Identity Fascism: Why I'm quitting Facebook

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Identity Fascism: Why I’m quitting Facebook

The time has come for me to leave Facebook. Having spent the best part of 5 years on it, it’s not a decision I’ve taken lightly, but recent events have shifted the nexus between its cost and its benefit to the point where I no longer think it’s worthwhile to stay.

Facebook itself has changed, from being a private network between friends to being a commercial experience, where your supposed “relationship” with brands and TV shows are intermingled with your relationships with people. This is perverse. But this, and other changes have made Facebook, for me, a place I no longer wish to inhabit.

Consider this quote from Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook.

“You have one identity,” [Zuckerberg] emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”

In time, this statement will seem as spectacularly wrong-headed as Thomas J. Watson’s (possibly apocryphal) 1943 statement that “there is a world market for maybe five computers”.

But it is a statement that drips with insight into the thinking of Mark Zuckerberg and his camarilla. We will have only one identity online, and it will be one controlled by Facebook. This is identity fascism, and the deliberately complex privacy settings and the now-regular manner in which their are opened without my consent shows that it will be imposed by force. Even today, after I had used the Facebook Privacy Scanner to tighten my privacy settings last week, I found again had been opened up, and not by me. This is the last straw.

My identity - both online and off - will be constructed on my terms.

As an independent, middle-class male living a reasonably privileged existence in a developed country, I am probably affected little by any breaches in my privacy - certainly compared to, say, a woman escaping a violent relationship, for whom the release of certain private details might enable her attacker to trace her down.

The other concern I have about Facebook is the sheer amount of data aggregated about me. Facebook’s reach now extends throughout the web, and each interraction with a Facebook enabled web page provides another data-point about me, collected through the cookies in my web browser. Data-mining on this information may make it possible to find out information about me that I had not intended to reveal. Again, this probably won’t affect me too much, but for a person who the data-mining computers are able to infer had an abortion, or that their car is breaking down, it would be different.

Our freedom is diminished in the degree to which other entities know more about us than we know about ourselves. This is the real danger in the data-mining - that our psychological triggers, our hope and our fears, both conscious and subconscious can be inferred from our actions, and that deep within some computer somewhere will be information about us that we don’t even know ourselves. When that is used to advertise to us, we cease to even be free actors in a consumerist society, but become, to a degree, automatons. Such a development must be resisted at every step.

The other reason I’m quitting Facebook is to recover some balance in my relationships. The siren call of Facebook is that you can maintain “relationships” with people in your life merely by dipping your toe into the stream of bon mots that flow past. I don’t think is true.

We can fool ourselves thus, but ultimately, any relationship is valued by the effort that you put into it. I hope that removing myself from Facebook will force me to pick up the phone more often and write more emails, and hell, even visit friends with whom my contact has withered. Life is bigger than the flow of items in your Newsfeed.