Have We Arrived In “Brave New World” ?

Hi, Sue. Here (below) is my first attempt at addressing your thoughtful comments and questions.

***********************************************************

I recognize a great deal of wisdom and truth in what you’ve shared here, which leaves (for me) an uncomfortable dilemma. Facebook, one particular tool you’ve mentioned, has become sort of a “public utility” or meeting ground, which in itself has a great deal of value. Beyond the social problem it solves, shrinking my universe to a comfortable kitchen table where I can break bread with a very diverse group of people and groups, it has also become an unexpected and valuable problem-solving tool for me. Whether I wish to toss something out into the ethos to draw on the wisdom of those crowds, or search out that wisdom more quietly through easily discovered allies and interest groups, it is a very effective tool, and one I’m loathe to give up. Where else do you find this kind of living network of intelligence and willingness to share?

Indeed .. everything you state is true. Therein the polarity, the dilemma.

I realize people would argue the internet itself fills this gap, but I don’t agree. It feels more like an impersonal directory or map to the individual doorsteps, lacking the personal choice people have made to coexist and cooperate under that one roof, such as Facebook. Like you I continue to become more and more aware of the price to be paid for that privilege, because the platform facilitating this is -not- that public utility as I treat it, but a commercial business whose bottom line interests don’t always align with my own.

In a nutshell. And it’s more FB’s philosophy than it’s bottom line interests that has bothered me. I also think that its continued use by a large critical mass of people will have real and lasting and perhaps permanent effect on what we understand as culture, right to dissent and protest, etc. The more we use it, the more we are mediated out of ‘real life’ by its philosophy and thinking and what it wants us to do .. which I think is in direct inversion to an holistic human experience of life in all its vagaries and joy.

Like you, I’ve had a blog for sometime, but largely abandoned it and interact mostly through Facebook and 2 other private networks. I realize it’s because the blog felt like sitting in a room waiting for people to come to me, and that I had to be more formal in my posts (read: work harder to share), rather than being at a larger kitchen table where I could simply toss something out there. The latter certainly creates it’s own problem, as trying to keep up in a space like Facebook is kind of like standing in front of a fire hose. I know there’s a happy medium in there somewhere. Just haven’t found it.

I started feeling more and more like I was being forced, almost, to be more narcissistic and more displaying-of-myself than I wanted to be .. and while there are some good (no, excellent) conversations develop here and there that I have both watched and sometimes participated in, the bulk of Facebook is, I think, full of people being shiny and happy.

That includes / included me, and I didn’t enjoy it enough to keep doing it.

So this leaves me with a question that I’m anxious to explore: if not Facebook, what? It’s hard to argue with the fact that it clearly serves an important purpose. Why else would so many people and organizations treat it as the holy grail of connecting and sharing?

Very good question. I think that there are people here and there working on this issue, on creating alternatives. I’ve long believed that as we get more ‘practiced’ and also get tired, let’s face it, of the constant bombardment of stuff other people post, “we” will want to distill our online relationships down to those that are meaningful to us and yet find a way to let the adjacency of discovering new delightful or interesting people surprise us in positive and desired ways. In effect, both FB and G+ let us do this .. concentrate on the people with whom we want to interact. In both cases, “we” are the product. What troubles me is that I think also there’s a real possibility that us being the product stands a good chance of changing us in inner ways more than we may realize, without us being conscious about it.

Which brings me to the more philosophical business aspect, I think. I think Google is less flagrantly ‘sociopathic’ if you will, in its exploitation of us as a product. It offers a wider range of possibly-useful services. Yes, FB enables a fundamental need, of connecting and sharing in easy and expressive ways. But it’s also clear that all it is doing is mining us, exploiting us. It’s completely aligned with the dominant cultural frame of our times, the beat that drives us on. It taps into our barely conscious anxieties, helps us feel less ‘naked’ and completely bereft in front of forces over which we believe we have no control. We ‘huddle’ together and toss aphorisms about some kind or other of change at each other.

The closest thing I’ve come to answering that was omidyar.net, a public space based on the “attraction” of people with shared goals and values, versus the “promotion” of it’s own agenda, or that of commercial interests. This was possible because it’s hosts, Pam and Pierre Omidyar, had both a sincere desire and the means to create and offer such a structure without attaching commercial interests to it, and the wisdom to be as “hands off” as possible at all times, allowing the community to find their way through how, why and what they connected around. They also funded projects and needs that bubbled up on their own merit through a “reputation system” akin to what they had built into eBay, and ultimately what made it so successful. However, the evolution of this new kind of “network of trust” was not without it’s growing pains, and I was sad to see the network disappear within a few short years. In the end, I suspect it didn’t serve the needs of it’s hosts, to more effectively and authentically find new ways of discovering global good and funding those things to help scale them up and share them more broadly. While wildly admirable, at the end of the day, the platform and network itself depended on the agenda of it’s host, and when a network is private, whether commercial or non-profit, it is rarely without an agenda.

I wish Omidyar.net had flourished more. I really dislike being as cynical as this will sound, but I think that the bulk of people don’t really give a shit. If they did, we would have seen more massive social actions to date, or protests and push-back against the dumbing down and soporificizing that’s been going on for two-to-three decades at least, by now.

Is it possible to imagine developing a network of trust, similar to Facebook, where it exists without a commercial agenda, and in a way that truly does respect the privacy and rights of the people who comprise it, while nurturing their well-being, and ultimately that of their local communities?

I don’t know. Perhaps if ‘everybody’ has a reasonably well-developed sense of how to manage their privacy, and their interests in so doing. The lack of awareness and privacy ‘literacy’ on the part of individuals is not down to a lack of warnings or material analyzing the core issues. Technically, I think the capability of managing access to you is available in both FB and G+. What is not open to discussion to date is your ‘ownership’ of information about you and your friends, for example not having the option to deny FB using that information to extract prices from advertisers because FB is where everybody is.

Whether you define a community by geography, or as a collection of people with common interests, doesn’t really matter. There is clearly a need and a value to having a technology-based “public utility” that makes it easy for people to gather, share and celebrate. If not Facebook, what?

Yes, that is a critical need. Somehow in the past we figured out how to create libraries and have them be at the center of a community. I think Facebook could have been a truly great arrival into the arc of human history. I think if I had been Mark Zuckerberg, I might have made FB into some kind of cooperative or not-for-profit that still managed to create well-paying jobs for as many employees as it now has. But, it went private. That’s a clear sign of the times. Our world is much more about money and clever business models that extract money from peoples’ lives .. which is why advertising is still really the only business model on the web with any widespread effectiveness. A real pity, that.

And how might we go about seeding such a thing within our communities?

I don’t know.

Perhaps a tool like The Brain? It allows us to gather knowledge and resources and ideas in a common space, and easily discover the connections between those things that we often didn’t even know existed. If perhaps we had a “community brain” locally, connected to other community brains, it would create a platform rather like Wikipedia in it’s (supposed) democratic and self-governing growth, but with an intelligence and connectedness behind it. I’ve been using “Personal Brain” since Jerry Michalski introduced me to it about 10 years ago, and it’s the one tool I keep coming back to when thinking about the dilemma you’ve posed regarding the problem with Facebook.

I’ve always liked the Brain, tho’ I stopped using it about a decade ago. I remember meeting Harlan Hugh, the creator of The Brain, in 1997. I liked the concept and tool then, I still like it. Yes, I think it could create a Wikipedia-like platform with intelligence and connectedness at its core, or as the main and fully-nested platform for purposeful development of higher levels of awareness and (dare I say it ? ) consciousness.

I’m not yet brave enough to let go of Facebook because of the immense value I feel I receive from it, but I recognize the price I am paying for that choice. Deeply curious to see where your own thinking evolves on this Pandora’s Box you’ve popped the lid on, Jon, and grateful for the chance you’ve given me to recognize it and think more deeply on it.

Interesting choice of words .. “not brave enough”. Isn’t that just enough for you to experiment with that lack of “bravery” ? You could always de-activate your FB for a month or three, and see what happens, and then go back if you really start getting the shakes. And if you do, I guess maybe you’ll be done for 😉