There’s furor over the latest revelation that the world’s largest corporate social media site, Facebook, sells personal data to those who want to manipulate its users. The story — this time — is about Cambridge Analytica, a psychographic analysis organization which claims to be able to drive voter behavior. Many people have weighed in, so I won’t say much here. But I want to pick up on a point made by Adrian Chen in The New Yorker:
Just because something isn’t new doesn’t mean that it’s not outrageous. It is unquestionably a bad thing that we carry out much of our online lives within a data-mining apparatus that sells influence to the highest bidder. My initial reaction to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, though, was jaded; the feeling came from having seen how often, in the past, major public outcries about online privacy led nowhere. In most cases, after the calls to delete Facebook die down and the sternly worded congressional letters stop being written, things pretty much go back to normal. Too often, privacy scandals boil down to a superficial fix to some specific breach or leak, without addressing how the entire system undermines the possibility of control. What exciting big-data technique will be revealed, six years from now, as a democracy-shattering mind-control tool?
His point about “the entire system” is precisely why I started the S-MAP several years back. Or more precisely, the “entire system” is why so many alternative social makers do what they do: make new social media systems that allow for the pleasures of connecting with others while staving off so many of the deleterious practices associated with corporate social media: surveillance, data mining, the sale (or leak) of personal information to third parties, and above all the manipulation of our sociality.
Surveillance capitalism — a system where every move we make through space and thought is tracked, analyzed, and sold — is the system we need to eradicate. There can be no other way. As Chen notes, the short-term answer to Cambridge Analytica/Facebook will be a “superficial fix,” but the real answer needs to be the wholesale dismantling of a system that sees you and me and everyone we love as objects to be cognitively and emotionally dissected.
For now, #deletefacebook will trend on Twitter (sadly, another corporate social media system), but it’s started to trend elsewhere: on Mastodon, the federated microblog. On Twister, the totally decentralized, peer-to-peer microblog. I haven’t looked, but perhaps it’s trending on Dark Web social networking sites.
It is only after we leave corporate social media behind and take on the work of socializing social media — making it our own, owning it, democratically administering it, democratically improving it — that we will even begin to address the system as such.
And then, or better at the same time, let’s move to the eradicate the fusion of money, media, and power that is our contemporary democratic form of governance.