read them now.

They drank an ocean and pissed a cup.

It matters when the tool you're using doesn't respect your privacy, yea.

Hyperlinks. You need self-discipline to stay on one page.

Because the interface influences the way your brain processes the information.

Reading a book != reading Wikipedia != watching an educational film

Judging by most of the comments on this article I'd say that people feel like we've lost something in the latter two.

I think that this an overstated case. Back in the "dawn" of online education I worked for a university where one school was swapping to using iPads for all their reading. You sign up you get and iPad with all your textbooks on it.

Initial polling was that students hated it from the get go. They wanted, needed textbooks. At the end of the first semester they did the polls again and, surprise, nobody wanted to go back to dead trees. Books are expensive and text search is amazing.

We switched to laptops for every student when I was in high school. I'd say that, even pre-Facebook, it was a boon to increasing computer knowledge, a decrease to attention span, and about equal on educational outcome.

I loved being able to play ROMs during class, but the difference between looking at information on the screen and in a book? Not fundamentally different.

I'd say where digital information shines is in post-secondary education where you're beginning to perform self-directed research, for the reasons you mentioned. And some students have a modicum of self control by then... ;)

I've noticed largely the same thing. I tried to purge it by unfollowing / hiding every major news source without blocking friends because MOST of the negative stuff in my feed was attached to links in those news sources.

The algorithm knows how to make you engage though. I'd get lost in really good debates with people over topics that we've discussed a before...and it just struck me about what a time sink it is because no matter how much we discuss things, nothing changes. All I'm doing it generating ad traffic for Facebook because they're keeping me engaged.

It's a lot easier to like a baby picture and walk away than it is to walk away from a topic you like discussing (and there are a lot of political topics that I like discussing). One of my good friends is a teacher and at some point in our discussion I made an observation that I'd never really thought of before (that had some negative implications)...and he did not take it well and got really, really upset with me. I apologized by phone, we cleared it up...

But at that point it really just finally hit the "enough is enough" point where nothing good is coming from this activity anymore...and I was done. And it's been great...except that now I notice how much time other people spend on it a lot more.

Regarding the observation point of contention, we were discussing the limits of current attempts at implementing school choice where schools had to opt in rather than giving people the money to go wherever they wanted. I realized that by including any type of religious name in a school, it basically legalized discrimination against poorer families since government funds wouldn't allow them to attend those schools. Struck me as an angle of the discussion I hadn't considered before and he took it as implying that he endorsed discrimination against those families - which would understandably upset anyone.

I wonder about what my toddler thinks of my/my wife's smartphone habits, and the extent that we can permanently shape her attitudes toward technology before she reaches school age.

Children learn some things from peers, no matter what their parents do. For example, kids whose peers speak Standard American English will do the same, and will generally not have an accent — even if their parents do. In this case, it is probably a 'good' thing that kids are picking up skills from friends instead of parents.

But consider smartphone usage. Even if I could, by words and actions, impart to my toddler that technology is a tool and not a master to be heeded, does this attitude stand a chance of sticking once she starts school and sees older/richer kids with smartphones? What are effective strategies for inoculating against influences that you know will be coming?

Yeah, I stopped using facebook completely, because I suddenly realised I was in the habit of checking it absolutely everywhere, no matter what I was doing. It was a habit, whenever my hands were free I would open my phone and go on facebook, even though it was always the same re-shuffled crap, negative news that were making me feel like shit, I'm normally a very positive and optimistic person, but I realised that absolutely nothing coming out of facebook was positive. Not a single thing. So I just said to myself - show some strong will, and stop using it. And I did. But god, it was hard for the first 2 weeks, then the compulsion started to go away.

And yes, I was exactly same as you - started programming around 12-13 years old, but when you stopped using the computer you would go and do other things. Now it seems to be literally everywhere.

I go on Facebook a few times per month. I think that's a healthy amount.

> It amazes me how much time my wife spends mindlessly looking though stuff on it and the negative feelings that sometimes flow out from it.

I felt like that, so I started unfollowing things/people that made me feel negative emotions and now my feed is full of Synthesizers and Dog Memes. My own little echo chamber!

but you're on HN. Is it really that much better?

On the other end of the spectrum, my wife participates in a medical research group within Facebook, because the group creator and that community find Facebook more natural to use.

I share your concern but we can extend the problem to mobile phones.

> taking quizzes where any moron with the ability to type would get 90% correct -- and then sharing the results with their friends.

This bothers me so much for some reason. Title a kindergarden math quiz "Only people with an IQ of 150 can pass this test! 90% of people cant!" and when people get a 100% on it, they will inevitably share it, to show off. And then another person sees it and says "there's no way cousin Sally could get that good of an IQ score! I've got to try this to prove that I'm better!"

It's clickbait that appeals to pride.

Ironic the the apex of decades of some of the greatest mental achievements of the last century (Von Neumann, transistor, IC, compiler design, nuclear war survivalable networking protocols, etc) has been coopted to create a planet of Eloi. You can't make this stuff up.

Steve Jobs, tellingly, did not let his children use the Ipad.

Lmao! We get, what, around 20 years of a social networking boom and you take it to mean that thousands of years of amazing work has been coopted? Sorry, I don't know what world you're living in. The world I'm in has this Facebook crap, sure. But we're also getting into very advanced genetic engineering, we're starting to develop a yearning for space travel, we're starting to worry about advanced AI/robotics taking over our jobs, we're beginning to think about climate change and what we can do about it, etc. Kids are learning programming. Private space industry. Large Hadron Collider. Dark matter and dark energy. Exoplanets.

Some people just love overreacting and arrogant intellectualism.

I have indeed trafficked in overreaction and arrogance masquerading as intellectualism in my days. Probably will again. Such is life.

The hell do exoplanets have to do with anything in this thread? Half your "points" are just stream-of-consciousness Scientific American covers. Blah blah, exciting times, whatever. Irrelevant.

The other half, your societal analyses, are 50 years out of date. Climate change, space yearning, AI fear - you'll find it all in 60s and 70s sci fi.

None of which even remotely addresses the "planet of Eloi" assertion. You may as well have just pasted the lyrics to "We Didn't Start The Fire".

I'll play devil's advocate. Humans are social, no way around that. It'd be much simpler if we weren't but then we wouldn't be human. Social media is what you make of it: it's a tool, or if you let it be, a game.

For Facebook, 95% of the time I only use Facebook Messenger and Events. Both of these things are only as intrusive and distracting as you choose for them to be, and are very efficient for communicating and organizing events. The other 5% I scroll through the news feed and unfollow anything non-wholesome or people that I don't keep in touch with anymore, which leads to a trimmed, much less populated feed.

Snapchat I find redeemable because it's a much more honest representation of people's lives, since they can have greater control of who sees their content and the knowledge that it is impermanent. Instagram and Facebook have both carbon copied the app's functionality in a testament to that value.

Instagram is definitely more on the side of the video game, but I use it as creative inspiration. There are some incredibly talented photographers on Instagram, and I also follow a lot of motorcycle photoblogs for build inspiration.

Reddit has helped me solve so many problems and has given me so much helpful advice that I can forgive the time I've wasted there.

tl;dr use social media productively and this vilification won't be necessary.

> tl;dr use social media productively and this vilification won't be necessary.

But that doesn't address that problem of Facebook acting as an intermediary for an increasing amount of our communication. Using Facebook "productively" still provides the company with an opportunity to aggregate and use your personal information to further its financial goals.

True, but I didn't because the OP didn't either. It is a problem that hasn't been solved yet, and for me, so far it's been an worthy compromise. I avoid putting anything truly personal on my Facebook - it doesn't have my home address, I turn location settings off, I never send sensitive information over Facebook messenger, etc. I try to minimize what they have, and I think that's an acceptable tradeoff.

The problem is not technology, but people. They are not as interested in these high minded pursuits as everyone imagined.

I'd encourage you to read Clay Shirky's essay "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus":

http://web.archive.org/web/20080708220257/http://www.shirky....

His observation is that for basically a generation after the industrial revolution began, all those folks who were forced out of a job by rising mechanization had nothing better to do but drink themselves into a stupor. It wasn't until they all died off (the essay says "woke up from that collective bender", but realistically, most drank themselves to death) that we got all the institutional structures of modernity - universities, nation-states, stable 9-5 jobs, labor unions, civic engagement, democracy, public education, etc.

And then once we did that, society went on another bender with TV and spent all the time surplus from their 40-hour work week watching MASH and Gilligan's Island. It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's Island on YouTube today, because the production quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with a YouTube webseries that a few college film students could put together with iMovie today.

People will remain people regardless of what toys you give them, and most are not going to do anything useful with those toys. But it's amazing today just how much creative output has increased, on all levels, relative to the world I entered in the 80s. I think the stat, when I was at Google, was that for every second of real-time that passes, 9 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. Even if much of that consists of unboxing videos and pirated movies and music collections and gaming streams, that's still such a huge increase over the creative output of the TV-centric world of the 70s and 80s.

  It's interesting to watch re-runs of Gilligan's 
  Island on YouTube today, because the production 
  quality & scriptwriting is basically on par with 
  a YouTube webseries that a few college film students 
  could put together with iMovie today.

Ha ha! Woah, woah, woah, there. Hold on a second. You are biting off a chunk of effort and talent there, and throwing it in the trash, without considering some of the huge, huge, huge barriers to television production back in 1960's & 1970's. (...not Gilligan's Island, but MASH, kind of)

Film making used to be so absolutely and drastically different from the way it is now, and there was a lot of sacrificed wastage both in time and material, due to the level of technology and it's reliability back then.

Just to do things like little title sequences and animation, or audio production that didn't look horribly dubbed and poorly lip-synced required careful dedication and the effort of multiple people. All because of poor technology in general, a poverty of integrated circuitry, no software at all, and most post production being performed optically, in-camera and with practical effects. Indoor lighting alone was painfully costly, and doubly so, due to the level of technology of the day. The undertaking of some examples of matte paintings and set design of the era (again, not Gilligan's Island...) are kind of mind-blowing to read about.

There were also political aspects such as centralized access to broadcast networks, which were also subject to high technological overhead, dealing with analog signals and the limited reach of syndication across geographic regions.

You can't credit today's undergrad capabilities visible on youtube, and trash what used to require an army of people doing new things for the very first time, with the boon that off-the-shelf appliances and downloadable software make possible these days. It was a drastically different world 40+ years ago.

Sorry for the rant. This was an XKCD:386 moment for me. [0]

[0] https://www.xkcd.com/386

That's my point. Technology has advanced dramatically since the 60s and 70s. You used to need huge teams of highly-skilled technicians just to handle the mechanics of editing, lighting, sound-recording, special effects, etc. Now you need: iMovie and a cell phone. That's allowed small groups of college students to put out creative works on par with what a major studio could do 40 years ago.

Or to tie it back to the Facebook example that started this thread: I regularly have political discussions with my friends on Facebook (or with folks here on HN, for that matter). If I say something interesting, there's the chance for that to go viral through reshares. When I was a kid, my favorite part of the newspaper was the Op-Ed section, and I always wondered what you had to do to get featured in the Op-Eds. Now everybody has their own personal Op-Ed section, with their own audience, and the type of discourse that was previously reserved for institutionalized publications now happens routinely on the Internet.

It's just that standards have risen correspondingly, so instead of this seeming amazing, it just seems like everybody is shooting their mouth off. Which it is, of course, but people fail to realize just how huge an achievement everybody being able to shoot their mouth off is.

Ha ha, yes, or to put it another way, pretty much everyone can have their own personal Gilligan's Island.

I think GPS has progressed to the point that it would be difficult to stray far enough to get lost, or marooned for that matter, on a 3 hour cruise. That said, the likelihood you would not be able to communicate the boats location or be found by the massive influx in boat traffic would be low.

I think the point was that these days technology has made things so efficient and cheap that even college students can make a big production.

Of course it was harder and more expensive back in the day...but that also meant less competition and a smaller pool of talent.

What's interesting is that most (all?) do not. Everyone has the resources, for the most part, to produce high quality content, but most simply do not. We have all this potentially productive tech, and we waste it on mindless entertainment. Sadly, I think this is one of those moments which decide the winners and losers of tomorrow. If you, or your family, are sucked into entertainment, you (or they) are highly unlikely to discover or invent anything, or start a successful business.

All literate people are capable of writing books, too. But most do not.

The march of technology only changes the things that are not being created -- not the fact itself.

I mean, somebody has to consume all that entertainment (which you call "mindless")

We can't all be creators

This is a fallacy. Creation and consumption are not mutually exclusive. We can all be creators. We can't all be creators with global reach, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't all try. And the more people try, the higher the bar will raise.

Not to mention that all the "creators" I know also consume a way above average amount of 'entertainment'.

Well it still takes quite a lot of work and skill to produce high quality content. It's just more accessible now than it was. You have to write scripts, gather people, find the location, do makeup and costumes, have all the equipment(lights, cameras, audio, etc) and know how to use it, manage how you get paid through ads and sponsors, manage fans, and editing is huge time killer.

Entertainment can be mixed with education, and even the most successful people are not robots and do not work 24/7. How many times have you seen education gamified just here on HN? Did you see how popular the recent "Hidden Figures" historical drama got? There are countless books that have made huge changes on society, and it would have been hard to do that if they weren't at least somewhat entertaining.

I get that there's a lot of mindless media though. The Endless Scroll on Facebook is notorious for being a time suck.

The essay you linked is amazing. And it is a direct counter to grandparent's comment:

> And I'm willing to raise that to a general principle. It's better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, "If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too." And that's message--I can do that, too--is a big change.

I really like your comment. Thanks!

I find myself in agreement and in strong disagreement at the same time. My fear is your thesis is just an extended form of whistling in the graveyard.

Yes, these patterns you mention hold true, and we'd be fools not to acknowledge them, but there's another pattern that you're missing out on: each generation of distraction devices is more engaging and more adaptive. Don't like what's playing in the symphony hall? Go down the street. Painful but doable. Don't like what's on the radio? Twist the dial. Much easier.

So it's not simply that mankind invents some cool new whizbang and then an entire generation zonks out, it's that mankind gets better and better at inventing Whizbangs that are more difficult to zonk out from. So let's assume, and I really hope you're right, that the pattern holds and 40 years from now we see some new rebirth in institutions and inventions. This round was more painful than the last. Much more painful. And the next round will be worse still. As AI slowly grows, it's going to go after the youth; the old folks are already hosed. So really it's game over once we find a way to hook new generations as they come along and keep them hooked.

Those other waves didn't work like this. I'd argue we're either already there -- or within 100 years of it happening. So yes, it's a beautiful thought and I wish you the best. I just can't find it in me to think of this as being a winning argument overall. In fact, your examples like Gilligan's Island are actually reverse examples. Cost of production of niche entertainment content means fewer people make less money targeting smaller audience segments. Doesn't take a genius to figure out that we're headed for machine-created custom content geared to the individual. Things automate. Digital things automate faster. This cyclical thing where new stuff comes along and distracts a generation will become continuous. The only question is when.

Is it actually getting more painful? The last round ended with a worldwide depression and the deaths of 60 million people, including two atom bombs. (I'm counting TV & radio as part of this round; the distractions in the last one included rum-running, flapper girls & jazz.) And as a percentage of population, even that was a fair bit less severe than crises of years past; even including WW2, there's a clear downward trend in number of war deaths per capita [1].

I think what you're describing is the hedonic treadmill. Happiness isn't designed, evolutionarily, to make us happy. It's designed to make us repeat the behaviors that led to our ancestors passing on their genes. So TV holds our attention because in our ancestral past, paying attention to moving objects was critical to our survival. Alcohol holds our attention because in the slightly-more-recent-past, drinking alcohol-laced water was a good way to ensure that pathogens in the water were killed. Sex & porn hold our attention because...well, self-explanatory. Nowadays, mindlessly clicking through Buzzfeed & HN holds our attention because in recent years paying attention to social trends has been critical for survival.

On a personal level, the way to achieve enlightenment is to realize that happiness is a construct of our genes & environment, and to decide to be happy regardless. Whistling in the graveyard, in other words. On a societal level, those addictive behaviors that don't actually lead to better survival will get flushed out of the gene/meme pool in the next major crisis, much like how past pasttimes like jousting, duels, and blood-feuds (and soon tobacco & fast food) became passe when they no longer led to status or survival.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-most-devastating-war-in-h...

This is a great essay

> Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?

I'll bet some of them were doing these things or things equally meaningful. Probably in roughly the same proportion as they would have been 40 or even 400 years ago.

Most people don't spend significant portions of their lives learning things or challenging themselves. From what I can tell this has always been true.

Yup. Right now I could be working on a useful and interesting side project. Instead I'm rolling through HN comments. Dang social media.

The best aspect of social media is social cohesion, and Facebook is decent at it. Being able to maintain, develop or otherwise keep in touch with people has a huge impact on quality of life.

The tragedy of Facebook is that it has integrated my ability to connect with friends and random people with 'news' using perverse solicitous internet marketing.

Of course, most of these temptations I've requested, essentially forcing myself to scroll through a Reddit-like waste of time just to see what my cousins or friends are up to. Yet the inertia of bad decisions is hard to steer against.

I'd view more ads or pay $100/month if Facebook was purely about individuals, had no brands or influencers, and it was just a way to maximize social cohesion.

If Facebook introduced a big "No News" button as an easy way to opt out of the noise, would it make the world a better place? Zuckerburg is making the world a better place through philanthropy but in business he's in the unique position of being able to magnify human ideals and spark a type of social enlightenment and cultural renaissance.

I really can't expand anymore on the article itself, so I'll just respond to your expressed sentiment. I'm interpreting you as feeling that the core problem with FB is that there is no one there "who gives a shit whether the guy on the other end is learning to be a better person."

I contend both that that is not the case, and that that concern is the precise inversion of what a developer's goals should be. FB is scrambling to ensure its users get the "correct" news on their feed, and every feature rollout has been intended to increase the social harmony among its user graphs. However, making those the focus requires the psychological manipulation you touch upon in your post. FB's product ends up not being a general purpose forum where people can express their social selves, but rather a precisely crafted echo chamber whose interface is a general purpose forum.

Don't have any contempt for the FB users you see at the airport, they're just as human as you and me. Somehow though, I've recently been able to get actual fun and satisfaction from FB. Turns out when you use it to just post links you like, or to write out and discuss ideas you have, or to check the latest Hegel memes, or show off something you've made, or to play meta games with people, or to just chat, you can have a good time without almost any of the addicting BS.

+1 for the Hegel memes

On a more serious note, I feel this is the right attitude towards the kinds of things. I've never had a problem with my feed and if something is uninteresting I just block it, period. The feed always ends up being a mirror of the users curiosities and interests so if you have a problem with it it's up to you to change it. Technology is a gateway to knowledge and self actualization, but you can't force those things into people, it's their journey.

I had this realization recently. The web is undoubtedly a great thing. Computers have obviously made our lives unbelievably better. But I'm starting to seriously question if the smartphone will ultimately be seen as a positive development for humanity. To be sure, we need modern telecommunications. Late 90's MMS phones covered this use case completely. But this world where everyone has an attention stealing machine in their pocket that feeds them nonsense 24/7 is seriously starting to affect us.

It speaks more to you as an individual that you believe the people around you should be pursuing things like "symbolic logic" or "global politics" rather than mindless games. Who are you to indict others for their hobbies, and on what authority can you judge their hobbies' value?

Look, HN is becoming a self-parody with this anti-Facebook circlejerk. People are allowed to have different lifestyles, and despite the inane comparisons to heroin that are being tossed around this thread, it's really not indicative of a systemic societal failure that people rather play Candy Crush on their phone than whatever noble pursuit you'd have them do while waiting to take off.

Take a look at that old photo of people reading newspapers on the train sometime. People thought the sky was falling with "new media" then, too. Every new media goes through an initial renaissance before it proceeds to mainstream appeal and accessibility. Not everyone wants to be like that kid you read about who built his own computer.

As another top level comment notes, Adlous Huxley nailed it 85 years ago.

Brilliant take.

Before it was FB/Internet/Phone games, it was TV, so we're perhaps just continuing further down a well worn path.

See Roger Water's underrated Amused to Death album or the book that inspired it Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Showbusiness.

Yes. Despite the potential, the most profitable/frequently used applications seem to appeal to the most basic parts of our brains, and thrive off of providing the dopamine hit. And just like heroin addicts, we've become slaves to getting that next high.

The problem lies not in the product but its customers. This is what people are like, on average.

Maybe all it really did is show us that >90% of people in society are not and never will be intellectually curious.

>... then reward them with blinky lights, sound effects, and the imagined praise of their peers. They'll do that shit all day long.

Upvoted.

that is such a bleak zero sum view. I can distract myself and improve myself at two different times. I've maintained and made some great relationships using facebook. I know people that still self improve using computers. I find it greatly amusing that people can have this opinion.

Add to this the economic absurdity of having multicore 64b, HD display, wireless, Gigs of ram and 10H of battery life; just to do a high res version of the 80s television/teletext. And don't forget to upgrade with the new model, because you clearly need an octocore to swipe right.

I'm cynical but I liked that race at first. A smartphone was cool, but I agree that it's not the result I planned.

It's even a little more absurd, because it seems that society aggregates issues, and try to develop solutions, but the solution just replace the other sources of problems, so on and so forth. Moving target.

I'm sure soon some people will pay to have disconnected areas to relive how it was before.

ps: the easiest way to get smarter is to avoid relying on society, and solve problems on your own. For that reading an old book with a pencil nearby is probably more than enough. society and tech are religions somehow; distortion field.

> Contrast that to my trip the other day by commercial air travel. Everywhere I went, people were on their phones. Were they learning foreign languages? Becoming experts at symbolic logic or global politics?

> They were not.

I am currently using my phone to learn mandarin using the "Hello Chinese" app [1]. It doesn't require internet connection for lessons that you have already downloaded, so it is perfect for long trips and such.

my first foreign language was rather obscure (Pashto) so I had to learn it in a classroom without any apps or other programs to help with self study. Learning using the hello chinese app is so much better compared to classroom learning it just boggles my mind. I can go at my own pace, it uses sound recognition to grade my pronunciation, I can study words and phrases, everything. It is a wonderful tool

[1] http://www.hellochinese.cc/

Facebook is:

* One of the most addictive products the world has ever seen (Opioids, another such product, were used to overthrow countries)

* The single most important media company in the world

* Controlled by one person

Threat to free society? Jury's out. But at this point, it certainly seems worth regulating.

(Edit: The above points are not meant to paint FB/Zuck in a bad light. To their credit, they've built an incredible ecosystem and a mind-bogglingly good product. We all strive to create sticky/addictive products.

My point is: When your product is incredibly addictive to a large chunk of humanity, regulation should be considered)

I was telling people last year (before the tide shifted against FB) that there will one day (decades away) be Big Tobacco style litigation by governments against Facebook for intentionally making their service addictive when they knew the harmful effects (e.g., depression). I did not expect the sentiment to change so dramatically but I guess people are looking to blame anyone for the election.

I'm willing to bet in my lifetime Facebook will not become the world's largest company.

Google may have a chance of beating Apple at #1 but Facebook has quite a margin.

Essentially both Facebook and Google are ads businesses. Facebook seems to be optimizing for short term growth at the expense of their brand.

I know many people who joined Facebook around 2008 and absolutely were big fans of it. After 10 years none of them even use it, the novelty wore off.

> I'm willing to bet in my lifetime Facebook will not become the world's largest company.

PS - There's an easy way to bet on this, just buy some stock :)

EDIT - Well, technically, you want to short the stock.

It's inverse, so the way to bet is to not buy some stock. Done!

Or rather, to short their stock, if you want to make some money off it.

Does Facebook's valuation assume growth that will make them the largest company on the planet?

No, it is to short the stock.

The question is if you can hold out long enough and if the change you predict will happen fast enough.

That can get expensive quickly, so it's not quite the inverse of holding stock where the only downside is how far the stock can drop, not how far it can go up.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Timing as ever is the key.

Timing the market is a fools game.

Saying it will not become the largest company is not the same as saying the stock will go down.

Facebook will remain an "ads" company for as long as it's profitable. Marketing dollars will always need go somewhere, so I'm not convinced the advertising market will just wither and die in the face of adblockers. As long as Facebook commands an army of eyeballs, its advertising business will be profitable.

Facebook has shown a willingness to diversify its social properties via synergetic integration. See: whatsapp, instagram.

Facebook will likely continue to diversify its business. For example, it could easily repurpose its excess hardware to enter the cloud computing market and compete with AWS/GoogleCloud. I would be surprised if this is not on the roadmap.

Yes. As we've seen, the only way to stop such things, is for the next disruptive company to come along and fuck their shit up.

Something will likely come along. My guess is that it will be spam-related, which will make the FB user-experience too difficult to use to get a quality experience. FB will try to appeal to government for protectionist legislation, but it won't happen fast enough.

Man I agree with you 100%. I have been trying to get this message across whenever these topics come up in discussions with people. We are risking the minds of people. Take this example. So many mobile games which essentially leverage the thrill of gambling to make their games addictive. Of course, this only increases micropayment revenues. How many people get hooked and waste hundreds of hours? How many kids!?

To me this is the same as cigarettes. Why do we regulate it? Because the average person is unlikely to know its harmful effects. What about these applications? Which are profitable by tapping into our desires and impulsive tendencies.

Its time we discuss this.

okay, then let's regulate donuts, let's regulate hacker news because I just can't stop myself from checking it everyday. let's regulate cereals and candy, etc. Oh and coffee too. oh and toothpaste as well, i can't help but brush my teeth two or even 3 times a day!

my sister has an addicition to shopping for clothes, so that's going to need regulation, as well as my friend's action to watching tv, etc.

They used to make radium toothpaste, heroin coffee. Legislated away.

Of course, the laws and regulations that have cropped up sometimes are in response to the addictiveness of particular vices. That's why we don't regulate shopping for example. It is kind of disingenuous to put "shopping for clothes" and nicotine addiction on the same footing.

> It is kind of disingenuous to put "shopping for clothes" and nicotine addiction on the same footing.

But putting Facebook and shopping for clothes on the same footing isn't. And the "Facebook causes depression" arguments are utterly unconvincing.

I agree with much of what you said. I'm not sure where I'd place Facebook in this case. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd make ruddct's argument for regulation based on the addictiveness of facebook more than I'd make the old anti-trust, money in politics and unchecked influence arguments.

Two questions for you:

Do you believe there should be a minimum age to buy tobacco?

Do you believe tobacco companies should have to publish information stating that tobacco is addictive and dangerous on their products?

Cigarette addicts can lead useful, productive lives before cancer or emphysema takes them out. Gamers on the other hand twitch away the best years of their natural lives, in some self-chosen dark sweatshop. Cigarettes then arguably the more benign of the two.

> To me this is the same as cigarettes. Why do we regulate it?

Taxes.

I feel like your conflating 2 arguments here. And I agree with 1 but whole heartedly disagree with the other.

Many Mobile games do abuse psychological elements. Agree they shouldn't abuse and should be stopped.

Waste hundreds of hours? I thoroughly enjoy hundreds of hours of game play so I don't see anything wrong with that.

Tapping into our desires? What's wrong with tickling our fancy?

Tapping into our impulsive tendencies. I feel like this is abusing human psychology again.

I'm not a gambler but I have felt the excitement and joy of it. I also love video games. I see nothing wrong with either of these things. But there is a clear distinction between the rewards of playing and the manipulation a company takes to enrich their bottom line.

Except it's not physically addictive. It's at most psychologically addictive and the withdrawal is not terribly painful. Just stop using it. Distract yourself with a good novel for a couple of days and it's done.

"Oh, I finished my book! I should probably take a picture of the cover and post it on Facebook!..."

That was not my experience. I had a goal of reading 52 books last year, one for each week of the year. I reached 40 but never felt the need to post any cover photos on FB. Your relationship with it changes quite fast once you start finding other things to do rather than hang out on Facebook

For me, it always end up in binge-reading the rest of the books in the series, or picking up a similar one. I guess I have poor impulse control.

Very interesting. Is it really controlled by one person? Or is facebook dependent on user's, well, using it?

If facebook went away tomorrow, would meatspace life materially change for any of its users?

A little peer pressure to affirm that Facebook is a giant waste of time, narcissistic and generally kind of silly is all it takes plant the seed to drop FB altogether. I have seen that work in meatspace.

The "what would happen if it went away tomorrow" question is not particularly useful to determine facebooks power, since it's not going to go away tomorrow.

I think the argument is about influence, not complete determination. Influence can be exercised independent from a services replacability.

> When your product is incredibly addictive to a large chunk of humanity, regulation should be considered

Yes. Let me compare FB to a phone company. When telephony was first invented, it quickly turned out to be addictive to a large chunk of humanity. Did we leave it unregulated? No, we didn't. In fact, there was regulation stating that telephone conversations may not be eavesdropped by telephone companies. Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network so people could call eachother, regardless of their operator.

But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.

>But somehow, we think that these types of regulation should not apply in this day and age. Strange.

Who is the "we"? I certainly think it should apply. I'd argue that the main difference in this day and age is that the "we" now includes corporate entities as persons who, thanks to Citizens United, now hold the lions share of political influence to affect whether regulations like this come to be.

I don't think FB itself is the structural threat to free society - treating corporate persons equally with flesh and blood people under the law is the structural threat. FB is just one of the more frightening corporate mega personages at the moment. Any of them would be equally so if they were as adept at people farming.

That's a great comparison. Facebook has taken on that kind of quality for me. It's become one more communication channel. Fantastic for keeping up with my friends who use it, but not intrusive. I'd say telephones are still addictive (along with email and other forms of communication as a whole), but more in the category of food being addictive than drugs. Yes, some people used to ring up $2000 phone bills, but the more common case was legitimate communication.

> Yes, some people used to ring up $2000 phone bills, but the more common case was legitimate communication.

Telephone tariffs in some parts of the world made long distance relationships very hard. Monopolists (often government controlled) took consumers to the cleaners every chance they got.

Only in the last two decades have prices finally been coming down.

So even those $2000 phone bills could easily be legitimate communication.

Today I'm still very conscious of the time I spend 'on the phone', especially when abroad. On mobile phones I've been hit more than once with a surprise bill because of living close to the border that was in that neighborhood (but the phone company was good about dropping those charges because even if I was on Dutch soil my phone kept switching to a German base station that was very strong where I lived).

One theoretical framework that justifies regulating telecoms, but not necessarily Facebook is that telecoms usually have special privileges granted to them by governments, up to and including monopoly status.

Building the hardware layer for a telecom network requires access to public land, and often private land where the landowners may not be cooperative. In exchange for the government enabling the telecom to build its network, the government gets to impose rules, sometimes even mandating competitor access to said network.

Facebook is different. The internet is already there, and is not owned by any single entity. Facebook does not need to compel cooperation from anyone to operate. It does not invite regulation in the same way a telecom does.

Now, there are plenty of people who believe that anything is fair game for the government to regulate if it's in the public interest, but I think that position is less universally accepted than that of trading special privileges for regulation.

This is actually a great comparison. FB has > 1 billion users, and it would be great if through gov't regulation those users could chat between whatsapp, snapchat, apple messenger, etc.

In the past this would be deemed "anti-competitive", now it's perfectly reasonable from an "innovation" standpoint.

What is stopping any of the 1 billion Facebook users from using whatsapp, snapchat, or any other messaging service?

It's the inconvenience of having multiple accounts and logins with multiple services. Sure it's not as inconvenient as having multiple phone line accounts so AT&T customers can talk to Bell Atlantic customers but at the end of the day, your data is providing revenue to these companies and the companies continue to silo themselves.

Wouldn't that be easily solved if all the other services offered a "log in with Facebook" feature and routed messages to other people who also logged in with Facebook?

I assume there's a gaping flaw in this idea that I can't quite see at the moment ;-)

Part of the gaping flaw is that Facebook will very quickly disable your API account so you can't offer login with Facebook, if you're competing with them. :)

Don't forget that Whatsapp is also owned by Facebook

I disagree with those saying that this is a good comparison. Telephone companies were not regulated because they were addictive, but rather because they are a public utility. Facebook possesses none of the characteristics of a public utility:

-Supplies an essential good or service

-Prohibitively expensive to replicate/enormous initial investment

-Inelastic demand

-Region-specific

-Few or zero consumer alternatives

> Other regulations allowed other companies to be active on the same network

well, this sort of thing is due (at least in part) to the physicality of infrastructure.

adding more telephone lines (and gas, electrical, etc) is welcomed for the first person to come through, but subsequent businesses/developers have a LOT more pushback if not outright blockage from local authorities.

It's safe to assume data miners won't be interested in designing a neutral ecosystem.

Consider the Open Mustard Seed project;

  Open Mustard Seed (OMS) is an open-source framework for 
  developing and deploying secure and trusted cloud-based 
  and mobile applications. OMS integrates a stack of 
  technologies including hardware-based trusted execution 
  environments, blockchain 2.0, machine learning, and secure 
  mobile and cloud based computing. This platform enables 
  the managed exchange of digital assets, cryptocurrency, 
  and personal information. Harnessing mobile and personal 
  data, OMS establishes a sovereign identity, pseudonyms, 
  and verified attributes and provides each user with a 
  3-factor biometrically-secured digital wallet. This gives 
  individuals control over their identities and their data   
  and supports the formation of decentralized, responsive, 
  and transparent digital ecosystems.

https://idcubed.org/open-platform/platform/

https://archive.org/details/FromBitcoinToBurningManBeyond

* Sadly, the developer site is down at the moment, but the design considers a standardized set of APIs to verify identities and allow personal ownership and hosting and licensing of your social media data.

Architecture of the OMS TCC: http://i.imgur.com/HV04itY.png

What exactly would be regulated?

Great question. Stratechery, as always, has an interesting read with some possibilities

https://stratechery.com/2017/manifestos-and-monopolies/

Thanks. I'll check this out. :)

All three of those points are hyperbolic to the extreme.

Unlike opioids facebook can not kill you if you stop using the service. And addiction rates are still being studied best I can tell. Certainly no leading papers claiming an epidemic [0]

Sources required and likely highly deterministic on how you develop a scale for such ranking

*FB is a publicly traded company with a board, it, by definition is not completely controlled by one person.

I personally am no fan of social media, don't really see the point in most contexts, but a call for government regulation into communication is the wrong step. IMO cults of ignorance, luddites, and anti-intellectualism are the threats to free society not social-networking.

[0]https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=addictiveness+of+social...

Facebook will never be regulated. The regulators love Facebook because they can do anything they want with Zuckerberg. He is their best friend. Hell, they want him to run for president. http://www.salon.com/2017/03/12/we-picked-the-wrong-billiona...

> Threat to free society? Jury's out.

Building a wall isn't going to fix climate change. Facebook is clearly a threat to a free society, but it may be the only chance we have.

And yet, you have something called: personal choice. People should be responsible for their own actions. Most of the concerns listed in the article, are things any other company or entity could do: "creating shadow profiles", 'crawling the web', etc.

If you don't want FB to have your pictures then don't go there. The parent article is over-reaching it's concern.

And it's not exactly accurate that it's controlled by 1 person. Ultimately FB can't do anything we don't want it to do. If FB does something we don't like, we're just one tab lick away from putting them out of business.

The last thing we need is more useless regulations that will stifle the already stiffled and slowing of innovation.

> If you don't want FB to have your pictures then don't go there.

That's all well and good until you get to US Customs and they demand to see your Facebook before they let you back in the country.

> If you don't want FB to have your pictures then don't go there.

There's a trivial error in your example: I can upload the photo of you to Facebook, and there's no mechanism you can use to take it down.

> If you don't want FB to have your pictures then don't go there.

Basically impossible if you have friends that use Facebook - which most people have unless you run only in very specific circles.

Facebook is a fad that will pass. Pretty soon people will be onto the next big digital media thing and forget all about their facebook accounts. But targeting and regulating a single enterprise just because it is too popular will set a dangerous precedent in law that will reverberate throughout the ages.

There have been other dominating monopolies before, (ma bell telecom monopoly comes to mind) which was much dangerous than a website.

Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.

Yes internet and social media addiction is bad and dangerous, but that is something that would exist with or without facebook and can be addressed in other ways besides regulating facbeook

I've been thinking about this, and personally, I thought Twitter was done years ago. To me, it was just a media that was designed specifically to give a few well-privileged famous celebrities a way to spew their empty garbage to the masses. It's very much a one-way "popular kids" channel.

I thought that most people would find it boring and useless and abandon it. But I think it's done the opposite. It's fed into the tabloid-news impulse of the lowbrow class, and only become more popular.

The genius of FB is that when sub-groups of people piss each other off, they can just unfriend, block, and ban, and they're in a nice comfy bubble.

The next thing that comes along will probably be both of these. With better AI-generated/sourced content.

I just started using Twitter this past year. What you get out of Twitter really depends on who you follow, which is not obvious at all to get a hook into and find good accounts you'd value hearing from. I luckily found a few good ones, and you find more by being exposed to content they retweet. It has been a great boon to me because I found a few cogent tweeters of the kind of politics and analysis I like, who I would not have been exposed to otherwise. I feel like it has expanded my political awareness and given me a better informed commentary than I'd find elsewhere. Not just empty heads there. You also get some minor amount of conversational interaction with them and others, and real time commentary on unfolding current events, and some of the jokes that get retweeted are funny. It's easier to see the value of Twitter on the inside than from the outside and its gimmick of short messages.

A lot of content to shift through, so following too many is not so good, and no real way way to sort them into themed content or more favoured tweeters, is my issue.

I don't think facebook is a fad.

It's the default communication mechanism for many people.

Telephones stink and we still use them because they are a standard.

It's the ubiquity of physically robust infrastructure that allows for telephones to persist, not some "standard".

> I don't think myspace is a fad. > It's the default communication mechanism for many people.

This is just as relevant.

No, not at all.

Facebook is a de-facto standard of communication. They have your info, you friends info - and you need FB to find and share with others.

The technology medium is completely irrelevant.

It's like saying 'hospitals are not important for saving lies, what matters the most are 'roads' because that's how sick people get around'.

My Space was never a communication mechanism, it was almost purely social, moreover, it didn't have broad appeal. My mother and grandmother never used MySpace - but they use Facebook.

Facebook has cross generational and cross cultural appeal, and has a 'global critical mass' making it the default platform for a lot of human communication.

I don't like Facebook at all, but they are here to stay for a while, until something else replaces it.

> I don't like Facebook at all, but they are here to stay for a while, until something else replaces it.

Just like MySpace. At the time, MySpace was the defacto standard of communication for most young people of a minimum socioeconomit status. You're missing the point by ignoring the history/reality.

Telephones still exist because the infrastructure is difficult (expensive, time consuming, hard to maintain) to replicate in a robust fashion. Wireless has come a long way, but it's still using the hardline protocols because we still have hardlines. Usually where financial incentives to switch are different.

> Facebook is a fad that will pass.

Facebook is about talking (and texting, and instagraming) to your friends (and family, and acquaintances, and people you can't quite remember). That's not a fad, that's a general human desire.

Facebook the company might fail in the market and be replaced by someone better, just as they did to their early competitors. The desire for this kind of communication is universal though (and Facebook surely did much less to invent the idea than Graham Bell!). It's not going away.

> Facebook is a fad that will pass. Pretty soon people will be onto the next big digital media thing and forget all about their facebook accounts.

I used to think Facebook would become a passing fad as well, but we've been saying this for a while and nothing has changed other than Facebook growing larger in size.

> Also facebook isn'really a media company. Yes they have some news stories, but that's not what people really go to facebook for, people go there to keep updated on their friends, which doesn't seem like such a threat.

The Facebook brand is tenacious and it's pivoting into other things. Take for example the recent deal to stream live MLS games [1] or news outlets leveraging Facebook Live for supplementary content. Let's also not forget that, sadly, Facebook is a primary source of news and information for many people. I think the days of Facebook being only about status/friend updates are over.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/10/facebook-scores-a-deal-to-...

> Also facebook isn't really a media company

tell that to the millions of people who get most of their news via facebook. Zuckerburg also disagrees (https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/21/fbonc/)

It's addictive if you want/need to be social. My wife does, not me. I'm not a very social guy honestly, I have a few friends in my inner circle who I text/gchat/fb messenger with but I don't use the facebook app or the web interface.

Since I deactivated my acct in Dec last year to focus on bschool apps, I've accomplished so much, and I say that not to brag, but to illustrate that it was a bit of a timesuck for me and I've been able to do a lot more since I quit.

On one hand, you compare Facebook to opioid drugs in terms of addictive potential.

On the other hand, you suggest "regulation" in response.

But, if history and the nature of the state are our guides we must conclude that state intervention is unlikely to produce healthy outcomes, since the state has been unable to craft any "regulation" in the face of a century-long opiate(-iod) epidemic other than a prohibition environment, which has been disastrous for public health and dynastically enriching for drug cartels.

We are agreed that the government's response to opioids has been both awful, from a humanitarian perspective, and ineffective, from an engineering perspective.

But regulation must not be viewed as a monolith. Especially in the realm of communication tools, where many good, pro-consumer pro-competition regulations exist. e.g. number portability for mobile providers, common carrier rules, etc)

(Disclaimer: Obviously not all comm. regulations are good, cough cough cable companies in America. But clearly some regulation of these entities is needed, so let's fix the regs rather than trashing them.)

It depends on how you view the effect of time.

My sense is that, with time as the X-axis and need for the state as the Y-axis, we're experiencing a downward slope.

I find it plausible (in truth I find it inevitable) that the state will crumble and that society will be better for it, especially in terms of corporate domination of everyday needs, which I believe that state empowers rather than "regulates."

I don't think the opioid comparison is valid. My litmus test would be: would someone resort to prostitution to get on Facebook for a few minutes?

It'll be an interesting day indeed when the people living in my alley are moaning for a little bit of Facebook.

That's fair criticism. My intent was to give an example of a hugely addictive product that shaped the course of history. Facebook is, obviously, not physically addictive like an opioid.

But it is addictive. Dopamine-hit addictive (thanks, likes and little red notification dots!). In what appears to be a very universally appealing way.

> Threat to free society? Jury's out. But at this point, it certainly seems worth regulating.

Regulation is the threat to free society.

Ideologues are the real threat to free society.

Nonsense pseudo-intellectual one-liners are fun!

I'd be tempted to agree, but I will not trust the current congress or president to do the regulating.

* Facebook is not "unregulated" - the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Trade Commission both regulate it. The latter has taken multiple interventions, and will probably continue to do so in the future.

* Facebook is not physically addictive - there's a huge difference between addictions like gambling and drug addictions.

* Facebook is not the most important media company in the world - Facebook does not produce news, only disseminate it.

* Facebook is not controlled by one person - it is a publicly traded company.

* The SEC isn't going to regulate content, only financials. FTC fought facebook over privacy settings

* Experts are beginning to disagree with this http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

* Facebook workers recently admitted to filtering content they didn't agree with (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/09/fo...)

* Zuckerburg controls facebook: http://fortune.com/2016/04/27/zuckerberg-facebook-control/

It's not Facebook, it's the fact that we're all too happily Amusing Ourselves to Death: http://a.co/frMmE2s

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”

> It's not Facebook, it's the fact that we're all too happily Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Sounds like the audience of depressed pedants on this website will save us, then.

This sounded pedant

Exactly, Facebook is not a cause to be dealt with: it is an effect of those who are willing to use it. Very few of them can be swayed by articles such as this one. They simply have NO INTEREST in the possible consequences. This interest, or a desire to live by a higher standard, can only come from WITHIN. Until this changes there will always be Facebooks waiting to take advantage of them.

The events of the last couple of years caused me to evaluate the psychological toll that me self-induced exposure to media, of all forms, was taking. I came to the conclusion that with social media, mankind was participating in the largest social experiment of all time and just hoping that things turned out well. I decided the results, so far, have not been promising and I no longer wanted to participate. I deleted my FB and canceled cable. Now I chose what I'm exposed to. I advise more people to do the same.

Unfortunately, HN is addictive too.

HN does have a noprocrast timeout available, although it's almost undocumented.

Whoa. Had never heard of that.

Check [0] if you, like me, hadn't.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Usefull

I'm ahead of you by 6 years. ;)

8 years here. :)

Funny Story. I had to create a new FB account recently so I can give them money(advertise) but I didn't want people to friend me. So, I put a short version of my name. But somehow they figured out that I didn't give the correct name and suspended the account. So much for trying to give them money. :)

> I had to create a new FB account recently so I can give them money(advertise)

Can you really not place advertisements on Facebook without a 'social Facebook account' (I accept you obviously need some kind of 'account' for billing, monitoring purposes, etc.) linked to your real name?

"DON'T SHARE, COPY AND PASTE"

“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”

― Terence McKenna

it's stereotypical counterculture talk, but the dichotomy of creating vs consuming really sticks with me

The threat is that Facebook has become too big to fail. A major leak of private data and messages of its users would be devastating to society given the scale.

What happens if/when Facebook fails as a company? What happens to the data then? It gets sold off. That's a scary prospect.

Facebook is in the fickle game of Internet advertising. When the noise overcomes the signal in what Facebook shows, when the content of the users' connections gets drowned out to advertising, people will leave in droves. When advertisers fail to see the return on their investment, the money will dry up.

What data can facebook possible have that would "devastating" in a leak scenario? Facebook has only what users have put on the site to share, and all data present is at least semipublic. There are no addresses, no bank accounts, no SSNs. The valuable part of facebook is already freely available: your list of "liked" pages and your social graph.

It's very reductive to claim that only addresses, bank account [numbers], and SSNs could be dangerous if leaked.

What about people who discuss private matters in chat? (e.g. sexuality, medical history, drug use, etc.) Yes, we know that's a bad idea, but most people aren't HN readers.

What about state actors using Facebook's metadata alone to quash democratic movements before they get off the ground?[1] To advertisers, most of the social graph is available only in a semi-abstracted form (e.g. target X, Y, and Z qualities and degrees of connection). A leak or sale could make that information available directly.

What about criminals using a public leak of location data and some predictive algorithms to strategically rob homes? (and maybe also using patterns of likes and connections to predict whose home is worth burgling?)

Really, to say that the valuable part of Facebook is already freely available brings to mind the words "limited imagination." Facebook keeps the valuable part to itself and meters even limited access to it. And there is extensive danger with the possibility of a leak or sale of the raw data.

[1]: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...

That's what I'm saying... Actually, it reminds me of when Wikileaks first came out, and I'd been reading the book of Revelations (as literature, it's an epic poem). There is this part where there is a scroll with 7 seals. An angel asks "who is worthy to break these seals?" People are weeping about it.

What kind of society can handle a full disclosure of information on this magnitude, now or even in the future, looking back? Imagine living 40 years from now, and your parent's full social media records have just been leaked in a mass dump of some data collection company. Could you handle that?

Okay and without appealing to apocalyptic literature, just think about the potentially devastating consequences of mass numbers of people getting access to their enemies' private data all at once. Good for you if you survive that kind of dump personally, but what about your community, your family?

But back to the metaphysical level, shit's about to get real wild if scientific knowledge keeps growing like it has been, especially as "ai" comes more able to translate and interpret these masses of digital data... Plus the vast stores of biological information waiting to be tapped.

Really, a history of likes, a corpus of chat messages, a corpus of public status, and some corpus of potential location data/ usage data depending on the devices used; that's what you liken to an apocalyptic event? Your family, your community, everyone will be just fine. Potentially some population already living in oppressive situations will be impacted (your religious family learns you're gay, etc) but the vast majority will just stop using Facebook and move to the next social media site. What kind of data do you imagine people storing on facebook (remember nothing is there you, the user, hasn't explicitly decided to share with someone aside from whatever they track internally interms of usage and location).

By default a person's friends list is visible from their public profile so if you want to go put together a graph you're welcome to.

First off, yes, I also think people will make it through this and be better in the long run. But I think this stuff is inevitably going to be a major source of heat, and it's going to take some processing. There is a lot of 'potential energy' stored up in private information (I'm not just talking about Facebook). People keep secrets, and the amount being held behind cryptographic algorithms is only growing by the year.

I'm mostly talking about private messages, browsing history, stuff that people would prefer not to be known widely because of pervasive judgements and stigmas in our society.

"What kind of data do you imagine people storing on facebook..." Nude photos and videos, secrets, accusations, candid personal details, private plans, irrational fears, fantasies, love notes to people who aren't their spouses, etc.

The human web is thickly interwoven. You say "Potentially some population already living in oppressive situations will be impacted". Well, their experiences would not be trivial, and your experience is not disconnected from "those people" either for that matter. I'd imagine they are your friends, your neighbors, your community too. People around us are having secretive relationships ("affairs"), while others hide domestic or sexual abuse. People have skeletons in the digital server closets, things they'd rather forget about and move past, but which are lingering on redundant backups somewhere.

And my larger point is not so much about Facebook messages, but about biological data... http://www.ctpost.com/local/article/Yale-study-Brain-scans-m...

Uh, it's widely known that fb buys tons of data from many 3rd party brokers. It's not hard for them to get whatever they need, including ssn's I'm sure. And they definitely do have addresses from 3rd parties.

Their published data partners: https://www.facebook.com/help/494750870625830

>" Facebook has only what users have put on the site to share, and all data present is at least semipublic. There are no addresses, no bank accounts, no SSNs."

No FB buys third party/offline data about its users, I don't we know what they have:

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2016/12/30/facebook-...

> A major leak of private data and messages of its users

What's to say this isn't already happening in real-time? You don't even need to tap the trunk lines (to use a Matrix reference), you simply need to have enough "fakebook" contacts and some Persona Management Software [1].

[1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED:-Th...

If a major leak will be that devastating to society, we need a major leak even more urgently, so that the illusion of privacy is dispelled and people can properly calibrate to the costs and/or risks of their behavior. Otherwise we only continue to raise the stakes.

I really don't think the best deterrent to getting into a fatal car accident is to get into a fatal car accident. Also, I don't wish to experience losing a limb but surviving a car accident in order to prime myself to avoid a fatal accident.

Any kind of non-democratic for-profit organization is going to have incentives that don't align with "free society".

When one of those organizations runs the top centralized content and communications silo, use it to censor, stalk its users and promote its or its sponsors interests, it becomes a threat.

Of course also democratic non-profit organizations wildly disalign with what one might call a "free society".

Those adjectives mean little (as does "free society") without a definition.

Non-democratic organizations inherently don't represent all parties and interests participating within it. If they did, they would be democratic organizations. A non-democratic organization will be influenced by, and will bend to the interests of, the few.

A for-profit organization inherently has incentives that are perverse. Historically, the profit motive has incentivized things that run contrary to the well-being, and rights enjoyed by, society. It is profitable to censor, erode privacy, erode labor protections and rights, use psychological manipulation to influence the behavior of others and push negative externalities onto others.

Yes, democratic non-profit organizations can misalign with a "free society". However, a non-democratic for-profit organization is fundamentally incompatible with the ideals expressed in the article.

> Those adjectives mean little (as does "free society") without a definition.

Merriam-Webster works for most when colloquial definitions bottom out or are hard to recall.

(Disclosure: I have accepted a job offer at Facebook, but not yet started)

Does Facebook really have a unique amount of data? Google also knows a lot about people through billions of searches a day. Apple can learn a lot through people's iDevices, and Google (again) or Samsung can do the same with Android. So can any cellular service provider, or anyone running coax or fiber into your home. The government can tap any or all of those. At least Facebook doesn't have an army, or paramilitaries like DHS or just about any sheriff's department I've ever encountered.

I'm not saying the author's concerns are invalid. I've had occasion to think about these exact issues a lot, and I'm sure many of my soon-to-be colleagues have too. The way I see it, Facebook and other social media occupy much the same position as phone companies used to, both in terms of how they facilitate interaction and in their privileged financial/infrastructural positions they occupy. There's good in that (e.g. ability to pursue the kinds of speculative projects that Bell Labs was famous for). There are also dangers, no question.

The thing is, if it wasn't Facebook it would be someone else. There's no shortage of others ready to step in if Facebook alone were targeted with laws and regulations. Instead of worrying about Facebook specifically, we need to think about what a modern "common carrier" law should look like in the social-media age. Perhaps some kinds of regulations on use of information do make sense, but that dialog isn't likely to be very constructive so long as most of the people on one side seem to be free-market fundamentalists betraying their own principles by singling out one company among many.

Facebook has the advantage that its users connect themselves with their friends, colleagues, and relatives. The users also give Facebook nearly all data about themselves (full name, phone number, date of birth, mother, father, etc.). People organize their events and talk about everything related to their lives. Facebook also provides their newsfeed and can track what they click and, most importantly, like.

Unless you have a Gmail or a Google+ account Google has to guess. Google can guess pretty well but they still have to guess instead of just know. You search for something on Google and then go there. Facebook keeps you on its site and encourages you to comment on Facebook which then incentivizes others to stay on Facebook, too.

Facebook messenger is also unencrypted, and I'm not sure if their privacy policy grants permission to read the chats, but I know they definitely do insert Uber ads into messenger whenever a car or "ride" is mentioned.

> The thing is, if it wasn't Facebook it would be someone else.

You will make a good Facebook worker drone

Imagine if MySpace won the war

I'm not sure what you comment means but I found it funny none the less :)

Would you rather have a Facebook with people who actually think about these kind of issues, or a Facebook without such people? At least there are debates within Facebook about such things. I've heard - publicly, long before I had any thoughts of working there myself - that they can get quite fierce. Never hear of such things at Twitter or Google. Is it better that people there just don't seem to give a damn? I don't think so.

If people rule out or discourage internal regulation with nastiness like yours, all that's left is the external kind. I'm pretty sure that's against a lot of people's principles, but I guess those who failed the coding test are willing to sacrifice principles for revenge.

Look, here is a simple suggestion. Come back here in about 6 months after you join FB (settle down first). Since there is no realistic chance for FB to improve their practices within that timeframe, there will be one more complaint thread about some ethical practice or the other at that point. Give us a little inside peek into these supposed "fierce debates". Just participate and add something meaningful to the discussion by telling us the different positions people took in the debate and what the outcome was. We will even give you a handicap - you don't actually have to tell us who took which position. Since you seem to be so passionate about this, I don't think you are going to make up stuff.

If you actually manage to do this, then not only will people here appreciate you, but more importantly, I am sure you will be doing a heck of a lot of good for your soon to be employer's image.

>"Would you rather have a Facebook with people who actually think about these kind of issues, or a Facebook without such people?"

Do you really believe that the average worker bee's opinion at FB carries any weight?

Mark Zuxkerberg controls Facebook:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-28/mark-zuck...

> Does Facebook really have a unique amount of data? Google also knows a lot about people through billions of searches a day. Apple can learn a lot through people's iDevices, and Google (again) or Samsung can do the same with Android.

In amount it's hard to tell. Google and other big players of surveillance capitalism also collect what they can. But it does not really make it any better to have an oligopoly which has a similar huge amount of knowledge about a huge amount of the population.

> At least Facebook doesn't have an army, or paramilitaries like DHS or just about any sheriff's department I've ever encountered.

Maybe not until Zuckerberg is president of the USA ;). Also governments, esp. those who already run their own massive mass surveillance programs will use that privately collected data (at least in the long run if they do not do so already).

> The way I see it, Facebook and other social media occupy much the same position as phone companies used to, both in terms of how they facilitate interaction …

Not remotely. A far as I know they did not influence on a personal level with whom you interact, when that interaction takes place and surely not the topic of the interaction. Also Facebook today is a media company which does much more than providing infrastructure for communication of individuals.

> The thing is, if it wasn't Facebook it would be someone else.

You are aware that's probably the most lame excuse to do evil one can think of?

> You are aware that's probably the most lame excuse to do evil one can think of?

Nice assumption of doing evil there. I'm saying someone else would fill Facebook's role whether it's evil or not. Do you disagree? Do you not see the others waiting in the wings, from direct clones to Twitter and Google and Amazon? Do you deny that they lack mostly the ability to collect as much information, but have the same will? Brin and Page would be glad to step into Facebook's shoes, or Bezos, or Thiel. How is that better?

Again, whether it's evil or not, this kind of information gathering will continue and accelerate. Personifying it as Facebook or Zuckerberg just makes privacy a big game of Whack-a-Mole. Bills of attainder are both immoral and ineffectual. We need to address the what, not the who. The only lame excuse here is failing to work toward a viable long-term solution because it's easier (or more fun?) to demonize.

> I'm saying someone else would fill Facebook's role whether it's evil or not. Do you disagree?

History says you're right.

There were many similar sites before Facebook existed, including Friendster and Google's Orkut. You might also count MySpace.

There have been a few attempts to replace Facebook, the most obvious one being Google Plus.

Typically, due to power law effects, technologies end up with a dominant supplier: there's only one Amazon, one Google, one Wikipedia, etc.

Given that Google is already dominant in search, email, online video (YouTube) and mobile phones, there's a case for defending Facebook as the lesser evil...

>" At least Facebook doesn't have an army, or paramilitaries like DHS or just about any sheriff's department I've ever encountered."

No but they hand that data over to the surveillance state:

https://www.aclunc.org/blog/facebook-instagram-and-twitter-p...

>"The thing is, if it wasn't Facebook it would be someone else"

This is rather flimsy rationalization, see "The Futility of Illusion":

https://ethicsalarms.com/rule-book/unethical-rationalization...

I find it amusing that news media outlets are stoking fear and resentment over the government hacking technology to spy on us when the information it gathers is a mere shaving of what corporations like Alphabet and Facebook have access to on the back end.

How is it preferable that a handful of incredibly talented, well-funded, private companies know more about you than your mother or your best friend (or arguably yourself)? Why are people more frightened by a bureaucratic government agency led by Donald J. Trump than the world's leading researcher in artificial intelligence, who owns the index to the entire internet, and creates things like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7xvqQeoA8c? Why is Wikileaks working so hard to protect these companies?

> How is it preferable that a handful of incredibly talented, well-funded, private companies know more about you than your mother or your best friend (or arguably yourself)?

It's not preferable, but it's less worrying. It's less worrying because companies can't legally throw you in jail or take all your money or kill you.

And scary robotics promo videos aside, they aren't in command of the world's most powerful military and an enormous police force to boot.

If at any time they threaten you in a meaningful way, you can freely leave their services. If things get particularly bad -- like, worst case scenario -- you can even flee to a part of the world where they have less influence. Government does not provide you any of those options.

People are right to be more worried about government intrusion than private intrusion. (They are of course also wrong to be unworried about private intrusion.)

> Why are people more frightened by a bureaucratic government agency led by Donald J. Trump than the world's leading researcher in artificial intelligence

If it comes down to a forced choice, I'd much prefer Page or Brin over Trump. At least the former two are on IMO the correct side of existential issues -- nuclear arms, global warming, and so forth. (Of course, as indicated above, I'd prefer neither.)

It's less worrying because companies can't legally throw you in jail or take all your money or kill you.

But they do this all the time. Sometimes illegally, sometimes with full force of law.

The settlement of the Americas, through what might be considered a public-private partnership on the part of several nations (Spain, Portugal, England, France, Holland, Russia, largely), resulted in the genocide of a native population once numbering perhaps 40 - 50 millions. What this lacks in the intensity of nuclear annihilation, it greatly exceeds in magnitude.

The public-private partnership of Belgium in the Congo saw untold atrocities, including the unhanding of hundreds of thousands or millions of Congo natives. See Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness.

Or of England, the East India Company, its private government and army within India, and the Opium Wars against China -- chemical, biolical, and conventional war against two entire cultures.

Labour unionisation, a concept and principle defended by Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and other classical economists, say violent opposition by factory and mine owners particularly in the UK and United States. U.S. Steel, the West Virginia Mountain Wars, the Wobblies, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and more.

Industrial accidents have killed or destroyed many tens or hundreds of thousands: the Halifax, Galveston, Port Chicago, and West, Texas, explosions -- some entirely private, some public-private partnerships. Mining accidents claimed an average of greater than 2,000 lives/year for much of the first half of the 20th century, statistics tabulated by the US Department of Labour, and available online. That's on the order of 100,000 souls over the century, virtually all of their deaths preventable. The Union Carbide Bhopol disaster. Dam failures, including Johnstown, in the United States (this was the instigation of the Red Cross as a disaster releif organisation, and of significant concepts expanding liability law). For public-private parternships, the Vajont dam disaster, claiming 2500 lives. And showing that poor management, planning, engineering, and response aren't solely the remit of nominally capitalist societies, the Banqiao Dam disaster of 1975, in China, in which some 170,000 souls perished, on par with your nuclear bombing example, though it was but 25 thousands who died immediately from drowning, the others were lost due to starvation and disease in the following weeks -- as I said, exceedingly poor planning and response.

There's the US housing bubble leading up to the 2007-8 global financial crisis, and the robosigning and fraudulent documentation depriving people of their very homes.

For raw corporate aggression, I'd suggest the Johnson County War:

On April 5, 1892, 52 armed men rode a private, secret train north from Cheyenne. Just outside Casper, Wyo., they switched to horseback and continued north toward Buffalo, Wyo., the Johnson County seat. Their mission was to shoot or hang 70 men named on a list carried by Frank Canton, one of the leaders of this invading force.

I've written on this previously: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/xwjjk1bh7yki6ja4lrg7ka

There is the insidious poisoning of millions through lead, asbestos, tobacco, mercury, and dioxins, both generally and across specific sites, all whilst paid corporate shills actively and deliberately sowed confusion on the matter, knowing full well that their position was false. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway have covered much of this history excellently in Merchants of Doubt.

And there's the little matter of carbon dioxide emissions and their effects on global tempeatures and ocean chemistry, known since the 1880s, and recognised as a major threat since the 1950s, but still actively denied by numerous interests more concerned over their trillions of dollars of accumulated wealth and power than over the fate of the planet they live on and the souls they share it with.

* > still actively denied by numerous interests more concerned over their trillions of dollars of accumulated wealth and power than over the fate of the planet they live on and the souls they share it with.*(

Interests that are now controlling the US government....

And one of the more plausible conspiracy stories I've heard for who's benefitting from the whole situation. Need to track down that article...

Not sure where the conspiracy is.

However, Trump says climate change is a Chinese hoax and bullshit. Trump's advisor Myron Ebell says the environmental movement is "the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world". Trump's head of the Environmental Protection Agency is Scott Pruitt, who believes the EPA shouldn't even exist.

Trump's Secretary of State is Rex Tillerson, former boss of Exxon. Exxon is being investigated for spending decades ignoring its own scientists’ research, which tied fossil fuels to climate change. It also has a $500 billion oil deal with Putin, for which Trump will have to remove sanctions.

Trump also says he's going to bring back "beautiful clean coal".

So, under Trump, there's a green light to destroy the US environment and the whole planet for the pursuit of profit.

Trump is using the presidency as a marketing platform to promote himself, his properties (including Trump Tower and Mar a lago), his daughter and in-laws. The GOP is using it to give very rich people $600bn in tax cuts while ensuring that (if its AHCA goes through), tens of thousands of ordinary Americans die because of a lack of health insurance.

What's going on in broad daylight is bad enough. The behind-the-scenes corruption is probably worse.

As I said, it was a specific article I had in mind. Turns out it's Charlie Stross (@cstross):

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2017/02/some-not...

[I]if you have heavily invested in fossil fuels, time is running out to realize a return on your investment. Buying a US administration tailored to maximize ROI while fighting a rear-guard action against action on climate change and roll-out of a new, rival energy infrastructure is therefore rational (in business terms).

Russia and the Putin angle is best understood as part of this; oil and gas exports accounted for 68% of Russia's export revenues in 2013. The possibility that Trump is personally heavily invested in Rosneft via shell proxies while being at loggerheads with Merkel might be an inversion of the normal state of affairs in international relations for the past 70 years but is entirely consistent with the big money picture: Germany is trying to push (heavily) for renewable power....

This, quite frankly, makes as much sense to me as anything else. If not considerably more.

An: sometimes a conspiracy really is a conspiracy, and they really are out to get you.

Interesting piece. The move to exploit dirty energy while destroying the environment is clearly the centrepiece of Trumpism, as I said above. Whether Bannon is actually planning some sort of "final solution" is open to question.

The real problem is that the world burns whether there's a conspiracy or not....

There's a tendency toward this among all living things, and worse cases in the past: Great Oxygenation Event and Snowball Earth being an extreme case. William R Catton, Jr., made the point, in Overshoot, that assigning blame isn't particularly useful. It's the dynamics which drive the thing.

At the same time, humans can, and do, know better. Yet we're headed down that same path. And there definitely appear to be those capitalising on the short-term view.

To me, at least, there's a difference between information I willingly, if unwittingly share on a social network vs having the government unwittingly and unwillingly collect information indiscriminately. Furthermore, Facebook, Google, et al do not have SWAT teams that can be sent to smash open my door and flash bang a baby based on what they find.

I'm not saying I think it's good that private companies collect all of our data (and personally the info a CC company has creeps me out far more than FB or Google), but I can choose to stop using their service and greatly minimize the amount of data they receive. There's very few caves in the world where you can hide from the US Government.

Yes, as is Zuckerberg.

He wants to run for president. That's why he's found religion, why he's touring the country, why he changed some rules so he can control Facebook while holding office. There's been a creation myth about Zuckerberg for years. Even Jobs didn't get a Hollywood movie about him until he was dead.

Zuckerberg is dangerous because he's so damn vanilla. Outside of his contemptuous statements about his users being "dumb fucks" when he was a kid, everything he does is a PR move. Having a child? Better make a social statement out of it. Headed to Nigeria? Better have someone take pictures.

If you listen to Zuck obviously he's intelligent but he'll never say anything controversial or especially enlightening. He's had the world in his hands since he was 21 (or younger), never been challenged. What does that do to one's ego? Some of us talk too much and we've never ever done anything. What happens when you've been a billionaire since you were 25 or are worth $50 billion at 30?

He's far more dangerous than Trump ever was. He's normalized invasions of privacy, has more information on people than anyone in the world save maybe some government agencies and Facebook has more clout than many countries.

It'd be nice if Facebook was replaced by something better, but I hope people will stand up against what they are doing. It's unethical. If you ever combine that mindset with government, it's over. Maybe not by Zuckerberg but by the next Trump, which is the great irony in Zuckerberg and Facebook's social positions.

Yes, I agree.

Zucks rants about his dream for society scare the hell outta me. It's seriously 1984 type shit... the only way to create "safe" and "friendly" global communities is with bulletproof censorship. Some level of civil disobedience and public disagreement is needed for a properly functioning society. Look up China and "harmonious society" if you don't buy it.

I wish Sergey or Larry from the Goog had such aspirations. At least from what I've read their intentions are pretty benign despite running such a huge monopoly.

I agree, but... I wonder if we're at peak-Facebook yet? All good things must come to an end. Maybe it will be Snapchat, or more likely a slow decline. I remember when Microsoft was at its peak, and seemed invincible. Facebook seems that way in social right now.

I hope Zuck pulls a Gates and goes full-time philanthropic, but he might be too young for that.

Mark Zuckerberg is probably less vanilla than Trump, and better at hiding it.

It'll be interesting to see if he tries.

My impression is that he has the charisma of a loaf of bread and won't do real well in politics.

Some people certainly seem to like Trump, but I can't say I see the charisma myself. Some pretty toxic, hideous, unpleasant people have been elected to very high positions.

Trump is extremely charismatic.

Look at the pundit reaction to his speech a couple weeks ago, or at how well people respond to his extemporaneous word salad.

You make lots of assumptions here. I'm not saying they're wrong, but don't assert these otherwise.

Some people just want to watch the world learn.

I agree that they are just assumptions.

Some people just want to watch the world learn.

That's a good line. I'll have to borrow it from you.

Deleted FB a few years ago, I haven't missed it for a second. I thought we reached peak FB about a year ago and was obviously wrong. I honestly don't understand why people can't communicate directly with each other given the insane amount of tools available and how cheap data, domains and services have become. There is absolutely an "us vs. them" going on between those who are on FB and those who have opted out. I'd love to get more people to opt out and this article is one of the better arguments out there. For those who want to try a true block of FB and all its works, try this... https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...

I too am not a user of Facebook, but I think for a different reason. It's interesting that you cited an "insane amount of tools available" as being an alternative to Facebook. Isn't Facebook one of those tools?

I really wish this weren't being reframed as an "opt out" discussion. The article is expressing valid concerns about the collective impact of FB. Opting out, even in large numbers, won't change the fact that the company has tremendous, unchecked influence on our lives.

I really believe if people left FB in significantly large numbers to something else with better practices, FB would be compelled to change. Even if they didn't change, at least you would not be a part of their bad privacy practices/manipulation/etc.

Yes and "tech savvy" people should educate their friends when possible.

Most of my friends, for instance, ignore that FB knows most of their web chronology through the omnipresent Like button.

And we must fight the "I-have-nothing-to-hide" attitude.

For me, the scariest bit is that I tell people about this (techies and non-techies alike) and they are made aware of the consequences of their every move being tracked and they still don't care. At all.

We're either collectively retarded and it will take very little to rule us all, or venturing toward a society where privacy simply does not exist but it's... fine? Can society adapt to this and someone having a sextape or their browser history leaked be no big deal to anyone?

I don't know which is scarier.

One problem is that most people decide very early on in their life that they will keep their heads down and never question the violent totalitarian authority that controls them, and thus see no reason why the government would use this data against them.

But then you try the insurance / health care angle and they still just don't care. We've been raised this way. Raised to be like scared children who do not know how to look towards the future or how to accurately assess any complex situation not immediately under their area of expertise

I deleted Facebook from my phone a while ago, and don't miss it. I've been surprised how much I don't miss it, honestly - I get less notifications and haven't been tempted to reinstall it once.

The website is another matter. I felt reluctant to cut the cord entirely. At least visiting the website feels more deliberate than reacting to all the phone notifications.

But shortly after the election, I did log out, and kept myself logged out for a while. My fingers would still take me to the page, but the login screen would remind me, and I'd close the tab.

I finally logged back in a couple of weeks ago.

I do feel like I've noticed a couple of subtle differences. I think the political discussions are a lot less useful than I used to think. I especially think my friends posting political awareness posts are less useful than I used to think. No sense preaching to the choir unless it's actual surprising information. I think the months off started to make me feel less like a Democrat and more independent (although far from Trumpy-Republican.) I'm more free-speech and less boycotty. I'm less tempted to unfriend people that voted differently than I did.

I generally believe that the most ridiculous opinions I see in comment threads on facebook are... well, I have no way of knowing whether those comments are by real people or by bots. So I feel less like engaging with them.

Facebook is more enjoyable when you use it to connect with your friends - sharing photos, good personal news, etc. Current events, not so much.

I highly recommend the News Feed Eradicator plugin. It substitutes the News Feed with a quote of the day. That way you can keep up to date with PMs/Events without getting distracted by other peoples lives.

The biggest problem with Facebook is that it's a walled in garden. Whatever you write there isn't accessible outside the web. It's not even searchable inside FB itself. I'm sure this is done on purpose, if people knew that the crap they write could be searchable they'd be much more reluctant to express themselves.

Black box warnings exist in the drug industry because its understood people do not understand complex risks and they don't read the fine print. Facebook IS a threat only because many of its users are sharing information ignorant of the risks.

HIPAA exists in healthcare because its understood data can be misused to the great detriment of patients. Facebook IS a threat only because its users have no recourse over the misuse of their information.

Products liability laws exist for manufactured goods because raising the costs of failure to protect your customers results in safer products, and because it decreases government's obligation to support injured consumers. Facebook IS a threat only because there is no cost associated with injuring users, and little awareness of how Facebook is injurious.

Its a systemic issue beyond Facebook. Legislative reform is required.

IMO this is a side product of the "software must be free" mentality.

Frankly, software should not be free. When you let people give you things for free, you basically let them control you and take away your freedom.

>When you let people give you things for free, you basically let them control you and take away your freedom.

How is this different from proprietary software? Where you have no idea what's going on under the hood?

Granted, "giving in order to get" is a common and effective social engineering tactic.

> How is this different from proprietary software?

Most free software is proprietary software! Big chunks of Facebook's code base is proprietary, and the data they collect is extremely proprietary. Ditto for google.

By "the expectation that software should be free", parent meant the expectation that you don't pay money for access to a hosted copy.

I believe the OP was talking about cost, not source code.

I'd wager that the FSF disagrees with your statement.

You don't say.

Of course the Free Software Foundation is going to disagree with that statement.

The "Free" refers to freedom, not price. Facebook is not freedom-respecting software as defined by the FSF.

>IMO this is a side product of the "software must be free" mentality.

"Software must be free" usually means free and in speech not free as in beer.

Free as in beer

Thanks for the correction.

RMS definition of free still leads to free as in beer because it requires that the user has the freedom to distribute the sides for free (as in beer).

But Facebook is not "free as in speech" but is "free as in beer". That's why it is a "Structural Threat."

This is absolutely not true. There's so much wrong with that argument and how it applies to Facebook it's hard for me to provide decent criticism, but I'll try anyway.

Facebook is not provided 'for free'. Nothing is. Facebook is provided to users in exchange for their personal and social data. Facebook is also not really 'a thing'- it's much more complicated than that. The worst part of your argument is that this criticism of free software also holds true for proprietary software- there are plenty of nonfree services which do the same thing. More generally, 'free' software as you define and apply it is not a useful categorization of software to make. What about freemium services? Are those free or do you pay for those? Whether or not you pay in currency for a software license is not really meaningful in the discussion of user freedom. I recommend you actually do some reading on the topic of software freedom and Facebook before you go spouting completely unfounded aphorisms online again.

So better pay for the privilege? There's no reason a paid social network service (aside from the fact that no one would ever use it) wouldn't collect the same information. The issue is that Facebook is not free (as in libre) so users don't have personal control of their information.

In fact, paid services such as AOL and Oracle have EVEN WORSE track records when it comes to lock in, privacy, and abuse of users.

Facebook is not software, it is a service.

Service as a Software Substitute, as RMS would put it.

RMS is fond of making up "cute" names for things. It lets people identify themselves as part of the tribe.

OP is complaining about free services (like Facebook) but said free software (like PHP) so the whole comment is a non-starter. I'm not sure why nobody else pointed that out... Facebook has huge operating expenses.

"Facebook understands the emotions expressed in what you type as statuses, and in messages via Messenger or WhatsApp."

Is this correct? There was a very involved discussion about WhatsApp's encryption that I thought indicated they don't, in fact, have access to WhatsApp messages.

It is impossible for FB to understand that.

Unless Facebook has some sentiment analysis tech that's far better than academia's (which isn't that unlikely), "understanding the emotions" of statuses is still a long way off.

they could bake a pre-trained CNN into the messenger pretty easily and run it locally... so plausible

Author here - you're right. I've made an edit accordingly. Thanks!

Facebook likely has a watson-like technology that can answer a lot of interesting questions about a user, but "understanding emotions"... that's still a ways off. Maybe a long long way off. But it's wrong not to be very, very concerned.

Suffice it to say: (Paraphrasing Dijkstra) Whether Facebook understands human emotions from text is as relevant a question as whether a submarine can swim. I think they can get a helluva lot out of what you're typing and what you're liking. That should be enough to worry about.

Wasn't there a case of FB doing some kind or research where they tried to influence the mood of the users by manipulating what content they see?

"Understanding" emotion is definitely a biological trait that computers are unlikely (maybe 2200) to ever be capable of replicating.

But lexical content is a very well understood field, and emotion recognition is a huge industry for advertising. Even if facebook doesn't know that "I like it when stan fingers my butthole" was just a joke between buddies... there is tone inferred from the words and grammar involved. Positive vs. Negative is relatively straightforward, and when associated with a topic... can lead to lots of "opinion" data.

With the average American now spending 40 minutes on Facebook per day [0], it may be worth checking out this TedX talk: Distracted? Let's make technology that helps us spend our time well | Tristan Harris [1] (he speaks of a good design example at 4:00 in). It's astounding that this average means that roughly an entire day is wasted each month essentially scrolling through a newsfeed.

[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-monthly-average-time... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT5rRh9AZf4

Has time spent watching TV gone down by more than 40 minutes?

"Wasting" time is not very new...

Exactly, I'm confused by all these statistics of 'x minutes of facebook per day'. We can't measure other unproductive activities that ALL humans indulge in, it's not as if society will suddenly start producing PhDs by the dozen if we ban Facebook.

I have recently created an account, having resisted up until now with the excuse that my son, then a teenager, said that it was "creepy" when persons of my generation were on Facebook. He informs me, however, that persons his age are leaving Facebook in favor of SnapChat and Instagram.

(I have so far spent all my Facebook time looking into what would be required to use its OAuth functions.)

People's disregard for privacy and political mobilization[0] are a threat to Free Society. Facebook is just a symptom.

[0] I can't blame FB for anything regarding the latter. Quite the opposite.

True. People still choose to join FB and give their data/privacy away. I don't know what it would take for a rebellion or if there will ever be an open decentralized platform to replace it.

Yes. I think that what must happen is a revolution of the value of one's private information. An open platform that made certain that information was only shared with particular "trusted nodes" and also was flushed from storage after a certain time would be cool. Like an information vault where your info was held, and you could selectively choose what fb could see and what must be deleted and re-cached in x many hours or days.

I don't think Zuckerberg is malicious, nor are people working at or in control of facebook. However, that doesn't exclude the whole system from being bad for society, just like the constituents of of viruses or cancers are just benevolent atoms and electrons.

Regardless of whether they are malicious, their actions are causing significant societal harm. Zuckerberg retains almost complete control of the company and this is occurring under his guidance. He might not be malicious, but he is certainly at fault, as are the ridiculous and shameful engineers picking up paychecks to create a such an authoritarian product.

If they're not malicious, then they're criminally negligent.

All mega corps area a threat to freedom, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple. Google is the one that is really fucking scary, they've started deciding which parts of the network are tasteful and which are not, regardless of your feelings on anything that should be highly disturbing to everyone.

Yes, it is, and I'll tell you why:

Freedom and freedom for a society, in a modern information age, relies on the individuals that make up that society having control of that information. Any instance where they cede that control en masse is a structural threat to that freedom. The reasons are mostly irrelevant, because we can argue that people know what they are doing, or that they were manipulated into that position, but it doesn't matter, the fact is that they are giving up their informational control to a third party who then owns it.

People need to start taking control of their information, and hackers like us need to stop perpetuating the mantra that privacy is dead and it's too late. I could very easily imagine infrastructures setup to protect peoples control of their own information, but it tend to not be the most business friendly, or government friendly.

Since when did hackers become so beholden to business interests? Lopht/codc warned everyone, but nobody listened, and then all the old schoolers got older and started chasing money, I mean mudge was working at darpa (it seems he is trying to do good things, but from inside the system). It's time to find that counter-business, pro-freedom resistence strain of hacking again and make it bigger.

Also, there is a reason in-q-tel, the cia's venture capitol arm, invested in facebook and google at the first stages...

Decentralized gplv3 software is the place to start. I'm not hopeles though, I think people vastly underestimate the weakness of systems like reddit, facebook, etc. The long arc of the universe tends towards justice, and they will collapse under their own dystopias.

Freedom is the real sustainable ecosystem. Individual freedom. Under individual freedom, the intellectual freedom to come up with novel solutions and apply them in novel ways is exponentially more likely than under some 1984 surveillance security engine. Freedom is therefore the strongest weapon in the fight against evil and in the fight for survival.

> The long arc of the universe tends towards justice ?

Is there any philosophical view point which thinks so? But according to natural science doesn't universe tends to entropy (granted entropy doesn't translate directly to lack of justice but still..)?

> Decentralized gplv3 software is the place to start

What course do you recommend to promote GPL adoption to tip the balance towards it? .. should people refuse to release closed source software in corporations?

Personally I would love to live in utopia where all code is free, cooperation trumping competition ..

This picture reminds me of a scene in a sci-fi flick called "Cypher" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284978/). I wonder if some other parallels could be applied to FB...

Do you know what's a structural threat to free society? Regulating free enterprise like online communities where people voluntarily intermingle.

Facebook? How about the CIA/NSA/ABC intelligence organizations? We're not at war with a country, why do we need a spy agency (much less several)?

Roll personal and funding into the FBI (Note: this does not make me a fan of the FBI) so there is at least some public oversight.

Not that I want to defend any intelligence organisation but war is not a binary thing. Other countries might be harming your country even without you knowing it. Agencies try to prevent that from happening.

Who knows? They are certainly not going to tell. Secret services are rather secret about their services.

Indeed, who knows. But would it benefit the country if they released their ops reports?

Not an expert, but as secret stuff gets leaked it tends to create huge public discourse and leads to political action.

Knowledge about their actions does seem to have an effect on the country. Secret service staff would probably not necessarily evaluate it as a good effect though.

> Knowledge about their actions does seem to have an effect on the country.

Can you give me an example?

Take the latest Wikileaks Vault thing for instance. That was a leak that created public discourse, what was the effect? I still don't trust my iPhone and pretty much most of the software I use, were any 3 letter agency looking to get me.

While I don't necessarily disagree with the spirit of your point, Wikipedia gives three current wars the U.S. is involved in[0]: in Northwest Pakistan, in numerous locations against ISIL, and the war in Afghanistan. You might argue that most of our foes aren't states, and you'd be right, but the fact is still that we are at war and have been continuously for over a decade.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...

The truly unacceptable part of this for me is that congress has quietly, and passively relinquished one of its key powers, the ability to declare war. ever since korea we have had these anemic 'use of force resolutions' that are frankly not a check on executive power in the slightest. I am not a peacenik by any means, if anything I am a hawk, particularly about russia, but I detest living in a state of forever war, undeclared and un-debated. WE HAVE BOOTS ON THE GROUND IN SYRIA and no one cares or is even aware.

https://warisboring.com/the-united-states-of-forever-war-4bc...

I understand the 'threats' that we face are complex non-state actors..but I do not think the amount of blood and treasure we invest in going abroad to find foreign monsters to slay is worth it and there is never true congressional argument on this topic.

this is quite silly. the cia/nsa are about attacking and investigating foreign nationals(obviously followed in the breach sometimes- see SNOWDEN) ..the fbi is required to follow american law in regards to due process. we do not extend those rights to foreign actors. I am for increased oversight of our national security apparatus but rolling in international facing organizations into domestic ones is a terrible idea.

as for having these organizations even during peacetime...Si vis pacem, para bellum. If we want these capabilities to some degree, we must keep them running. You can't launch spy satellites into orbit the day after an attack on american soil...

Well, Facebook is not so much of a threat as WeChat is in China.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAesMQ6VtK8

Basically all apps converge into WeChat, and there is absolutely no way to avoid it.

This is close to the platonic ideal-article for HN. Big, grand, non-falsifiable argument about current tech darling/source of controversy; endless opportunities to parse phrasing and argue edge cases.

Facebook is a threat to privacy, and by hoarding too much information about people, it has power to use it against them (or be used by others against them). The rest are consequences.

Solution is also obvious - don't use Facebook, and switch to decentralized social networks. It's not an easy solution though, because of inertia and network effects.

However it won't solve the human factor. I.e. people willingly trading their privacy. Once they do it, crooks would find a way to exploit that.

Google essentially has an entire monopoly on how information enters our brains. They exert complete control over Internet search for almost everyone on Earth outside of China, Russia and South Korea. Granted, Google is not exclusively controlled by a single individual in the same way Facebook is, but the same argument made in this article could be or could have been made about numerous absurdly influential companies throughout recent history.

South Korea?

http://www.naver.com/

Glad to see them mention the virtual reality piece, although I think the implications are vastly understated.

Look at that photo of a room full of people; voluntarily absent this reality and immersed in another of one man's creation. Notice how that man is the only one not in his virtual reality, but instead "overseeing" those who are.

And, we all know how addictive VR will be, once it hits a certain point.

Sends a chill up my spine.

Step one: admit, and put it into a public consciousness, that Facebook is a monopoly.

I'm a right wing free market advocate, but even I'm not a fanatic - and believe that when a single company grows to control the whole industry, it should be regulated. "Facebook is monopoly" needs to become a meme - this will help people from all the political spectrum on board to regulate it.

> Remember that Facebook feeds are not chronological. Facebook decides what posts you see, and who sees your posts.

Not my posts. I don't have a Facebook account.

Over 1 billion people do, and the information they're being fed is influencing elections in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, at a minimum.

At a minimum. Worth repeating.

Nearly 2, having read TFA. But yes.

Ironic that I visited HN deliberately to avoid working on my dissertation? I've been off of FB for years. This article seems overblown to me. Though, yesterday on NPR I heard a prof speaking about a survey where 48% of teenagers who were asked would rather have a broken BONE than a broken PHONE. But FB isn't the only reason teens are so attached to phones.

Yes, the lack of ethics review boards for research on FB users is reprehensible. Hardly any of the internal research would be approved by ethics boards for publically funded research on human subjects. Many people who use FB have no idea what freedoms they are giving up, how their information is being (mis)used, or how they are being manipulated.

What alternatives to FB exist?

What worries me is when Facebook and Google both decide to insert themselves into politics. I definitely saw Google trying to influence the last election. I would constantly get push notifications to my phone with anti Trump news. These were the very first and only push notifications I received from Google News.

There's also the question of "Fake News" on Facebook. You could conceivably abuse their reporting system to bury articles you don't want people to see. This already happens quite a bit on YouTube where people will mass report videos for copyright infringement just to get them taken down.

If we rely entirely on these global channels for our world information they could conceivably shape our world view to their benefit. It's a scary proposition.

The human reward function is all jacked up. We keep looking to mesianic liars as leaders and willingly give up personal power and freedom in exchange for the feeling of safety and group belonging.

Facebook is not the cause. It is merely the symptom.

Yes, but the upside of this "tool for political power" is the threat it puts on established media. Surely, expansion of liberal bias in our newspapers over the last 50 years is a bigger problem than the social media effect(?)

Yes, just as TV and rock music were harbingers of the downfall of Western civilization.

Facebook has an unfathomable amount of data you say?

Well, https://www.corbettreport.com/meet-in-q-tel-the-cias-venture...

http://www.therealnewsonline.com/our-blogs/facebook-and-its-...

Did you even read those links?

Have a different view on this,fb is a publicly traded company, its not only man (Zuckerberg) show. Though Mark got supreme power but I'm sure its not him behind every single decision. But if we talk about a single company having so much data, that's a threat for sure. As it's not in our hand we can just expect fb to understand, with great power comes greater responsibility.

The same can be said about any centralized service.

The difference is facebook wants to sap your time and make you addicted to checking your newsfeed.

There are far better ways to make money (as Google does). Why do these authors automatically assume that the more time you spend on facebook, the more money they make? I hardly ever click on faceboon ads. The thing lacking is intent to buy.

Backup here: http://archive.is/AUZrG

Related, a freshly-former US Attorney from Chicago: gun violence spreads over social media.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3516525-03132017-Unt...

I get the point of the article but "facebook" could be replaced by "computing" and we could ask, "Are computers a structural threat to free society?". Ultimately we could conclude, "Humans are the biggest threat to Society/Humanity".

This argument can certainly be made. Would you rather rid the world of humans, or facebook? =P

Yes.

I highly recommend News Feed Eradictor. It substitutes the news feed with an inspiring quote, that way you can use Facebook only for PMs and Events.

We'll make sure there will be laws governing social trade. Facebook will have to obey. It can't be kept unregulated, Injustice will thrive

Wow that pic of Zuckerberg is really messianic looking, even without the suggestion imposed by the title of the post.

"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." --Reagan

I can't wait for Facebook, or LinkedIn, selling "backchat protection" or equivalent...

Apologies for a grab-bag of links and references, but the fundamental question is one I've been thinking about, and researching, extensively over the past six months, though it's occupied me long before as well.

The realisation I had shortly before the US election was that all major changes in media seem to be associated with profound changes in human societies, often tremendously disruptive. Going back to the development of speech itself (better communications => better toolmaking => better weapons-making and military tactics). Writing, ever cheaper and lighter media, printing, literacy, mass media, broadcast, electronic, and online/mobile media, now with AI and A/B enhancements, all the more so.

Elizabeth Eisenstein & others on have explicitly realised this. See also: H.L. Menkin, Walter Lippman, John Dewey, de Bon, Mackay, Bernays, McLuhan, Chomsky, Jerry Mander, Niel Postman, Michael & Joyce Heusemann, Clay Shirky, Danah Boyd, Plato, esp. the Sophists

"A Revolution in Media" https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/gqzszjwf4unuqfupzqff8g

A friend has come up with an observation I've been calling Woozle's Paradox of Epistemic Systems: as the size (and power) of a media audience grows, more parties will be attracted to it for the purposes of influencing that audience. (And Facebook is the largest single media audience on the planet.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...

Another set of concepts is that Data are liability and "Who are you?" is the most expensive question in inforation technology. No matter how you get it wrong, you're fucked.

#45's Twitter account is as secure as Google's gmail account security. The same which failed when John Podesta's account password was phished. security

Scale effects and phase transitions are also profound. As I've had the opportunity to note in several recent HN conversations, both scale and rate matter. Just because Y is "the same as X" doesn't mean that Y is X, if the rate of change is 10x, or 100x, or 1000x, or 1,000,000x greater. A 10x change gets you from walking speed to a car. 100x is an aircraft. 1,000x is an ICBM. The Tsar Bomba is Greek Fire ... at scale.

Unintended consequences are the ultimate "hygiene factor" of technology. Ted Unungst's post on HN today walks through a set of cases of just these, the point being that those consequences cannot be known in advance. (Though I'm working on a framework which suggests how they might be better anticipated in at least some cases.)

I've covered these and related points in some recent-ish HN comments:

"media and revolution" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13750889#13754972

"media and revolution" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13736414#13736903

"journalism" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13678413#13681938

"data physics" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13635230#13640423

And there's a bit of a grab-bag post touching on elements here: https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5rnjg0/state_o...

(I'm working on a more comprehensive post or series on this topic ... there's a lot to cover, and to discard....)

One thing is the influence of Facebook on the USA population and on politics there. This is dangerous - but I am sure that it will be reined in. It is yet another thing for non USA residents. With Facebook all the notions of sovereignty go down the drains.

Dopamine is the culprit

Facebook has become a virus that can destroy a whole generation.

I think Google is more of a threat than Facebook.

Late to the fuckin' party

Facebook let's me send and receive messages to friends. In what way is that a "media company" or any kind of threat?

Strongly disagree. Facebook is not the threat. It's individuals who make decisions to sell their data in search of convenience. Maybe individuals make this decision out of ignorance but pretty much everyone in Western world is on Facebook, so I have to think that people consciously trade their data.

Its not like Facebook is shoving the product down our throat.

> Its not like Facebook is shoving the product down our throat.

No, but network effects are a thing and you can't open a webpage these days without a Facebook 'like' button on it. (Well, ok, you can but they are definitely getting rarer and rarer.)

Sure, but this is what the majority of the population has opted for.

You wouldn't believe the amount of pressure that people put on each other to sign up for Facebook. In some of my circles I'm next to invisible because I'm not 'on facebook'.

That's never going to work on me but I can't fault people for giving in and going with the flow. Still, in many cases it's not as voluntary as it might seem to be to you, just like it almost is no longer voluntary not to have a phone, not to have email and not to have internet access.

Theoretically you should be able to live your life without those, but in practice it is getting harder all the time and a choice against any or all of these comes with a social price that not everybody is willing to pay.

I don't disagree with your comment (in fact, I face the same issues in my life). My point is that we have to accept we live in a democracy and there is probably nothing we can do. It turns out that this is just our personal preference. To give some examples:

* Cars everywhere. Nobody gives a shit about global warming or pollution.

* Gmail everywhere. Nobody cares that your email gets marked as spam if you pick some other email provider. People will just ask you to switch to gmail.

* Chrome everywhere. Nobody cares that you now use Firefox and their website does not work well.

* Waste and opulence everywhere. Nobody cares about the insane things we dump _every_ day in the oceans.

My point is that this is humanity. All these are individual decisions and not pushed down by corporations. But people are not prepared to make any sacrifice at a personal level.

> Nobody gives a shit about global warming or pollution.

Plenty of people do.

> Nobody cares that your email gets marked as spam if you pick some other email provider. People will just ask you to switch to gmail.

Yes, that's one more example of network effects at work.

> Nobody cares that you now use Firefox and their website does not work well.

True, but then they'll lose me as a potential customer. They probably don't care so point taken.

> Nobody cares about the insane things we dump _every_ day in the oceans.

The worst to me are things that are manufactured in order to be thrown away. Tools that are so bad you can't use them even once, consumer goods whose sole feature is they are created to be presents that nobody ever uses afterwards, packaging, mountains of packaging, all kinds of disposable paper goods. It's incredible.

Have you watched the movie "The age of stupid?"

If you have try to reconcile that with the current head of the EPA being who he is...

So even if those decisions are all made - in principle - of people's own volition our views of the world and our actions in it are shaped to a fairly large extent by governments, corporate entities and media (this comment being a part of that because of the reference to the movie above).

> But people are not prepared to make any sacrifice at a personal level.

Some people are. Generalizations are hard.

>It's individuals who make decisions to sell their data in search of convenience.

Here's the problem: They're selling your data, too. If you have an average social life, your picture will end up on Facebook. People will click on the little box around your head and put in your name. They may mention you or discuss you in the comments.

With enough of that kind of stuff, Facebook knows you exist, what you look like, and where you like to hang out. It can make educated guesses at other things like whether you went to college and where, plus all the things you can derive from pictures like age, ethnicity, and weight.

Social networks really are networks, and you can know a lot about a network node from its neighbors.

Is media a structural threat? No. Facebook is a very very weak form of media. So no. The huge response of sentiment about how it is (or might be or whatever) is silly.

Grand statements about people's feelings as the premise for these gushes about personal distaste and fears and elitist cliches are used throughout:

> Freedom and freedom for a society, in a modern information age, relies on the individuals that make up that society having control of that information.

The society does have control. The questions are always about truth or validity, but there's no critical thought applied to the pretty words. Mediocrity masquerading as greatness again.

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