The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica (CA) data leak scandal has provoked a debate on whether the social networking giant can be trusted any more. Leading Silicon Valley figures such as WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton have deleted their Facebook accounts, and tweeted a call to action with the hashtag #DeleteFacebook.
This has also triggered a larger debate on whether social networking and privacy are mutually exclusive. Is there no way one can be a part of an online community without surrendering one’s data? Or is Facebook’s model of offering connectivity in exchange for the opportunity to commercially harvest people’s data the only possible one?
One book that answers this question with clarity is Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget . Though it came out in 2010, Lanier, a computer scientist and tech philosopher, anticipates Facebook’s present-day problems, pointing out that whenever “Facebook has attempted to turn the social graph into a profit centre in the past, it has created ethical disasters.” CA stealing Facebook’s user data to help political parties is the perfect example of using the social graph as a profit centre, if we define ‘profit’ as a form of gain that also includes political power.
Not only does Lanier paint a sobering picture of Facebook’s moral bankruptcy, he demonstrates that there was nothing inevitable about the digital design of Facebook. “You could always create a list of links to your friends on your website, and you could always send e-mails to a circle of friends announcing whatever you cared to,” he writes. He goes on to show that there were, and are, design alternatives that do not force people to adopt “multiple choice personalities”. But the trade-off with such designs is that they “would make it harder to use database techniques to create instant lists of people who are, say, emo, single, and affluent.” And without such a database, Facebook wouldn’t be a viable business.
You Are Not a Gadget is a brilliant exposition of the political and cultural ramifications of Web 2.0, a term that denotes the second layer on top of the World Wide Web, such as social networking sites and Wikipedia, that has come to dictate how we navigate the Internet. A useful companion to it is Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). Though focussed on mass media, his critical framework has the depth to illuminate the dynamics of Internet-enabled distraction technologies that rule the lives of so many today.
