permaculture

["Felicity Wright" <flickwright@ozemail.com.au>]

This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday January 14 2008 on p6 of the 
G2 comment & features section. It was last updated at 07:37 on January 14 
2008. 

With friends like these ...
Facebook has 59 million users - and 2 million new ones join each week. But 
you won't catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not 
now that he knows the politics of the people behind the social networking 
site 
  a.. Tom Hodgkinson 
  b.. The Guardian, 
  c.. Monday January 14 2008 
I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes 
itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you". 
But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the 
people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the 
imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the 
pub? 

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? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at 
home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from 
connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

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. ("I like Facebook," said another friend. "I got a shag out of it.") 
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. Witness the cover line on Dennis 
Publishing's new Facebook magazine: "How To Double Your Friends List."

It seems, though, that I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time of 
writing Facebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in the 
UK, Facebook's third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That's 59 
million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information and 
consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing about. Right 
now, 2 million new people join each week. At the present rate of growth, 
Facebook will have more than 200 million active users by this time next year. 
And I would predict that, if anything, its rate of growth will accelerate 
over the coming months. As its spokesman Chris Hughes says: "It's embedded 
itself to an extent where it's hard to get rid of."

All of the above would have been enough to make me reject Facebook for ever. 
But there are more reasons to hate it. Many more. 

Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the funding, a group 
of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly thought out ideology 
that they are hoping to spread around the world. Facebook is one 
manifestation of this ideology. 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. 

Although the project was initially conceived by media cover star Mark 
Zuckerberg, the real face behind Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley 
venture capitalist and futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three 
board members on Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third 
investor called Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners 
(more on him later). Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook when Harvard 
students Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to meet him in 
San Francisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the site. Thiel now 
reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook's current valuation of 
$15bn, would be worth more than $1bn. There is much debate on who exactly 
were the original co-founders of Facebook, but whoever they were, Zuckerberg 
is the only one left on the board, although Hughes and Moskowitz still work 
for the company.

Thiel is widely regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital 
scene as a libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual 
banking system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for 
himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital Management and 
a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg Markets magazine 
recently called him "one of the most successful hedge fund managers in the 
country". He has made money by betting on rising oil prices and by correctly 
predicting that the dollar would weaken. He and his absurdly wealthy Silicon 
Valley mates have recently been labelled "The PayPal Mafia" by Fortune 
magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and 
a $500,000 McLaren supercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely 
competitive. He has been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury 
when losing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitveness, saying: 
"Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser."

But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a 
futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A 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. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing 
journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux 
("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an 
internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack 
MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls 
himself "way libertarian".

TheVanguard is run by one Rod D Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel 
greatly admires. On the site, Thiel says: "Rod is one of our nation's leading 
minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. He possesses 
a more complete understanding of America than most executives have of their 
own businesses." 

This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision 
for the world: "TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who 
believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the 
best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, 
especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies that will 
"reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes its politics as 
"Reaganite/Thatcherite". The chairman's message says: "Today we'll teach 
MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the leftwing media some lessons 
they never imagined."

So, Thiel's politics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened 
to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His 
philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened 
thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound 
life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes' famous characterisation of life as 
"nasty, brutish and short", and towards a new virtual world where we have 
conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that 
PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real 
manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a 
way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets 
puts it like this: "For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable 
people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe."

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.

Thiel's philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, 
proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard 
reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another 
without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in 
the case of Thiel's virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you 
need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence 
financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. Girard is a 
regular at Thiel's intellectual soirees. What you don't hear about in Thiel's 
philosophy, by the way, are old-fashioned real-world concepts such as art, 
beauty, love, pleasure and truth.

The internet is immensely appealing to neocons such as Thiel because it 
promises a certain sort of freedom in human relations and in business, 
freedom from pesky national laws, national boundaries and suchlike. The 
internet opens up a world of free trade and laissez-faire expansion. Thiel 
also seems to approve of offshore tax havens, and claims that 40% of the 
world's wealth resides in places such as Vanuatu, the Cayman Islands, Monaco 
and Barbados. I think it's fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is 
against tax. He also likes the globalisation of digital culture because it 
makes the banking overlords hard to attack: "You can't have a workers' 
revolution to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu," he says. 

If life in the past was nasty, brutish and short, then in the future Thiel 
wants to make it much longer, and to this end he has also invested in a firm 
that is exploring life-extension technologies. He has pledged £3.5m to a 
Cambridge-based gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey, who is searching for the 
key to immortality. Thiel is also on the board of advisers of something 
called the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. From its 
fantastical website, the following: "The Singularity is the technological 
creation of smarter-than-human intelligence. There are several technologies 
... heading in this direction ... Artificial Intelligence ... direct 
brain-computer interfaces ... genetic engineering ... different technologies 
which, if they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the 
creation of smarter-than-human intelligence."

So by his own admission, 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. Facebook is a deliberate 
experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young thing in the 
neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out techno-utopian 
fantasies. Not someone I want to help get any richer.

The third board member of Facebook is Jim Breyer. He is a partner in the 
venture capital firm Accel Partners, who put $12.7m into Facebook in April 
2005. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he 
is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). 
Now these are the people who are really making things happen in America, 
because they invest in the new young talent, the Zuckerbergs and the like. 
Facebook's most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock 
Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock's senior 
partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is 
also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What's In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and 
check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA. 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, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies 
and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help 
deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US 
Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions".

The US defence department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying 
easier. "We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries," defence 
secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. "We need to make the leap into the 
information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation 
efforts." In-Q-Tel's first chairman was Gilman Louie, who served on the board 
of the NVCA with Breyer. Another key figure in the In-Q-Tel team is Anita K 
Jones, former director of defence research and engineering for the US 
department of defence, and - with Breyer - board member of BBN Technologies. 
When she left the US department of defence, Senator Chuck Robb paid her the 
following tribute: "She brought the technology and operational military 
communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the 
battlefield into the next century."

Now even if you don't buy the idea that Facebook is some kind of extension of 
the American imperialist programme crossed with a massive 
information-gathering tool, there is no way of denying that as a business, it 
is pure mega-genius. Some net nerds have suggsted that its $15bn valuation is 
excessive, but I would argue that if anything that is too modest. Its scale 
really is dizzying, and the potential for growth is virtually limitless. "We 
want everyone to be able to use Facebook," says the impersonal voice of Big 
Brother on the website. I'll bet they do. It is Facebook's enormous potential 
that led Microsoft to buy 1.6% for $240m. A recent rumour says that Asian 
investor Lee Ka-Shing, said to be the ninth richest man in the world, has 
bought 0.4% of Facebook for $60m.

The creators of the site need do very little bar fiddle with the programme. 
In the main, they simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts 
voluntarily upload their ID details, photographs and lists of their favourite 
consumer objects. Once in receipt of this vast database of human beings, 
Facebook then simply has to sell the information back to advertisers, or, as 
Zuckerberg puts it in a recent blog post, "to try to help people share 
information with their friends about things they do on the web". And indeed, 
this is precisely what's happening. On November 6 last year, Facebook 
announced that 12 global brands had climbed on board. They included 
Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, Verizon, Sony Pictures and Condé Nast. All trained in 
marketing bullshit of the highest order, their representatives made excited 
comments along the following lines:

"With Facebook Ads, our brands can become a part of the way users communicate 
and interact on Facebook," said Carol Kruse, vice president, global 
interactive marketing, the Coca-Cola Company. 

"We view this as an innovative way to cultivate relationships with millions 
of Facebook users by enabling them to interact with Blockbuster in 
convenient, relevant and entertaining ways," said Jim Keyes, Blockbuster 
chairman and CEO. "This is beyond creating advertising impressions. This is 
about Blockbuster participating in the community of the consumer so that, in 
return, consumers feel motivated to share the benefits of our brand with 
their friends."

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

Now, by comparision with Facebook, newspapers, for example, begin to look 
hopelessly outdated as a business model. A newspaper sells advertising space 
to businesses looking to sell stuff to their readers. But the system is far 
less sophisticated than Facebook for two reasons. One is that newspapers have 
to put up with the irksome expense of paying journalists to provide the 
content. Facebook gets its content for free. The other is that Facebook can 
target advertising with far greater precision than a newspaper. Admit on 
Facebook that your favourite film is This Is Spinal Tap, and when a Spinal 
Tap-esque movie comes out, you can be sure that they'll be sending ads your 
way.

It's true that Facebook recently got into hot water with its Beacon 
advertising programme. Users were notified that one of their friends had made 
a purchase at certain online shops; 46,000 users felt that this level of 
advertising was intrusive, and signed a petition called "Facebook! Stop 
invading my privacy!" to say so. Zuckerberg apologised on his company blog. 
He has written that they have now changed the system from "opt-out" to 
"opt-in". But I suspect that this little rebellion about being so ruthlessly 
commodified will soon be forgotten: after all, there was a national outcry by 
the civil liberties movement when the idea of a police force was mooted in 
the UK in the mid 19th century.

Futhermore, have you Facebook users ever actually read the privacy policy? It 
tells you that you don't have much privacy. Facebook pretends to be about 
freedom, but isn't it really more like an ideologically motivated virtual 
totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed the UK's? 
Thiel and the rest have created their own country, a country of consumers.

Now, you may, like Thiel and the other new masters of the cyberverse, find 
this social experiment tremendously exciting. Here at last is the 
Enlightenment state longed for since the Puritans of the 17th century sailed 
away to North America, a world where everyone is free to express themselves 
as they please, according to who is watching. National boundaries are a thing 
of the past and everyone cavorts together in freewheeling virtual space. 
Nature has been conquered through man's boundless ingenuity. Yes, and you may 
decide to send genius investor Thiel all your money, and certainly you'll be 
waiting impatiently for the public flotation of the unstoppable Facebook.

Or you might reflect that you don't really want to be part of this 
heavily-funded programme to create an arid global virtual republic, where 
your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into 
commodites on sale to giant global brands. You may decide that you don't want 
to be part of this takeover bid for the world.

For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as 
unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook 
doing something useful, such as reading books. Why would I want to waste my 
time on Facebook when I still haven't read Keats' Endymion? And when there 
are seeds to be sown in my own back yard? I don't want to retreat from 
nature, I want to reconnect with it. Damn air-conditioning! And if I want to 
connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece of 
technology. It's free, it's easy and it delivers a uniquely individual 
experience in sharing information: it's called talking.


Facebook's privacy policy
Just for fun, try substituting the words 'Big Brother' whenever you read the 
word 'Facebook'

1 We will advertise at you

"When you use Facebook, you may set up your personal profile, form 
relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form groups, set 
up events, add applications, and transmit information through various 
channels. We collect this information so that we can provide you the service 
and offer personalised features."

2 You can't delete anything

"When you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior 
version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the prior 
version of that information."

3 Anyone can glance at your intimate confessions

"... we cannot and do not guarantee that user content you post on the site 
will not be viewed by unauthorised persons. We are not responsible for 
circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on the 
site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal, copies of user 
content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages or if other users 
have copied or stored your user content."

4 Our marketing profile of you will be unbeatable

"Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as 
newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the 
Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg, photo tags) in 
order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalised 
experience."

5 Opting out doesn't mean opting out 

"Facebook reserves the right to send you notices about your account even if 
you opt out of all voluntary email notifications."

6 The CIA may look at the stuff when they feel like it

"By using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data transferred 
to and processed in the United States ... We may be required to disclose user 
information pursuant to lawful requests, such as subpoenas or court orders, 
or in compliance with applicable laws. We do not reveal information until we 
have a good faith belief that an information request by law enforcement or 
private litigants meets applicable legal standards. 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."