Monday, January 9th, 2012, 2:02 pm
Facebook Breaks the Web
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HE BUSINESS model of Facebook is truly poison on the World Wide Web and the Internet at large. It is the very opposite of what the Web was intended to achieve. At risk of stating the obvious, Facebook is a multi-player popularity game where information about one’s real friends is hidden behind walled gardens. The access to such information is conditioned upon a sort of blackmail which is giving one’s personal details away, for advertisers to spy on individual people and in turn impose on them all sorts of proprietary lock-ins and barriers, at the behest of affiliates. Rather than a society that openly shares we become a society of cliques and stalkers — people to whom the rules of society are determined by sociopaths like Mark Zuckerberg, who calls Facebook users “dumb fucks” (real quote) for trusting him.
People who never joined Facebook oughtn’t join and those who joined would be better off escaping it. Google+ is not much better. It’s just another brand and a perceived “underdog” (even though Google is the bigger company). What the Web needs is to provide people with personal space that they control. That’s what Tim Berners-Lee intended when he uploaded his physics papers for peer review; what the Web is becoming now is an advertising farm with paywalls and spying everywhere, including DPI. Then there’s SOPA and other nasty dictatorial legal mechanisms. The bad guys are winning. The Internet is losing. We are all losing, except those whom the Internet weakened while empowering the public in the nineties.
