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Facebook Privacy Alert

by Ben Atlas on 05.9.2010.7:18am · 0 comments

On the subject of Facebook Deservedly Under Attack but for the Wrong Reasons, now this. Facebook privacy heads up! As of today, there is a new privacy setting called “instant personalization” which shares data with non-Facebook websites, and is automatically set to “allow”. Go to:

account/privacy settings/applications & Websites/instant personalization → (uncheck “allow”)

Please copy and re-post because if you “uncheck” this and your friends don’t, your friends are still sharing info about you. (via Arvind Narayanan)

Facebook Deservedly Under Attack but for the Wrong Reasons

by Ben Atlas on 05.8.2010.10:07am · 2 comments

First there was the post by Thomas Baekda – Facebook is Dying – Social is Not. Thomas predicts that the Facebook will collapse under the weight of it’s own overcomplexity. And just a day latter the Internet is abuzz about the Wired article by Ryan Singel – Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative. Ryan proposes the creation of an “open source” Facebook clones to respond to the painstakingly cataloged privacy breaches.

Not sure if Ryan Singel realizes that’s this is not just the Facebook, but this is how the entire Internet works. And going few decades earlier this was the deliberate mass use of computers to evaluate the popular tastes on the orders of the product marketeers and the henchmen behind the manipulative political rhetorics. And later people made the bargain with the devil during the evolution of the Internet. You give us your clicks and we’ll give you the free Internet and the free information. To support this “value proposition” we will channel the clicks through the highly centralized bottlenecks of servers where we’ll exchange the clicks for the ads. This is how Google works and almost every company on the Internet today.

So what Ryan Singel suggests with the “open source alternative” is that instead of Mark Zuckerberg presiding over the bottleneck oligarchy while the rest of the developers starve, there are multiple “open source” platforms with all the developers starving equally. This free culture is so ingrained and the expectation of the “free” is so corrosive that if tomorrow Mark Zuckerberg would propose a complete Facebook privacy in exchange for $1 a month subscription, the result is rather predictable. The problem is not with the Facebook but with the Frankenstein monster of the free Internet that destroyed the creative class and the value of the original work in the haze of the “creative commons” mashup. The only value proposition left is the centralized market where the information about your home, your family, your friends and your “likes” is sold to the advertisers or the political hacks.

The alternative is not another free for all platforms but the Internet-based on rewarding the creative efforts instead of linking or “liking” it, the internet based on the micropayments and subscriptions. The choice is stark; you can either pay for the products of the human imagination and creativity or give away your privacy and your freedom to the slavery service of the scalable, centralized oligarchy. In this light the “open source” is the problem not the solution.

In the Internet of the future Rob Dobi (his photo above) shouldn’t have to sell the t-shirts but will make a dignified living selling his beautiful photos.

LiveJournal as a Second-Order Expression

by Ben Atlas on 04.27.2010.4:30pm · 0 comments

There have been a lot of incoming links to the “pictures” over here. Is there anything more hideous than the LiveJournal Russian blogs, I mean besides the Facebook? But you know already by that name, there will be noting “live” in the journal (as there is no “face to face” or “books” in the Facebook). There is a quote by Jaron Lanier describing a “second-order expression”:

“The distinction between first-order expression and derivative expression is lost on true believers in the hive. First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a whole that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first order-expression.”

To be alive is to be born a human and what makes a human alive is that he or she is a world onto itself, a unique and complete cosmos. Conversely a derivative, fragmented and impulsive commentary is stillborn. Naturally a web site dedicated to this type of expression will try to overcompensate with the name. The first-order expression is not easy and rare but you can tell a lot by the direction.

Advertising as Worship

by Ben Atlas on 04.27.2010.9:07am · 0 comments

The graffiti artist known as Bansky, Sale Ends Today, from the LA Series.

As much as the content of our society is advertising, the content of an ancient empire was sacrifice. But could it be that we are as delusional about the usefulness of advertising as people were about the sacrifices? These things are very hard to measure, even given the spy grade tools of the Internet and this is precisely the point. As long as people believe that it works, it’s all that counts. Speaking of the propelled by the ads Internet, as long as there are budgets allocated to “the Google strategy”, “the Facebook strategy”, “Twitter strategy”, etc. – it’s “what’s people do”. And now this timely riff by Joseph Javier Perla – Facebook is a Ponzi Scheme. Joseph is right, there is the novelty curve. The Internet is pretty good for point of purchase links but terrible for the classic “let’s create the vibe and the image” branding. People will catch on eventually, they always do.

Jaron Lanier – How to Redeem Your Internet Life

by Ben Atlas on 03.19.2010.1:30pm · 0 comments

Jaron Lanier suggest in his book these redemptive rules to make your internet creative contribution meaningful:

“Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don’t yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won’t fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
If you are Twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine”.

The Social Media to Sharing is what Porn is to Love

by Ben Atlas on 02.13.2010.10:59am · 0 comments

We like to share, it’s in our DNA code, alas the Internet culture, especially the so-called Social Media interchangeably described as the “Web 2.0 religion”, takes this indispensable urge, hollows it out and displays it back to our species as a caricature of ourselves. As I wrote, we evolved due to our capacity to belong to a group as much as we did through the ruthless individual selection. We are the sharing animals, as in “my friend, I killed an elk today, let’s find some wood together so we can roast it” or “my friend, I saw a dream today, do you know how it explains the mythology of our tribe?” The key is not a “link” to the dream, but the shared interpretation. We are predisposed to sharing because that is how we construct the world or even survive physically. Fast forward to the dawn of the Internet when the idea of friendship is superseded with the “following” and the idea of sharing means spamming your “friends” with the links to the vapid Onion skits. The natural act of sharing is just a foreplay to a conversation. The sharing is unfulfilling and unfilled when it becomes a destination instead of a road.

And yes I am aware that in theory Web 2.0 is a conversational medium with the explicit feedback loop. But I am not talking theories here, I am talking the broadcast reality of how the tools are used. I am talking about the viral crap of the lowest common denominator, that literally spreads like a disease. Remember the warped phenomenon of the “dancing baby”? Well, it still endures in the literally and figuratively puke inducing Etrade commercials. Speaking of which, this distortion burrows its way into the essence of the American consumerist ethos, even a cursory scan of this year’s Superbowl commercials will show a trend towards the cheap and the vulgar laughs at the expense of the creative and the imaginative. Turns out that that the millions of dollars invested in the production would rather buy a quickie, viral ready giggle than an emotional (let alone intellectual) response. Welcome to the “LOL generation” gone mainstream. Share alike and like!

The Reasons I am Hanging Up on Twitter and Facebook

by Ben Atlas on 02.8.2010.11:19am · 1 comment

Communication by Soizick Meister

I am not deleting the accounts. I would still have the ambassadorships there so people can find me. But I do plan to minimize my visits to the sites, max out the privacy settings in Facebook including the exclusion from the search result. Un-follow the static Twitter noise. I have been actually doing this for a while as my dissatisfaction with the social media grew stronger but the final push was listening and reading Jaron Lanier, now I know I am not alone in my observations.

Reasons to hang up on Twitter:

I might be interested in what my real friends are doing; I am certainly not interested in a stranger’s itinerary.
I initially though that Twitter is a good service to get to know people but I found a grid full of self promotion and little incentive in making a real contact.
Twitter gravitated towards the broadcast model, if I want to listen without being able to respond I might as well listen to a radio.
140 characters are inadequate to express anything coherent.
People who pimp Twitter for marketing and promotion strike a religious tone that in itself should be enough of a turn off.
There are many users who tweet obsessively. I rarely find any value in their stream and links, but I am often concerned for their sanity, what else they might be missing in life?
The so called “real time search” is a sham.
The most annoying parade of Twitter/marketing experts and consultants. How stupid you need to be not to be able to figure out the f-ing 140 characters on your own?
Twitter management is in over their heads (I met one and wasn’t impressed). The “suggested users list” killed this service for good.

Reasons to hang up on Facebook:

All Facebook Apps are intrusive and stupid, grownups should know better.
I am not interested in becoming a fan of any pages. I might be interest in what an actual person has to say. They way to make me to subscribe is to show some worthwhile content that resonates. Not to subject me to the spam links. I get this “fan” email from people whom I barely know, or friended because I didn’t want to offend them. And instead of taking this as an opportunity to get to know a person they want me to become a fan of some silly page, how rude.
I think it’s dim to commit an original content to Facebook, without any control on how the content is displayed. This devalues the expression and lets Facebook monetize your ideas with cheap and inappropriate ads.
No one is listening on the Facebook. Everyone is pimping something all the time so people just tune everything out.
There is noting more idiotic that the “likes”. I actually seen recently someone “liking” a status update announcing being sad about a friend’s suicide.
There is a certain indignity in using the Facebook.
Most importantly there is no evidence of a deepened connection with Facebook friends. In fact there is nothing that has done a bigger damage to the real, lasting, face time friendships than the social media.

P.S. Jaron Lanier addresses specially the distorted peer pressure on teens who grew up with Facebook, the only collective, social form of life that they know. I can’t say it any better than Jaron.

Behind the Scenes at Facebook

by Ben Atlas on 01.11.2010.11:03pm · 0 comments

In light of the recent pronouncements by the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that The Age of Privacy is Over, this conversation with an Anonymous Facebook Employee is rather interesting.

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