On Christmas day, I intend to commit an act of love by deleting my Facebook account. My reasons aren’t terribly mysterious. They relate to concerns that have been widely discussed by all sorts of people. You may not find all my reasons relevant to your own Facebook situation, but I’m sure you’ll identify with at least of few of them.
1. Facebook was founded so Harvard frat shitheads could rate women in a way that is public and humiliating.
The coded foundations of that premise persist in the current iteration of Facebook and will never disappear (read Jaron Lanier on the phenomenon of “lock-in”). There is something fundamentally anti-social about this social media.
2. Facebook’s “intelligent” algorithms are stupid.
They populate my feed with annoying shit and keep me from viewing things I care about. That wouldn’t be so bad if I had control over what gets into my feed, but the tools at my disposal are crude. I want a paint brush and they give me a backhoe.
3. I’m Canadian.
The fact that I’m Canadian might not seem like much of a reason, but I raise it to point out a distinction that was driven home as part of the public school curriculum when I was growing up. Call it indoctrination if you like, but as a kid, I was taught that Canada has (had?) an official policy of multiculturalism: the Canadian mosaic. This was presented in contradistinction to the American melting pot. It reflects an approach to difference. Although more aspirational than real, it is an ideal I believe is worth promoting. In the long run, people are better off when engagement with difference is part of their daily routine.
Facebook is a melting pot. Everything on Facebook is filtered through a set of universally applied cultural assumptions. (The creators of Facebook may not even be aware of this.) So, for example, if we look at its “intelligent” algorithms, we find that research is directed to a specific goal—presenting us with content we want. See Wired interview with “Deep Learning” researcher, Yann LeCun who asks: “How do we build models for users, so that the content that is being shown to the user includes things that they are likely to be interested in or that are likely to help them achieve their goals — whatever those goals are — or that are likely to save them time or intrigue them or whatever.” This approach is criticised by Eli Pariser in his Ted Talk about social media filter bubbles. Sometimes we need to see things we aren’t interested in and which don’t further our goals.
4. Facebook is the internet’s Walmart.
If you strip it down, Facebook is just a microblogging site. It allows people with limited digital skills to enjoy the same kind of experience that, once upon a time, only techies enjoyed, but on the cheap. So, for example, rather than demanding that people invest time and effort to learn granular privacy settings, Facebook dumbs it down so users only have to “spend” a couple clicks and there! They’re done. Sure, they’ve abdicated all their decision-making power to Facebook, but at least they get to upload the holiday photos without having to think about what they’re doing.
There are other ways, too, in which Facebook is like Walmart. For one thing, it makes its owners obscenely wealthy (just like the Walton family) while contributing nothing or even less than nothing (I leave it for economists to debate that question) to the welfare of its users. For another thing, just as Walmart eviscerates the local economies of small towns throughout the globe, so Facebook eviscerates participation in the “local economies” of the internet. I experience this firsthand as a blogger when I find that most comments to my blog posts appear, not on my blog where they’d be most relevant, but on Facebook where I post a link to my blog. A valuable part of the blog, namely the conversation it generates, gets sucked out of the internet and into the private sphere governed by Facebook.
5. Facebook doesn’t pay me enough for my content.
All Facebook content comes from us, the users. We give it its value, but it offers no compensation. All of that goes to people like Mark Zuckerberg (in fact, effective Dec 20th 2013, Facebook joins the S&P 500 index). Again, I refer you to Jaron Lanier for a conversation on how things could be restructured to be more equitable. I guess you could say that I’m a Facebook worker and I’m going on strike.
6. I have no control over my content.
When we post our content to the privately mediated realm called Facebook, we submit to its rules. For example, it polices content with little or nothing by way of dispute mechanisms or right of appeal. Instead of creating space for healthy debate about the boundaries between art and pornography, criticism and hatred, parody and libel, Facebook leaves matters to vaguely stated guidelines and unilateral vanishings.
7. The purpose of Facebook is to encourage consumers to buy more shit.
It sells advertising. That’s where most of its revenue comes from. Another chunk of its revenue comes from data-mining which it does, not for our benefit, but for the benefit of advertisers, and for military and para-military organizations. If we do nothing, then, we allow ourselves to be used. By our silence, we assent to this state of affairs.
In response to revelations that the NSA and other (in)security agencies gather vast amounts of digital information about everyone in the world, the world’s largest technology companies (including Facebook) issued a joint statement calling for reform of the NSA. The reasoning, it would appear, is that if governmental agencies keep forcing tech companies to grant access to private data, then customers will stop trusting such companies and, well, that would be bad for business. Interesting that there’s no conversation about ethics. I mean, why not issue a statement that this kind of information-gathering is, well, wrong? Oh wait, then it would be wrong for those companies, too, wouldn’t it?
8. Facebook does something weird to personal identity.
While this is true of online engagement generally, it’s especially true of Facebook. Although critical theorists have long preached the gospel of identity’s constructedness, never has it been so obvious as on Facebook, where we project our selves to the world. What’s different about Facebook is the narrowness of the projection. Just as it dumbs down privacy controls, so it dumbs down our “identity controls”. However, for those who immerse themselves in their online world, there is little in the offline world to supplement the avatars and About pages and photos from the bar where they went drinking that one time when they actually left their computer (but not their smartphone). Without a world of experience to draw upon, there’s little left by way of raw materials to construct a self of being-in-the-world. lmfao whatever.
If you’ve ever felt the urge to take a photo and share it online before you’ve shared the experience with the people you love most, or if you’ve ever felt a twinge of envy or regret that you aren’t able to do all the amazing things other people seem to be doing, or if you’ve ever unfriended someone or turned off their posts because you don’t like their point of view, then you’ve experienced this narrowness that squeezes the self on Facebook. I’ve felt it. I expect you have too. It’s not just microblogging; it’s microliving.
9. Facebook is a lonely place.
An irony of social media engagement is that we do it alone. We sit at our computer and plunk away at our keyboard. Or we sit in a crowded subway or coffee shop and isolate ourselves from the strangers around us by tapping our messages or uploading our photos. We share our experience of life with people who aren’t there while ignoring the people who are there. Facebook engagement = real world disengagement.
10. I don’t need Facebook to connect with my children.
From Facebook’s POV, this is the kicker. This is the point that should make shareholders sit up and take note. I observe how my kids (in their early 20’s) and their cousins (in their late teens) use Facebook. They don’t. They all have accounts, but their usage is sporadic. To them, Facebook is so yesterday. It’s a waste of time. It’s something their parents do. As much as tech media giants try to force culture from the top down, much of it happens organically from the ground up. My kids are on the ground. They already intuit Facebook’s growing cultural (ir)relevance. I’ll take my cue from them.
So…
Why do we subject ourselves to this junk? It’s not social and it barely qualifies as media; it’s fluff. Even things that matter start to collect lint when they get filtered through Facebook. There’s my selfie next to an interview of Noam Chomsky. I don’t want to live in a world of fluff. I don’t want that for me. And I don’t want that for you. I’m quitting Facebook because I love people too much to stay. I’ll see you out here in the wide world.