Re: [Marxism] Facebook?

["Ben Morgan" <bmorgan1984@xxxxxxxxx>]

 I do not trust facebook. As an application designer I will agree that
facebook provides great freedom for creating and regulating your own data
but it does so at the expense of lionizing it's own platform. I think
facebook is out there to suck up all the 21th century post-industrial
information capital it can get, while placing up the a front that it is all
inclusive and that it reserves all it's rights to it's users and developers.
I think the creaters of Facebook have huge profit motives like myspace, and
will ultimately suck up all the developers intellectual capital. I know this
is a big claim but I think it is warranted. Facebook is striving for the top
platform on the basis of it's inclusivity; everyone who invests their
intellectual labor onto facebooks platform only reifies support for the
former. If all the developers pulled out their labor then the platform would
collapse. Why else would facebook create a clause in the developers
application that prevents developers from pilot running their applications
via a different host? This seems like an elaborate attempt to tie developers
to facebook. In this way facebook seems to be profiting off of the all
inclusivity of post-industrial capitalism itself. Facebook has no control
yet all control. Because of this I can not trust facebook.

Furthermore, it is the breading grounds for online predators and what is now
coined as e-bullies. Most importantly as mentioned before National Security
has stakes in it. A group of College students from Towson University were
arrested for posting pictures of underage drinking at a frat party;
Obviously big brother is watching. Adversely, the initial concept was
somewhat admirable. Facebook began as a networking device for college
students and graduates, to share data, pictures and socialize from a
distance. However, the greed and profit motives of the developers overtook
them; as they allowed very young kids to join, turned it into an information
platform and opened it up to cyber industry, and added applications that are
so innocuous, its obvious you're being spied on. Not to mention the lax
privacy settings that allow virtually the whole world to know what your
doing (there is an application that allows facebook to broadcast whenever
you order food from online). Eventually, everyone on the platform will be
commodified, and the typical folkways of this post-industrial consumer based
society will be used like product placement inside of the dystopian
spectacle.

Comrade Ben
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