I feel as though I shouldn’t post anything here until I’ve at least posted about The Academy, and maybe until I’ve done everything to follow up on the day, but the former is going to take a while and the latter is: impossible. Besides, my need to post this missive about Facebook somehow supersedes everything I do online, including the Academy post I haven’t yet typed up.

I’m spurning Facebook as much as I can now, and this post explains why, as well as how else I’ll share the information I so love, in case you’re interested in following that trail. If you’re chasing notes about The Academy, festival guest Sophie Langley has posted some here and here.

Privacy Paranoia Mixed with Boredom

Check out this freaky video, in which Facebook’s connections with the CIA and the innocuously named Information Awareness Office (IAO) are illustrated:
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*SPOILER ALERT* According to this clip:

The IAO stated its mission was to gather as much information as possible about everyone, in a centralised location, for easy perusal by the United States government.

So, according to this clip, Facebook are doing much more than selling our data to advertising firms, which is bad enough: they are making that data available to gummint authorities, presumably for the purpose of civil surveillance.

Now, I’ve written before about wanting to move away from Facebook and not stuck to my Steakzooka, but this time it’s different. Until I can confirm evidence that contradicts the conclusions in this clip, I’m too worried about my privacy, and the affect of its exploitation on my life and the lives of others, to abide remaining as heavily involved with Facebook as I have been in the past.

I’m concerned about Facebook’s advertising-based business model: we feed them data, they feed that to advertisers, then the advertisers feed it back to us, perfectly catered to manipulate our consumption choices, then we talk about those choices on Facebook, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, etc., etc. We get enough advertising drivel already, and it saps our will to differentiate between products, rendering us susceptible to the will of the few large companies who control most of our production.

Those are now the least of my concerns.

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Call me paranoid, but there are other ways to share information on the internet and, for now, I’d rather be the one in charge of who I share that information with.

Privacy concerns aside, I’m moving away from Facebook for a much simpler reason: boredom. Facebook homogenises the way we share information, and it’s just stopped being fun for me: post a link here to illustrate your political acuity, ‘like’ a post there to congratulate your friends for the ideology you share, tag yourself in a funny avatar because you’re, like, totally removed from how your face represents your identity. Whatever.

Alternatives: Introducing ‘SIB’s Miscellaneous Miscellany’

Until I can be sure that my information is safe with Facebook I’m going to take my online activity as far away from the site as I can manage without compromising my ability to communicate with as many people at the same time as possible.

The obvious alternative to Facebook is Diaspora, for which I grabbed a sneaky alpha invite recently from Rohan Harris. Diaspora aspires to be Facebook with two fundamental differences: you can store your data on your own server, so Diaspora will never own your data, much less extract it and sell it; within the network you can choose who you share your data with according to Aspects. (Actually I think you can do this with Facebook’s Groups or Lists, but I’ve never really used these or known them to be used. Anyway.)

Great, but the general sharing model is almost identical to Facebook’s and (as Adam Ford said in a Diaspora comment) it’s not clear why Diaspora is even good, let alone better than Facebook. Adam described it as a ‘big echoey room’, and that’s what it is right now: considerably minimal, lacking certain functionality we’ve come to expect from such a networking site (stupid games, somewhere to post your androgynous, Hipstamatic self portraits, and your network of 67–5000 disinterested acquaintances).

So, Diaspora is not going to fulfil my need to over-share with relative strangers.

The less obvious but more fun and creative alternative is to begin sharing my Facebook links and thoughts here, on SIB. I will call the post category ‘SIB’s Miscellaneous Miscellany‘.

I was going to say ‘fun, creative and original‘, but that would have been a lie. What I intend to do from now on is based on a rudimentary understanding of ‘link-blogging’, which used to be popular in the late 90s, before sites like Facebook and Twitter made it fundamentally easier to post annotated links to pages you find interesting on the internet.

My intention is the same: I will filter the content I wade through on the internet, produce a digest of links with annotations, and email a link to the post to the people I’d like to share it with. I might also start using and building up my mailing list for this purpose. If you’re reading this and would like to be on the SIB mailing list, shoot me an email.

This conveniently brings me to the first step I’ve taken to get away from Google because of similar privacy concerns: finding a reliable, halfway intuitive, independent webmail provider or a web-hosting company that’s not affiliated with Google. I think my web-host (JustHost) is affiliated with Google. I actually don’t know what I mean by that, except that I’m equally paranoid they’ll scan my email and sell the data to advertising firms or, ya know, the gummint.

Thanks to Esther Anatolitis for pointing me in the direction of Fastmail.fm, an Australian webmail service that appears to offer all that I was getting from Gmail, sans evil #robots. I’ll explain my fear of the #robots in a forthcoming Gmail post.

Questions

Am I just being dumb/silly/paranoid? Do you think it’s futile to try to escape these companies’ reach? Do you share my concern about the way these internet interfaces will influence the way we consume information and culture?
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TINA was on this weekend. TINA, or This is Not Art, is a festival for independent, emerging and experimental art, based in Newcastle, New South Wales. The festival is made up of other festivals, of which I am most closely involved with National Young Writers’ Festival (NYWF).

What happens at NYWF is a whole bunch of writers, editors, illustrators, publishers, and anyone else you can think of who’s involved with writing and publishing, converge on the sleepy working-class town of Newcastle and talk about things they do. Very interesting for people who do similar things, but not so interesting for most of the town.

This was my fifth or sixth TINA, and each year I still come away feeling over-stimulated, under slept and over pickled. Usually I can’t string a thought together for days after the festival, and wallow instead in what is colloquially known as the TINA blues.

This year I’m going to blog about some of the half-formed ideas I came back with, starting with a conclusion about Facebook you have perhaps already reached and disregarded. I’ll tag them with Various and Miscellaneous Ill-formed Thoughts From TiNA.

This pearler about Facebook didn’t come directly from TINA, but from reading a sort of personal expose of Mark Zuckerberg in The New Yorker on the plane.

According to the article, Zuckerberg’s motives and ambitions are noble: to make the world a more open, honest and transparent place. I don’t buy it – it all sounds a bit like spin, especially now I understand that Facebook users’ openness about their identity and interests is fundamental to Facebook’s business model. This openness is what makes our personal information so valuable to marketers and advertisers.

And this exchange, between a fellow Harvard student when Zuckerberg was establishing Harvard Connect, the precursor to Facebook, doesn’t give me confidence he’s in this for other people’s good:

So I’m going to pull back some way from using the site: I’m no Tyler Durden, but I’m not comfortable with my personal information being sold to unscrupulous advertisers.

How do you feel about all this? Am I being paranoid or precious?

Again with the Monty Python, but this clip illustrates the following post as well as it did the post about my flesh wound:

Brian Ward disappeared from Facebook the other day, while we were in the middle of a debate. I was surprised by this, because Brian runs a great-value blog, a lot of which is dedicated to holding other citizen journalists to account. I’m bothering to post about it because I feel like it’s necessary to return the service.

Brian posted a link to an article about the new batch of deadly drugs going around at the moment, accompanied by a comment that people deserved what they got if they took dubious drugs from a dubious dealer. I would post the exact link and comment, but of course I no longer have access to Brian’s Facebook wall.

I said the comment was inordinately harsh, that some people might not be in a position to make a better decision and should not be judged so fiercely for making a bad judgement call. Someone else got involved and the debate quickly swung away from the initial issue to focus on the morality of dealing, something I feel entirely differently about: dealing dubious drugs is morally reprehensible; consuming them is not – and is certainly not deserving of the scorn demonstrated in Brian’s dismissive comment.

It’s exactly this sort of narrow-mindedness that causes problems in drug culture: people who are ignorant of the complexities involved in the decisions surrounding drugs make generalisations that tar the whole community with the wrong brush. Drug users are not all reckless and irresponsible – many use them safely, and I consider it a shame that such users bear the brunt of the stigma that results from those who are irresponsible, and from those who shame them.

Of course, I never got as far as explaining this to Brian. When I came back to the debate and couldn’t access his page, I thought maybe an error had occurred. I added him again, but my advances were rejected. I tried again the next morning. Then and now, when I search for his name he no longer comes up in the results.

At first I thought Brian had a massive dummy spit because I didn’t agree with him¹, but as I’ve gone about drafting the post I’ve realised I should give him the benefit of the doubt, as his Facebook page appears to no longer exist. Maybe something really has gone wrong: I’ve emailed him to find out, but have not heard back.

Of course it’s entirely up to Brian whether he allows me to see his Facebook page, and the truth is that we’re not exactly ‘friends’ – we have met once, through a mutual friend. But I had assumed Brian was reading the Facebook definition of ‘friend’ rather loosely – he did, after all, either extend a friendship request to me, or accept one from me, I can’t remember which now.

Maybe I was wrong in assuming that Brian was using Facebook for reasons other than to keep in touch with friends – I have seen him chime in on debates elsewhere, so I thought it would have extended to Facebook. Plus, that he published such a provocative and opinion-laden link suggests that he uses Facebook for debate and information extending beyond his immediate friend circles.

Brian, if something really has gone wrong with Facebook and you’d like to rejoin the debate here, I would certainly welcome that.

1. from what I’ve read on his blog, he doesn’t take criticism well