Regardless of whether it makes sense or not, the idea of a ‘Facebook killer’ has broad appeal. This hopeful narrative of the underdog, circulated by sneering pundits and anxious privacy activists alike, is supported by many people who have experienced harassment, humiliation and other problems associated with overexposure on the world’s largest social network.
Given this unfufilled desire, it’s not surprising that Ello’s marketing as an alternative to Facebook has sparked a flash of popular interest, which has in turn led to an angry backlash in the tech community. Commentary on Ello has oscillated between ingratiating praise for challenging Facebook’s dominance and accusations of hypocrisy and chicanery to do with its lack of a business model and its founders accepting VC funding. Both the boosterism and the backlash show the difficulty of launching new social networks at a time where the largest internet companies function not just as products and services, but as vehicles for ideological supremacy.
To Ello’s detriment, their marketing is almost entirely based on the common sense criticism of large internet companies offering free services: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” While often repeated as truth, this line is a tightly-packed cluster of questionable assumptions, none the least of which is that there’s no correlation between the way users are treated by a company and whether that company charges money for its service. If the users of Facebook are a product, it’s because Facebook’s value comes from rationalising and indexing social identity and relationships, not because Facebook is free or because advertisers are involved. Sure, Facebook lets advertisers in, but it’s Facebook itself who owns the data, not the companies wanting to get at it.
Playing on anger and fear of Facebook is surely the main reason why Ello has gone viral, but this message actually undermines what they are building and its potential value. Facebook exists and will continue to exist in the foreseeable future. What Ello represents is an attempt to shuffle and redraw existing design concepts; an attempt to start new conversations and promote new ways of creating and sharing content online. Facebook has little relevance to this mission, unless Ello’s goal is to grow their network to the scale of multiple millions of users and compete with existing platforms, which would include Tumblr and Twitter as well as Facebook. If that were really the case, Ello’s marketing rings hollow, and the accusations of hypocrisy are well founded.
Attempts to build an ethical narrative in opposition to Facebook have been largely unsuccessful. App.net has struggled to engage with a diverse and active audience. Diaspora promised an ambitious world-changing project and was unable to deliver it. Part of the problem here is that the idea of replicating the Facebook experience in a more ethical form may not be possible, because the Facebook experience is inherently based on surveillance and objectification.
Such criticisms of Facebook—aimed at promoting alternatives to Facebook—adopt a cyber utopianism around privacy which is a relatively weak stance. Though they often raise valid points, they tend to miss the basic emotional and ethical core of what frustrates people about Facebook, which has to do with consent.
Facebook has always had a problem with consent. Partly, this is simply a matter of scale, but it also has a lot to do with the unconscious bias and attitudes of its founders which are deeply embedded in the company. Facebook’s origins actually have less to do with the existing social networks of its time than is generally credited. Zuckerberg’s first viral hit was FaceMash, a ‘hot or not’ app which provided the foundation and impetus for what later became Facebook. Zuckerberg did not hesitate to hack into university file servers and harvest pictures of female students as fodder for his app. Such disdain for permission and active consent is part of the corporate ‘DNA’ of Facebook and continues to this day.
Facebook’s gendered dynamic is explored in depth by Kate Losse in ‘The Boy Kings’, a memoir about the early days of the company, charting Losse’s rise from a $20/hour customer support role through product management to eventually becoming a ghost writer for Zuckerberg himself. Tech industry pundits have accused Losse of perfidy and overreaction, faulting her for an “inescapable humanities perspective” and lacking sufficient empirical evidence to back up her claims. But these ideas about the book are misreadings, bordering on critical illiteracy. Where men in technology have framed Losse’s memoir as gossip, scouring the history of Facebook for specific events and incidents, the sexism she appears most interested in is structural, reflecting unconscious bias rather than mouthbreathing mysoginy.
Losse’s gaze is anthropological, her commentary curious as much as it is critical. She documents the early culture of Facebook as a collaboration between hackers and frat-boys, their obsession with growth, accumulation and technical prowess being the flip-side of lacking conscious awareness of power and privelege. A world where “everyone was the same and everyone was equal, but everyone was defined as young engineers competing for the same crown.” Losse describes the deep ambivalence she experienced through having these insights while working for a company whose world-changing mission was expected to inspire unquestioning support amongst employees; a company whose founder spoke of “revolutions”, but whose Facebook profile under Books stated: “I don’t read.”
Facebook’s brand and visual identity connotes a cool, unabashed neutrality. Rather than truly disrupting existing ideals, this bland and neutral aesthetic reinforces Facebook’s coexistence with existing corporate, financial and political power structures. Despite Zuckerberg’s claims, Facebook is not a revolution but a retrenchment.
It’s possible to go further than this. As a technology for rationalising and recording the details of individual people en masse, Facebook actually operates as a material extension of the modern nation state.
One of the key developments marking the rise of modern nation states was the process of reducing the complexities of traditional societies into forms that were legible to centralised bureacracy and planning. Standardisation of naming customs and land inheritance traditions made things like taxation and conscription possible at a mass scale. This marked the beginnings of a globalised process of homogenisation based on rationalising and recording information about large populations. In ‘Seeing Like A State,’ James C. Scott documents the evolution of this rationalisation into the high-modernist utopian projects of the 20th Century. He shows how the necessary abstractions of centrally managed social planning have very often led to widespread disaster, particularly when deployed by authoritarian state power.
Free market capitalism is very often framed as an antidote to these problems, which misses the central reason why many high-modernist schemes have failed. Authoritarian states were able to implement these schemes because of their ability to exert repressive control, but the vision for these schemes was always optimistic, grounded in ideals of progress, emancipation and improving the human condition. In order to be legible to the market, local variety must be commensurable to quantity rather than quality, favouring simplified order rather than resilience and complexity. This homogenisation reproduces many of the same problems which plagued earlier state-driven reforms.
Facebook’s vision to make the world more open and connected is founded on a similar kind of idealism and optimism to the schemes of high-modernism. Rather than taming nature and society in a material sense, Facebook is focused on the ‘social graph’, turning the unique connections and relationships between individual people into fixed vertices in a web of objectification. Such a slick rationalisation of personal identity enables vast possibilities for simplifying and optimising conversations between people and sharing information amongst social groups, but the side effects of this—depression, anxiety, addiction, stalking and harassment—are only just starting to be understood.
The recent controversy over Facebook’s emotional manipulation study is an indicator of one particular direction in which Facebook could fail the public on a massive, high-modernist scale, emerging from the recent trend of corporations shifting from targeting individuals towards modelling them. When systematically analysed, the kinds of details collected by Facebook provide the capability for covertly engineering public opinion through subtle algorithmic manipulation.
There is already empirical evidence that Facebook can influence large scale voting behaviour. In 2010, a study concluded that changes to Facebook’s user interface encouraging people to vote in congressional midterms caused an additional 340,000 votes to be cast. It doesn’t require a leap of imagination to evoke a digital gerrymandering scenario where Facebook’s algorithms push a preselected cohort of users towards voting for a particular candidate, or more disturbingly—in the vein of the emotional manipulation study—seeding users over a period of months with operant conditioning that associates selected political ideologies with specific emotions. Even if it was accidental rather than intentional, such manipulation would have far reaching consequences that are difficult to predict.
Even if we don’t see such direct abuses of power in the short term, we must still change our perception of what these companies are, beyond mere products and services. Bruce Sterling pointed out in 2012 that the largest internet companies—Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple—have already landgrabbed a huge chunk of territory which was previously the domain of the traditional nation state. As Sterling describes them, these ‘Stacks’ are on a mission “to take over the Internet and render it irrelevant,” with the primary objective being to deliver value to their shareholders.
If the ‘Stacks’ or ‘Data States’ are remaking the traditional nation state, it is not just through material and economic power but also through an emerging ideology of corporate nationhood: “companies as countries.” As Kate Losse argues, Facebook’s mission is to sweep away traditional boundaries of ethnicity and regional borders in favour of a logic of free and open sharing. Ironically, of course, this ideology is not grounded in a commitment to universal humanist ideals, but instead is based on the very obvious biases of the young priveleged American men in Silicon Valley whose adolescent concept of ‘meritocracy’ fails to withstand even the most basic critical scrutiny.
The construction of the modern state develops from a central contradiction. The state enables enormous opportunities for freedom, but also restricts, subjugates and controls freedom, a tension at the heart of all democratic systems. In their surge towards control of the internet, Facebook and the other ‘Stacks’ show a fractal-like reproduction of this same contradiction.
Over the past decade, the extraordinary growth of Facebook and the other ‘Stacks’ has happened so quickly that most people don’t understand what it means. These walled gardens have spread—somewhat unconstrained—across the global internet, but increasingly, they’re starting to butt up against the restrictions and strictures of national boundaries and legal jurisdictions.
The incompatibility of national borders and the global internet is fast becoming the central technological and political problem of the current decade. In public, Zuckerberg has prefered to frame this issue in the idealistic language of potential. “When one billion people are offline, the whole world is being robbed of their creativity and ideas,” he said during a recent visit to India.
In the same week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt was more blunt about the prospects for the future of the global network. “The simplest outcome is we're going to end up breaking the Internet,” he said during a US Senate roundtable event in Palo Alto, referring to the waning trust in American technology from many countries worldwide as a consequence of ongoing revelations about NSA orchestrated subversion of networks and mass collection of metadata.
Schmidt’s remarks could be read as pragmatic, but another reading is that Google is ‘subtweeting’ the US Government, demanding that they keep the global internet free from interference, or else cede control of it to a consortium of companies who will be more effective in keeping it open for business. Google—and by extension, Facebook as well—would like nothing more than to eventually force Washington to comply with their emerging paradigm of “companies as countries,” joining more and more governments around the world in outsourcing key social services and programs to the giant tech corporations. This, of course, is part of the reason why Google is currently being threatened with antitrust liability by European legislators. Meanwhile in America, the stage is set for an emerging public relations war between the ‘Boy Kings’ of Silicon Valley and the incumbent military industrial and petrochemical interests whose power is a direct consequence of the wastage, profligacy and corruption within the present system of government.
As Facebook becomes more politicised and more globally powerful in this way, it no longer makes sense to speak of new apps ‘being the next Facebook’. As well as the impossibility of catching up to a billion users, apps like Ello are competing with a moving target. In 2014, Facebook’s user interface is already beginning to fragment into a many-headed hydra of single purpose mobile messaging apps. In several years time Facebook is unlikely to exist in anything close to its current form.
Ultimately, it’s not the user interface that defines what Facebook is, it’s the data. People don’t just use Facebook as a service or utility; they’re also expected to buy into Facebook’s vision for making society more open and connected. A Facebook nation.
Short of unprecedented technological change or economic violence, the only entities with the power to effectively challenge or compete with these collosal data states are the traditional nation states themselves. The challenge for us now is to identify which of these is the lesser of two evils.