Tom Hodgkinson hates Facebook

January 14, 2008 4:30 PM

Tom Hodgkinson, of The Idler, really hates Facebook: "We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships."
posted by mekanic (85 comments total)

"We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships."

Oddly, I was thinking something similar watching a commercial for eharmony just the other day. that the site was for people who were all "well, I've got everything else organized. I guess I might as well order a wife." Which is ludicrous. Finding a mate through the usual happenstance and working through all the attendant difficulties is so much more fun and rewarding. Seriously.
posted by jonmc at 4:37 PM on January 14, 2008

"We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships."

Apparently, this man has never heard of the world's oldest profession.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 4:37 PM on January 14, 2008

Apparently, this man has never heard of the world's oldest profession.

Apparently, you don't know the definition of "friendships".
posted by dobbs at 4:40 PM on January 14, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

...and yet, even after all of those reasons to hate it, I still think it's worth it.

Facebook doesn't really isolate people. At least that hasn't been my experience. Instead, it has helped me to start relationships with people who might have remained acquaintances. And it's a really great tool for keeping in touch with people who are too far away to meet at a pub. That's part of the point.
posted by lunit at 4:40 PM on January 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night a home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk.

Yes, because without Facebook he would have surely been mountain climbing or organizing his community or whaling or otherwise drinking in the stuff of life. IF WE DIDN'T HAVE FACEBOOK WE WOULD NEVER BE ALONE.
posted by wemayfreeze at 4:41 PM on January 14, 2008 [6 favorites has favorites]

Apparently, you don't know the definition of "friendships".

And apparently, you don't know the definition of "commodification." Or you're just a humorless jerk.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 4:42 PM on January 14, 2008

dobbs, cool papa bell: hookers sell sex, they don't sell love and anybody with an IQ higer than algae knows this.
posted by jonmc at 4:44 PM on January 14, 2008

Tom Hodgkinson, of The Idler, really hates Facebook would prefer that Facebook remove itself from his lawn.

fixed &c.
posted by dersins at 4:47 PM on January 14, 2008 [7 favorites has favorites]

Poor guy has 59 million kids on his lawn, and they're not getting off anytime soon.
posted by ORthey at 4:47 PM on January 14, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

Look, I hate Facebook (and libertarians) as much as the next guy, but aren't telephone companies extracting capitalistic value from human communication? Aren't record companies extracting capitalistic value from human creativity? Aren't health insurance companies extracting capitalistic value from human suffering? Well...yes they are. But it just goes to show Facebook isn't something new and evil in itself.

("I like Facebook," said another friend. "I got a shag out of it.")

Kinda counters his own argument that Facebook ties you to a desk with no actual, real-life human interaction.

The more friends you have, the better you are.

Says who?

Like PayPal before it, it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who you want to be, as long as you don't mind being bombarded by adverts for the world's biggest brands. As with PayPal, national boundaries are a thing of the past.

I'm bombarded by adverts from the world's biggest brands as I walk down a street on a sunny day...and I have even less choice about it. And as for the relevance of PayPal...what? It's a way of sending money to people, in the absence of any other financial structure to serve that purpose. It's pretty much completely value-neutral.

But Thiel is ... philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening of individual freedoms.

But I don't see any evidence of how this actually plays out on Facebook or Paypal. I'm pretty sure they let black people join, and all those left-wing groups I'm a member of on Facebook haven't yet been shut down by the ghostly hand of Ayn Rand.

Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

Exactly. What's wrong with that? Telephone wires just mediate in relationships that were happening any way.

Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he also calls "nature", and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in this context that we must view the rise of Facebook.

Until Facebook dies, like MySpace, and is replaced by the next, new, coolest thing. In about 6 months from now. He'd better get cracking on his plans to take over the world.

"Share" is Facebookspeak for "advertise". Sign up to Facebook and you become a free walking, talking advert for Blockbuster or Coke, extolling the virtues of these brands to your friends.

Erm...I don't. I post videos of my son playing on the beach.
posted by Jimbob at 4:48 PM on January 14, 2008 [4 favorites has favorites]

I hate a lot of things, but you don't hear me bragging.
posted by Krrrlson at 4:48 PM on January 14, 2008 [10 favorites has favorites]

dersins, I see we have resolved our differences and are now making simultaneous similar jokes. Well done.
posted by ORthey at 4:48 PM on January 14, 2008

A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night a home alone on MetaFilter, drinking at his desk.

cough cough, nervous shuffle...
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 4:48 PM on January 14, 2008

dersins, I see we have resolved our differences and are now making simultaneous similar jokes.

If you two wanna smooch in public, go get yourselves a facebook account...
posted by PeterMcDermott at 4:56 PM on January 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Some good quotes an analysis:

Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am

Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

A little too early to be making broad generalizations about a new capitalistic experiment. I think we will see, this is much of the same advertising as before. Only now an algorithm will generate a Coca-Cola ad that targets people with tastes similar to mine based on my profile and hopefully appeal to me. Largely more specific demographic targeting. I doubt Facebook will shake us to the core.

Also, did anyone see Mark Zuckerberg on 60 Minutes (Part 2)? He needs to stop going in front of the camera or at least get a PR consultant. It was a fairly fawning 60 Minutes interview where they lobbed him some pretty soft questions and he comes off really, really bad. None of Gates' geeky aloofness or Jobs' charm. He's nicely referred to as "awkward," but I'd characterize as willing to sell private data for a price. It is never good to come off as Wall Street when you're trying to make people trust that at a certain level, you'll try to be as ethical as possible with people's private data.
posted by geoff. at 5:02 PM on January 14, 2008

Jimbob writes "Look, I hate Facebook (and libertarians) as much as the next guy, but aren't telephone companies extracting capitalistic value from human communication? Aren't record companies extracting capitalistic value from human creativity? Aren't health insurance companies extracting capitalistic value from human suffering? Well...yes they are. But it just goes to show Facebook isn't something new and evil in itself."

Nice paragraph.
posted by mr_roboto at 5:09 PM on January 14, 2008

Tom Hodgkinson, of The Idler, really hates Facebook would prefer that Facebook remove itself from his lawn.

fixed &c.
posted by dersins at 7:47 PM on January 14 [1 favorite -] Favorite added! [!]

I think I'm in love...
posted by MaryDellamorte at 5:11 PM on January 14, 2008

I tried Facebook for a while, but got bored with it very quickly. It looks like every time you want to use an application on facebook there's always this pressure to auto-spam everyone on your friend list with some blurb about the app.

I know someone who's very keen to get in on all these social networks (I think we all do). I really haven't found a reason to join all these networks besides wanting to be able to see I'm on all of them, so I've largely given up on the idea that social networking has much to offer me in exchange for the sort of information matrix I have to give it about myself.
posted by clevershark at 5:11 PM on January 14, 2008

Social networking sites work for some and not for others. Just as going to a pub works for some and not for others.
posted by MaryDellamorte at 5:14 PM on January 14, 2008

Ok, let's review.

Friendster was the first. People thought it was cool back in 2003. Ooh a new way to get laid. Yaay!

Then came MySpace. It was ugly as all sin, but unlike Friendster, it actually worked. You didn't have to see an error page every time you tried to log in. Plus, it was a new way to get laid. Yaay! Oh yeah and there was also some crap about bands.

Then came Facebook. It's not as ugly as MySpace, not as spam-clogged, and doesn't crash as much. Plus, it's a new way to get laid. Yaay! Oh, and theres some weird crap called apps that lets you unknowingly spam your friends with 1000 updates.

And apparently some reactionary dickbag owns a small percent of the company.

Any questions?
posted by Afroblanco at 5:14 PM on January 14, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

I think I may have found the network that caters to my deeply-rooted misanthropy -- isolatr, the antisocial network.
posted by clevershark at 5:16 PM on January 14, 2008 [3 favorites has favorites]

As with PayPal, national boundaries are a thing of the past.

Ok, and this is bad WHY? This very fact above has made it about twenty zillion times easier to run a business with an international clientele. For example -- The Black Apple, an Etsy seller who's sold a ton of prints (of her original paintings) -- is supporting herself quite nicely doing it. Five years ago, she probably would have had a shitty job somewhere while painting stuff in her spare time. With the rise of Etsy and the ease of PayPal (Etsy's payment processor of choice), she's selling thousands of prints.

Compare this to when I was in high school 15 years ago -- if you wanted to buy someone's zine from Canada or outside the US you had to screw around with international money orders and all kinds of nonsense.

Also, it's as easy to ignore online advertising as is it is to ignore the offline kind...
posted by bitter-girl.com at 5:17 PM on January 14, 2008

Afroblanco: Classmates and Sixdegrees were the first.

Friendster was the first "successful" one.
posted by aubilenon at 5:19 PM on January 14, 2008

I'm on Facebook, but for the life of me I can't figure out how someone can spend more than 20 minutes there at a time. Once you catch up on what all your friends are doing and write some blurb about what you're up to, what the hell else is there to do, really?
posted by desjardins at 5:20 PM on January 14, 2008

Any questions?
Yes. Why does everyone think that Facebook has some special lock-in that will prevent us all leaving in droves for the next new thing?
posted by bonaldi at 5:20 PM on January 14, 2008

what the hell else is there to do, really?
Scrabble.
posted by bonaldi at 5:21 PM on January 14, 2008

Why does everyone think that Facebook has some special lock-in that will prevent us all leaving in droves for the next new thing?

My point, exactly.

Or in Battlestar Galactica speak, "This has happened before, and it will all happen again."
posted by Afroblanco at 5:22 PM on January 14, 2008

There's also Orkut. Well, before it turned "Português only" anyway.
posted by clevershark at 5:22 PM on January 14, 2008

Christmas ruined my facebook. All merry this happy that when what I really wanted was to find out what Lost characters my friends are.
posted by srboisvert at 5:23 PM on January 14, 2008

From the "Google is white bread" thread, I think this bears repeating:

PROFESSOR ISSUES CALL TO SECURE TERRITORIAL INTEGRITY OF LAWN

The internet compromises the territorial integrity of traditional academics by allowing information to be readily available. It compromises the territorial integrity of traditional writers by allowing unknowns to make their work readily available without going through the usual gatekeepers. And now we see that it also compromises the territorial integrity of people who are successful in traditional social settings by creating environments where other qualities may be socially desirable.
posted by transona5 at 5:23 PM on January 14, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships

On its own, that statement is simply untrue. Relationships are commodified when the relationships themselves are bought and sold. Prostitution, for example, is a commodification of sexual relations.

Facebook is less like a market for friendships than say, a bar where friends can meet, and in the process, maybe see some ads or buy some drinks. The fact that businesses can set up spaces for social interaction & turn a profit from them does not entail that friendships have been commodified, any more than the existence of wedding photographers, florists, jewellers & reception halls entails that marriage has been commodified.
posted by UbuRoivas at 5:25 PM on January 14, 2008

Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval.

Yeah because before Myspace and Facebook, people NEVER did that with pictures (i.e. class photos, family photos, wedding photos, etc).

It also encourages a disturbing competitivness around friendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts for nothing and quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better you are. You are "popular", in the sense much loved in American high schools.

I guess he's only been perusing profiles from children in grade school. That's kind of creepy.

Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me?

New fangled techonology!!!!1!!!1! Too many confusing pictures and sounds! I guess he sends his mail via carrier pigeon.
posted by MaryDellamorte at 5:26 PM on January 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I'm on Facebook, but for the life of me I can't figure out how someone can spend more than 20 minutes there at a time. Once you catch up on what all your friends are doing and write some blurb about what you're up to, what the hell else is there to do, really?

You clearly have not yet found the application that, when you use it, it triggers brain pleasure center events that are on the order of 9 to 14 times more powerful than your every day orgasms. Once you have found that, you will understand the magic and the powerful addiction that is Facebook.
posted by psmealey at 5:29 PM on January 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

link plz, psmealey. tia.
posted by dersins at 5:36 PM on January 14, 2008

Once you catch up on what all your friends are doing and write some blurb about what you're up to, what the hell else is there to do, really?

A lot of people use it as a replacement for email. So, they use it as an email client.

Classmates and Sixdegrees were the first.

You want something to hate, how about classmates.com? Everything interesting is behind a pay wall, and the site is architected so it has "profile views" and "guestbooks" that it can spam you with every week in an attempt to get you to sign up and give them your money. Auto-resubscribing, of course.
posted by smackfu at 5:39 PM on January 14, 2008

I don't think Tom Hodgkinson really *gets* Facebook. It's not about collecting friends (although the average 30-something probably has close to 200 'friends' on average; the average 20-something, close to 300), it's about staying in touch. Some people create faux personas on their profile page, but it's pretty easy to tell who's being pretentious...other times it's interesting to see if someone has read the same obscure book you have.

Facebook is also incredibly useful for networking. I am essentially a client manager, and I travel around quite a bit, and know dozens, if not hundreds of people in a dozen or so cities. Some of them are on Facebook, and it's a create way to maintain work relationships.

But I try to avoid putting up too much personal info, such as where I went to school, where I live, my birthdate, any contact info.

At the same time, Facebook isn't making money off of this data - it's making money off of mining the data generated during complex interactions between 59 million users.

As for politics, well, as the Beacon debacle pointed out, Facebook is not easily controllable - the site is bigger (metaphorically) than its creators now. If libertarian dude wants to create some sort of 'Planet of Gor' utopia, best of fucking luck to him: idealogues generally need it.
posted by KokuRyu at 5:44 PM on January 14, 2008

what the hell else is there to do, really?
Scrabble.

Not for long?
posted by Jimbob at 5:44 PM on January 14, 2008

I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval.

Yeah because before Myspace and Facebook, people NEVER did that with pictures (i.e. class photos, family photos, wedding photos, etc).

Tried all three in wallet-size prints. Got me neither sex nor approval.
posted by hal9k at 5:50 PM on January 14, 2008

Tried all three in wallet-size prints. Got me neither sex nor approval.

God, this reminded me of the days when the internet was still in just black & white; chatting it up on the local BBS and actually trading photographs through the snail mail...sigh...
posted by MaryDellamorte at 5:54 PM on January 14, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

I prefer Wondermark's take on Facebook: You've been marketed to!
posted by drezdn at 5:58 PM on January 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

The internet compromises the territorial integrity of traditional academics by allowing information to be readily available

This is probably among the more stupid beliefs of the net. Does anybody really imagine that academics want to prevent others from acquiring information? Is this why they devote their lives to teaching the young and dumb? You've got to wonder.

But Thiel is ... philosophy graduate from Stanford

This is the heart of it. Nothing good has ever come out of philosophy graduates. They are pretty much all bad news. Further, nothing good has ever come out of California. It's a corrosive, atomizing force in Western civilization, that knows only how to tear down and destroy. Like the media, Disney movies, and cable news, California is a part that is pretending to be the whole. Beware!
posted by nixerman at 6:06 PM on January 14, 2008

Nothing good has ever come out of philosophy graduates.

Of course not. If they had lives, they'd have no time to bullsh- I mean philosophize.
posted by jonmc at 6:09 PM on January 14, 2008

bitter-girl.com: "Compare this to when I was in high school 15 years ago -- if you wanted to buy someone's zine from Canada or outside the US you had to screw around with international money orders and all kinds of nonsense."

I was about to agree with you wholeheartedly, but then I got a massive nostalgiaflash. Facebook is an ace way of keeping in touch with folk, and PayPal is a handy way of transferring money. But a friend request or virtual cash transaction will never match the thrill of opening a strangely-franked airmail envelope to find an Engrish missive from some schoolkid in Japan with no money, asking for a copy of the fanzine you made that they'd seen in a photo in the NME months earlier and somehow tracked down, in return for a copy of their fanzine.

Poke? Mahone.

I'll start laying the turf for that lawn now, eh?
posted by jack_mo at 6:11 PM on January 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

There's also Orkut. Well, before it turned "Português only" anyway.
posted by clevershark

Portuguese/Brazilian AND Indian, where it's insanely popular as well.
posted by sk381 at 6:15 PM on January 14, 2008

This is probably among the more stupid beliefs of the net. Does anybody really imagine that academics want to prevent others from acquiring information?

I am a traditional academic. Many academics want to discourage (not actually prevent) others from acquiring information in ways of which they disapprove.
posted by transona5 at 6:16 PM on January 14, 2008

I think facebook is very useless and all of its functions can be substituted by other, more privacy-friendly services. As with most unnecessary things, eventually people will forget about it and move on to the next fad.
posted by peppito at 6:33 PM on January 14, 2008

"After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund"

lolwut
posted by Spacelegoman at 6:42 PM on January 14, 2008

holy shit are they seriously trying to shut down scrabulous?
fuck hasbro. (though gotta admit, if they do shut it down, my facebook usage will plummet)
posted by jcruelty at 7:09 PM on January 14, 2008

"We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships."

Oh, that's been around as long as their have been mooches.
posted by Astro Zombie at 7:14 PM on January 14, 2008

You clearly have not yet found the application that, when you use it, it triggers brain pleasure center events that are on the order of 9 to 14 times more powerful than your every day orgasms. Once you have found that, you will understand the magic and the powerful addiction that is Facebook.

Actually, facebook addiction is probably more insidious than that. My theory is that it's akin to poker machine addiction, as it uses a similar system of intermittent rewards for behaviour, as first expounded by psychologist BF Skinner. The idea is that if you perform action X you can expect reward Y, and this can be mildly conditioning, or "addictive". However, Skinner discovered that this action-reward link embeds itself more firmly in your brain if the reward doesn't come every time, but more or less randomly, as long as it only comes if you perform the prescribed action.

Thus, a poker machine addict will keep hitting the "play again" button like a trained rat so long as the flashing animations and jangly sounds of a win only occur every now & then.

Similarly, with facebook: the "rewards" might be somebody writing on your wall, responding to a message, poking you or whatever, but if you receive this "aw, somebody thought of me" gratification every time you logged on or refreshed, then it wouldn't be as addictive. It becomes addictive precisely when you refresh & find no rewards. So maybe you write somebody a message or poke them, dawdle around doing something else, then refresh. And refresh again. Oh, and best log in once more before bed, just in case. Hey, maybe something's happened overnight, while you were asleep...?
posted by UbuRoivas at 7:19 PM on January 14, 2008 [13 favorites has favorites]

I hate a lot of things, but you don't hear me bragging.

Sadly, the sites that would seem to be for people like us, aren't.
posted by b1tr0t at 7:22 PM on January 14, 2008

Get out of my mind, Astro Zombie! Say, can you lend me a fiver?
posted by ersatz at 7:24 PM on January 14, 2008

Similarly, with facebook: the "rewards" might be somebody writing on your wall, responding to a message, poking you or whatever, but if you receive this "aw, somebody thought of me" gratification every time you logged on or refreshed, then it wouldn't be as addictive. It becomes addictive precisely when you refresh & find no rewards. So maybe you write somebody a message or poke them, dawdle around doing something else, then refresh. And refresh again. Oh, and best log in once more before bed, just in case. Hey, maybe something's happened overnight, while you were asleep...?

Oh, shit. Well that describes my fascination with Facebook in a nutshell. Great, I've been simplified down into one paragraph. Thanks a lot, Ubu!
posted by liquorice at 7:30 PM on January 14, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

The guy's ideological stance with the lawn and all is a bit intense, but the descriptions of the Facebook board members Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer are very interesting.

Also, from the privacy policy: "We may be required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws."

and: "Additionally, we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies."

That combined with the the fact that no piece of data is ever deleted is... well, you decide what it means.
posted by dminor at 7:31 PM on January 14, 2008

also.. what peppito said [hopefully]
posted by dminor at 7:32 PM on January 14, 2008

Oh, shit. Well that describes my fascination with Facebook in a nutshell. Great, I've been simplified down into one paragraph. Thanks a lot, Ubu!

Hey, I'm aware of this psychological process, and I still refresh my laptop every second time I wander past it.

At least I proved to myself that I could go cold turkey for a month with no problems. Having achieved that, I can happily refresh away to my heart's content, knowing that I am immune.
posted by UbuRoivas at 7:45 PM on January 14, 2008

Hodgkinson lost me when he wrote:

After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund.

After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited they invented a time machine and went back in time two years to set up their own venture capital fund?
posted by adamg at 8:49 PM on January 14, 2008

I think I liked The Idler better before all their shit burned down.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:51 PM on January 14, 2008

(Pardon me, that was The Baffler, wasn't it? Not The Idler. Ah, well. Dr. Johnson hated Facebook, too.)
posted by octobersurprise at 8:56 PM on January 14, 2008

jcruelty holy shit are they seriously trying to shut down scrabulous?
fuck hasbro. (though gotta admit, if they do shut it down, my facebook usage will plummet)

Me too. I hope Facebook management is aware.

Facebook has a lot of potential for board games. Basically any game (like Scrabble or chess) where players take turns and don't interact during each others' turns, would work well as a Facebook application, and the best of these (like Scrabble) are the ones where play benefits from time spent thinking.

More than anything else what the Scrabulous issue points to is Facebook's vulnerability to the vagaries of US intellectual property law. Facebook does not benefit from strong copyright. Quite the opposite. Facebook's own IP is very small and vastly less important than the stuff that it supports. The more free users are to send stuff to each other and do things together, the more time they spend on Facebook. US IP law threatens not just Scrabulous and the like, but fan groups for TV and movies, video and photo sharing, etc. If I were Zuckerberg, I'd be looking at a move to Antigua.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 9:04 PM on January 14, 2008

Scrabulous even rips off the coloring of the board from Scrabble. Plus Yahoo has an officially licensed online version of Scrabble.

So I'm shocked it's taken them that long to go after Scrabulous.
posted by smackfu at 9:27 PM on January 14, 2008

After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited they invented a time machine and went back in time two years to set up their own venture capital fund?

Exactly. *That's* how important & exciting the new technology was to them - they actually employed the alien technology they'd been hiding under maximum security for decades in Roswell, despite the fact that they knew that eventually an investigative journalist would uncover & report their mastery of time travel.

If that's not enough to scare you away from facebook, I don't know what is.
posted by UbuRoivas at 9:34 PM on January 14, 2008

I think social networking sites contribute to people increasing their investment in perception at the cost of, well, actually being and doing what they want to be and do, but not to an alarming degree. In terms of malignancy I'd place it a couple of orders of magnitude below the accepted definition of commodification of human relationships that has been around for over a century.
posted by MillMan at 10:38 PM on January 14, 2008

The saddest part about Friendster is the creators were offered $50 million for it and turned it down. Then Myspace came along, crushed it, and all offers were rescinded.
posted by Christ, what an asshole at 12:40 AM on January 15, 2008

George Orwell: "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face -- forever."

*registers faceboot.com*
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:36 AM on January 15, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

The saddest part about Friendster is the creators were offered $50 million for it and turned it down. Then Myspace came along, crushed it, and all offers were rescinded.

Wow. That really, really sucks.
posted by Locative at 1:48 AM on January 15, 2008

Occam's version: geeks use computers to make money, while members of the public participate freely because they like it.

Guardian version: Facebook is a libertarian/CIA plot to take over the world, destroy reality, and replace it with a totalitarian virtual universe.
posted by hoverboards don't work on water at 2:32 AM on January 15, 2008

Kind of a derail here, but I was talking about this with Slarty Bartfast the other day, and we were both wondering why anyone would want to hook up on Facebook, or any other social networking site after you’ve discovered Mefi.

Well, maybe Mecha could be an exception.

Ubu, you bastard--you spoilt the whole Mefi experience for me
I think I'll go off to bed now
posted by hadjiboy at 4:56 AM on January 15, 2008

I like this article purely because it makes me feel vindicated for not having joined Facebook, although my boycott's never had any particularly good reasons behind it (other than a gut feeling of 'that looks like a whole heap of bullsh*t'.) My (actual) friends have started up some kind of group on it called "Does [henners] think he's above us all because he's not on Facebook?".

Er, yep.
posted by henners at 5:03 AM on January 15, 2008

Facebook has a lot of potential for board games.
Ooh, ooh! Diplomacy for FaceBook! Yes indeedy.
posted by Wolfdog at 5:18 AM on January 15, 2008

I remember the first time someone tried to friend me that I didn't recognise. It took me about ten minutes to realise I went to school with him 20 years and I thought he was a complete git then, so I clicked ignore. I learned something important about myself that day - I can be really, really petty. But still, why on earth would I want to friend someone I hadn't given a second thought about in 20 years? In what perverse dictionary does the word 'friend' cover that non-relationship?

I signed up to keep in contact with the folks back in NZ, and it does quite well at that. Turned off all email notifications, didn't put my birthday in, rarely click on ads and joined one group "No, I don't want to be a fucking Vampire/Werewolf/Zombie". Apps annoy me and I usually cancel if I have to spam others to use them. I thought about leaving after Beacon, but then they more or less fixed that. I can take it or leave it, but it would be a bugger to collect all those email addresses just in case I needed to use them.
posted by Sparx at 5:40 AM on January 15, 2008

If Tom Hodgkinson told me to jump off a bridge I'd take it under consideration, as the man has written my personal substitutes for The Bible.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:03 AM on January 15, 2008

II don't think "grumpy reactionary condemns a new offshoot on the technology tree" makes for a good FPP, because all we're going to do is rip his arguments to shreds and then go on about our own Facebook experiences.

But if they shut down Scrabulous, I'm going to cry.
posted by orange swan at 6:10 AM on January 15, 2008

It would have been better had it been written in a less curmudgeonly curmudgeonly fashion. The privacy policy and the money backing the project are creepy. This was probably the more interesting part of the article.
posted by chunking express at 6:35 AM on January 15, 2008

I hate Facebook as much as the next guy but the article is written in such a reactionary, angry way that it makes me hate Tom Hodgkinson just as much. His good points are lost under insults and assumptions about the personalities of the people involved.
posted by dogbusonline at 7:02 AM on January 15, 2008

Similarly, with facebook MetaFilter: the "rewards" might be somebody writing on your wall sending you MeFi mail, responding to a message your comment, poking favoriting you or whatever, but if you receive this "aw, somebody thought of me" gratification every time you logged on or refreshed, then it wouldn't be as addictive. It becomes addictive precisely when you refresh & find no rewards. So maybe you write somebody a message answer an AskMe or poke them post an FPP, dawdle around doing something else, then refresh. And refresh again. Oh, and best log in once more before bed, just in case. Hey, maybe something's happened overnight, while you were asleep...?

Oh, now I get it.
posted by desjardins at 9:26 AM on January 15, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

Lets start an open source peer-to-peer address book program that manages various other data, like relationships, photos, etc.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:35 AM on January 15, 2008

And does Facebook the telegraph really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace dots and dashes, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook the telegraph, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook the telegraph actually isolates us at our workstations.

Seriously, I thought that this whole genre of ludditic tech-bashing had lapsed into self-parody decades ago.

...sorry, I just thinking back to a book called The Victorian Internet, which documented the rise of the telegraph and morse code. I vaguely recall the book having accounts of similar discontent with the telegraph, and regardless of that I thought the analogy worked.
posted by Weebot at 3:04 PM on January 15, 2008

desjardins: yes, I was aware of MeFi having similarly addictive qualities, by exactly the same principle. If there is a difference, the no-frills text-based nature of MetaFilter means that the actual content remains prominent, and has value on its own, ie it's still interesting to read. Facebook, on the other hand, is a lot more about form than content. It really does remind me a bit of a poker machine, with all kinds of colourful, moving, video & photo doodads - a bit like a playcentre for kids with ADD - and because it's almost completely useless for holding ongoing group discussions (no effective "recent activity" feature) the main interactions between users are all variations on people "pinging" you - messages, wall posts, invitations or the 1001 variations on a poke ("aw, somebody just patted my fluffpet!" or "god, not another fucking vampire bite!").

hadjiboy: "why anyone would want to hook up on Facebook, or any other social networking site after you’ve discovered Mefi?". Because MeFi is not about hooking up? Well, not for me, anyway. It's about reading interesting stuff & having quality discussions with intelligent people. I wouldn't say I use Facebook for hooking up either, although I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility - user profiles there can contain a hell of a lot more information about people (a shortcut version of "getting-to-know-you" party conversations) than the profiles here, and the whole friends-of-friends concept is applied much more effectively there than with our contacts feature. Facebook, for me, is more about keeping up with real-life friends & colleagues, and for whatever reason, to date I've not been able to encourage a single one of them to join up here, unless they're lurking or haven't revealed themselves to me.
posted by UbuRoivas at 3:21 PM on January 15, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk?

And that's precisely the kind of lazy either-or thinking that plagues so many critiques of social networking sites, or of the internet in general. Elsewhere in his article, Hodgkinson said he'd rather be reading a book. Doesn't that prevent him from talking and eating and dancing and drinking with his friends, too? The point is that these things are not mutually exclusive. You just apportion your time between them as you see fit.

Moreover, these different little spheres of life actually support each other in numerous ways. What's he going to talk about with his friends if he hasn't come across any interesting topics, from reading the papers or browsing the web or watching a documentary or from other solitary activities? And a Facebook invitation to a party or concert or dance is actually about the simplest possible way, other than email, for friends to coordinate real-life interactions. Hell, this saturday night I have about four or five separate events to try & juggle - a birthday party, a friend's band night, others going to watch another concert, and I forget the other two - all of which were communicated to me via Facebook. Somehow, I just don't feel at all disconnected, Tom.
posted by UbuRoivas at 3:33 PM on January 15, 2008

Tom Hodgkinson has turned idle moments into an art form. Here are 10 of his favourites

Saturday January 6, 2007

Deadheading the daisies

Doesn't it rather disconnect us, instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends?

Browsing in a charity bookshop

Doesn't it rather disconnect us, instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends?

Leaning on gates

Doesn't it rather disconnect us, instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends?

Listening to Radio 3 in the evening

Doesn't it rather disconnect us, instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends?

Walking from Clerkenwell to Soho

Doesn't it rather disconnect us, instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends?

Singing John Lennon songs in my head

Doesn't it rather disconnect us, instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends?

Blowing on fires

Doesn't it rather disconnect us, instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends?

Picking parasol mushrooms

Doesn't it rather disconnect us, instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends?

Watching the birds on the bird feeder

Doesn't it rather disconnect us, instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends?

Reading Edward Lear poems to my children

Doesn't it rather disconnect us, instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends?

Tom, you're a self-righteous, hypocritical wanker.
posted by UbuRoivas at 3:47 PM on January 15, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I wouldn't say I use Facebook for hooking up either, although I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility - user profiles there can contain a hell of a lot more information about people (a shortcut version of "getting-to-know-you" party conversations) than the profiles here, and the whole friends-of-friends concept is applied much more effectively there than with our contacts feature.

Yes, but over here, you actually get to know what people are thinking about, how they feel, and what their intentions are, so you can perhaps make a more informed decision if you like this person or not. And Mefi can be a pretty good place to hook up with like-minded people—you do have all the meet-ups that are planned constantly—and it does feel like people are enjoying themselves and taking the effort to get to know themselves offline as well.

I guess I like this site because it’s a whole lot more honest than anything I’ve yet to see on the internets, and I’ve never clicked on Facebook before, so I may not be aware of its advantages, but I know I wouldn’t find the kind of people over there that I’ve found over here.
posted by hadjiboy at 7:29 PM on January 15, 2008

Also, you do have memail to connect with people a little more effectively than you’re able to on the blue, or the grey or green. And then there is Mecha too.
posted by hadjiboy at 7:31 PM on January 15, 2008

I know I wouldn’t find the kind of people over there that I’ve found over here.

Yes. Or at best, the signal-to-noise is much worse there.

And perhaps we mean different things by "hooking up"? I interpret it to mean dating. You might be meaning just socialising, with one or more people of whatever gender or orientation.

In terms of sussing out people for dating, I think FB probably would be a better bet. Sure, you get precious little insight into what people actually think or believe, but on FB people can create all kinds of lists of movies, books, music, leisure activities, interests & causes and so on, plus you get a kind of sense of their personality from which applications they've installed, or who their friends are. Over here, I still don't have that much of a sense of the personalities even of many of the most prolific contributors. In fact, because it's all just words on a screen, it can almost feel like I'm talking to an army of near-clones. It's a great design advantage for discussion, I think, but not so much for making personal connections.
posted by UbuRoivas at 7:57 PM on January 15, 2008

Someone got too many vampire bites and not enough werewolf hugs.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 5:22 AM on January 16, 2008