In his grand vision for humanity, Mark keeps returning to how Facebook fundamentally "brings us closer together" by "connecting friends and families." What Mark fails to mention is that Facebook does not connect people together; Facebook connects people to Facebook, Inc.
Facebook's business model is to be the man in the middle; to track every move you, your family, and your friends make, to store all that information indefinitely, and continuously analyse it to understand you better in order to exploit you by manipulating you for financial and political gain.
Facebook isn't a social network, it is a scanner that digitises human beings. It is, for all intents and purposes, the camera that captures your soul. Facebook's business is to simulate you and to own and control your simulation, thereby owning and controlling you.
I call the business model of Facebook, Google, and the venture-capital-funded long tail of Silicon Valley startups "people farming". Facebook is a factory farm for human beings. And Mark's manifesto is nothing more than a panicked billionaire's latest sophomoric attempt to decorate an unpalatable business model grounded in the abuse of human rights with faux moral purpose to stave off regulation and justify what is unabashedly a colonial desire: to create a global fiefdom by connecting all of us to Facebook, Inc. [...]
It is not the job of a corporation to "develop the social infrastructure for community" as Mark wants to do. Social infrastructure must belong to the commons, not to giant monopolistic corporations like Facebook. The reason we find ourselves in this mess with ubiquitous surveillance, filter bubbles, and fake news (propaganda) is precisely due to the utter and complete destruction of the public sphere by an oligopoly of private infrastructure that poses as public space.
Facebook wants us to think that it is a park when it's actually a shopping mall. The last thing we need is more privately owned centralised digital infrastructure to solve the problems created by an unprecedented concentration of power, wealth, and control in a tiny number of hands. It's way past time we started funding and building the digital equivalents of parks in the digital age instead of building ever-larger shopping malls. [...]
We are sharded beings; the sum total of our various aspects as contained within our biological beings as well as the myriad of technologies that we use to extend our biological abilities. [...] It also follows, then, that any attempt to violate the boundaries of the self must be considered an assault on the cyborg self. It is exactly this abuse that constitutes the everyday business model of Facebook, Google, and mainstream Silicon Valley-inspired technology today. In this model, which Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, what we have lost is individual sovereignty. People have once again become property -- albeit in digital, not biological, form.
Is 'fake news' a fake problem?
Here's what we found. First, the fake news audience is tiny compared to the real news audience -- about 10 times smaller on average. [...] Online news audiences spent more time on average with real news than fake news. [...] We also found that the fake news audience does not exist in a filter bubble. Visitors to fake news sites visited real news sites just as often as visitors to real news sites visited other real news sites. [...]
Last, and perhaps least surprising to everyone but Mark Zuckerberg, we saw that audiences found their way to fake news via social media at a much higher rate than they did to real news. We already know that a majority of US adults get their news via social media platforms. Here, though, we can see that nearly 30 percent of all fake news traffic could be linked back to Facebook, while only 8 percent of real news traffic could.
