Another day, another Facebook job offer.
These headhunters obviously don’t do much research on the candidates they are attempting to recruit. If they did, they’d quickly discover that I am and have always been a vociferous critic of a service — I use the term loosely — that I believe is a blight on the on-line world.
Perhaps they believe I might be mercenary enough to work for them anyway, despite a total lack of affinity for the company or its product. If so, they are wrong. I wish Facebook absolutely nothing good.
Facebook is busy creating an alternate on-line ecosystem that will, if the trend continues, disenfranchise all who do not use it. The day is not too far removed when Facebook usurps e-mail as the primary means of communication. In some circles, this has already happened.
Already, so much material is lost to one unless one surrenders to the Facebook hegemony and signs up for an account. What should be — and, until just a few years ago, did still take the form of — unencumbered, accessible material is now sequestrated behind closed doors, assimilated and absorbed by a corporate entity that is gnawing away at the notion of publicly accessible information with the naïve cooperation of millions of collaborators, more commonly known as its users, from whom it draws its power.
It’s an unwelcome return to the bad old days, when the concept of multiple parallel, mutually inaccessible content provider networks was still the norm. The Internet ultimately won from closed systems like Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL by being based on open standards. These standards meant that no company could misappropriate the Internet’s protocols, control its growth or lay claim to its content. This made the Internet free — free as in gratis and free as in liberty — and this freedom was to become the ice-age for closed system dinosaurs like Compuserve.
Facebook is different, however. Whereas networks like Compuserve were distinct and separate alternatives to the Internet, neighbours to it, if you will, Facebook is burrowed deep inside it, feeding on it like a parasite.
What once might have surfaced as a blog or a user’s personal home page is now more likely to find a vent on Facebook, where it automatically becomes the intellectual property of the host company, generally inaccessible to anyone unwilling to join as a member. And there are many reasons why one might desire not to become a member of Facebook. There’s much wrong with both the company and its product, from multiple societal, sociological, technical and ethical standpoints.
For me, the biggest of many issues is the undermining of the social fabric of the Internet itself. Facebook partially solves the very real problem of managing on-line relationships, but does so by hermetically drawing the user inside its biosphere. Rather than expand the on-line universe, Facebook causes it to contract. The goal is not so much to aid human-beings in their pursuit of managing relationships, as it is to control the entire infrastructure for doing so.
Facebook therefore operates parasitically within the Web, like a huge tick in its flesh, steadily weakening its host. I want no part of that. It’s enough of a thorn in my side that Sarah sees fit to use it. She regards Facebook much more superficially and benignly than I do and, as a result, I can’t read what my own wife posts there or look at the photos she uploads. Other people in a similar predicament sign up for an account at this point, but I am of the opinion that I’d then be complicit in an endeavour that I believe to be fundamentally rotten and detrimental to the Internet
No amount of pre-IPO stock options is going to make me feel good about that, so thanks for this latest job offer, but no thanks.