Week 1: ‘You are the Product’ – Jon Lanchester.

I like Facebook. I shouldn’t like Facebook. As Lanchester explains, it uses my interests, my conversations and it can even see the small inquisitions made throughout my adolescence to adulthood (including all the questions that would naturally occur to any teenage boy). Ah. However, as some may say, ‘so what?’ all the piles of information and stacks of data could be described as nothing more than a slightly embarrassing looking glass into a marginally repressed but privileged formative years. Some one knows; no different to, in a more god fearing age, the belief that the Almighty can hear your darkest thoughts.

It becomes more visibly uncomfortable as you scroll through Facebook, trying to receive the emotional reassurance that your life is going ‘forward’ faster than an old school nemesis, and an advert appears in the familiar right hand frame for a product you ordered at lunch from your work computer. A little odd. ‘It’ knows. But it easy to suppress the immediate panic as you move logically to the thought that I would rather see adverts for cricket equipment (other hobbies are available however not recommended) than adverts for other items which would be ignored casually.

But what if it wasn’t sports equipment or anything else banal? What if something you heard on the news, saw a friend of yours post or tweet, peaked your interest? You read the article. Possibly a few hours later return to get your Facebook fix and interspersed into your ‘News Feed’ (subtly named) is a similar story, maybe a bit deeper into the subject, with a stronger message. In a matter of days you could have had a whole world view re cultivated. From reading one article through the network you are picked up by targeted algorithms. The news you see is shaped and moulded and unverified.

And, as Lanchester speculates, this is why Facebook is worth $445 billion. With access 2 billion users, two thirds of whom use The Social Network every single day, Facebook is the new tool to mould a world. Why else would, even with the most crude piece of mathematics, accounting for more genuine advertising revenue, each users information is worth an average of millions of dollars? 

Looking back through history controlling the ideas of the people has always been worth a considerable amount. Whether in the having all the people in one place (as Facebook is steadily doing) in the monstrous Bath complexes of Roman civilisation, filled with dark passages. Safe for conversation? Or a place to be easily overheard. Or the confession booths of Europe’s glorious monuments to God. Heaving under the stone of the cathedrals, through fear of a damned eternity, save your soul by telling the receptive priest all. More recently the Soviet Union and Communist party of China have gone to great lengths to control the ideology of the general population. Orwell, in his masterpiece, ‘1984’ predicted a world where we would live under total and complete surveillance and have all the news fed directly to the people.

Orwell missed one important point, it would not be by force we are subjected to total surveillance, we would do it almost willingly. ‘Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together’. ‘Don’t be evil’. The giants of Silicon Valley have earned our trust. These are the ‘good guys’. Not the big dangerous grey corporations and agencies of yester year. Even if cynical of the ‘mission statement’ we would all give over the data just to have Wi-Fi with a skinny latte, probably to check Facebook and indulge one’s caffeine and social media addiction in one convenient half an hour.
Facebook itself is just the tool.  An un-verified medium of distribution and collection. As the church became corrupted into or as newspapers and televisions had been previously used by totalitarian states.

However what is the vision of Zuckerberg? Far from the socially awkward Eisenberg in the film of creation, the joint sociology major has made a series of calm calculated steps to gain the support of the people. Are we moving to days of all hail Lord ‘Zucks’, slave to the whim of our fearless leader?



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