11 ms·

Douglas Rushkoff: I’m thinking it may be good to be off social media altogether

301 points by jedwhite 11y ago

Spooky23 11y ago
The man makes a good point. I quit Facebook for lent, and frankly, I don't miss it... And feel better for it. One way or another, it has stopped being fun for me and started becoming a drag. Too much politics, too much inane nonsense. Yet I feel compelled to go there.
- tajen 11y ago
  Should we consider HN as social media and should we quit it?
  - bobwaycott 11y ago
    Yep.
  - generic_user 11y ago
    You shouldn't if your commenting and getting information on programming. But unfortunately HN is overrun with mostly popular mainstream news nowadays. So its hard to justify unless you check maybe once or twice a day and only read the useful bits.
  - rcconf 11y ago
    I'm starting to just read the comments on HN and I don't even look at articles anymore. I suppose this behaviour is similar to what I do on social media. The good part is that I have become a significantly better programmer from the articles and comments on HN. Although, most of the improvements came from the first year of using HN and then it's started to taper off since. I should probably use HN less, but I think it has genuinely improved my life more than any other social media website.
    - rchaud 11y ago
      > I'm starting to just read the comments on HN and I don't even look at articles anymore. I suppose this behaviour is similar to what I do on social media. But this is pretty damaging, wouldn't you say? Not too long ago, I would follow several consumer tech blogs, and jump right into the comments, because the stories were increasingly page-view driven garbage that needed 8 separate blog posts of ~200 words each to describe one story. The comments tended to provide much more insight than the actual "article". With HN, (which I've been visiting for <2 years), I'm noticing that the articles posted tend to be long-form and generally thought-provoking. I make an effort to read the article, collect my thoughts on them, and only then view the comments.
      - bostik 11y ago
        For my part, I've found that a good chunk of technical blog posts (whether they are hosted on blog engines, personal sites or even pushed out to Medium) now assume that they will be discovered via HN. And I cannot be objectively sure about this, but I feel that these blog posts have been increasingly targeted to HN lurkers. They may touch technically very good topics, but the aggregate content, in my eyes, has become shallower. It's almost like the HN crowd is being systematically baited with superficially interesting tech posts. (A very enjoyable exception: nautil.us - for me the posts are either entirely irrelevant, or readable and interesting with a high probability. I don't remember experiencing much of a middle ground yet.) So, when my time is limited, I tend to check the discussion before hitting the link. Usually the first few posts are enough to confirm whether the link itself is worth visiting or not. And sure enough, a primary motivator for this is that finding non-clickbaity titles is increasingly rare. HN thread activity and tone acts as a pretty decent bloom filter.
  - danjoc 11y ago
    I am considering it. I already removed this site from my bookmark bar and landing page. If I had to list my top three reasons: HN has the "anything that's interesting" policy, which means I see a lot of stuff that only serves to distract me. I waste too much time reading newsy posts here or I catch myself following clickbait titles. I want to stay on top of the latest tech and that's all really. I've started using reddit more these days. Following subreddits gives me links that are more focused. Two, I find it far too easy to be downvoted into oblivion here. I frequently type up a post, just to close the window before I hit reply. I know I'm just going to get downvoted/hidden/deleted for having a point of view that is from somewhere outside the primary demographic here. I then realize I've wasted my time and additionally I feel ostracized as well. And the third.. this may seem kinda silly to most here.. is the name: Hacker News. Completely innocuous to computer programmers, but if "normals" see someone browsing a site named Hacker anything, it raises eyebrows. I was recently blocked from visiting this site in a foreign country, and I really can't describe the sort of sinking feeling I had when that happened. I suddenly realized where I was. My inner monologue went something like: "So now I'm going to be dragged to some foreign dungeon, for visiting a site that doesn't really care for my voice, to read articles that just distract me from focusing on my true interests. Why am I so stupid?" Yeah, I'm calm now that I'm back home, but I'll sorta worry when I have to go back there again. (I very nearly closed the window again. Hitting reply this time. You should hear the truth occasionally. Even if it's only a fleeting glimpse before I am deleted.)
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- wdewind 11y ago
  > Too much politics, too much inane nonsense. Yet I feel compelled to go there. A valid criticism of facebook, but that's not at all what he's talking about. He's saying that to the extent that he uses facebook for his career (ie: marketing his books), he feels that he's giving away the contents of his book and that is ultimately hurting sales: Professionally, I’m thinking it may be good for one’s career and business to be off social media altogether. Chris Anderson was wrong. “Free” doesn’t lead to anything but more free. Working for free isn’t leverage to do a talk for loads of money; now they even want you to talk for free. What am I supposed to do? Join YouTube and get three cents for every 100,000 views of my video? That is crap; that is insane! It's a completely ridiculous notion that's contrary to what anyone who is making money in the digital economy has figured out: digital content is marketing for stuff you can charge for. The fact that Rushkoff can't find stuff to charge for is indicative of a painful truth that he should consider: he's actually not creating that much value. He complains about getting 3c for every 100k youtube views, but never at all considers justifying why people should listen to him, simply that it costs him time to create this content. It's actually a pretty marxist philosophy (the labor theory of value), and it has huge limitations in terms of describing our economy.
  - id 11y ago
    Besides that there are quite a few Youtubers making a decent living. Also it's more like $100 for every 100k Youtube views.
    - adrusi 11y ago
      If you choose to put preroll ads on your video. Thats not always the best idea when you're making videos for reasons of marketing, as he would be.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    That's a rather ill-informed view of Rushkoff. Rushkoff has been charging for stuff since before Eternal September. He has a track record of making things happen that dates back to a time before "startup" was a word with an online scene associated with it. >never at all considers justifying why people should listen to him, simply that it costs him time to create this content. I suspect he's done a lot more considering than many HN readers have. It's true that Rushkoff is making - and has always made - the dissenting point that perhaps the Internet should be more than a machine for extracting cash and attention from the people who use it. In fact he's suggesting that the most useful models are the ones that contribute to users instead of trying to battery farm their time - and also that "creating shareholder value" really isn't the most sophisticated or interesting of all possible social and economic goals. I don't doubt some people find his views threatening. Personally, I don't see any reason to dismiss them out of hand without at least trying to understand them first.
- tomjen3 11y ago
  Unfollow and hide posts. That takes care of about almost all of it. The last part is people with interesting stuff that you want to know, and insane ramblings; for them I don't have a good solution. This isn't a facebook problem, I have done the same with Twitter and would do it with HN if I could.
exolymph 11y ago
Facebook and other social media are priceless promotion tools for unknown writers who want their work to be read.
- sehr 11y ago
  This is discussed in the article fwiw
- AznHisoka 11y ago
  Not exactly. That's like saying the App Store will help your app be seen millions of times.
generic_user 11y ago
One of the things I dislike about social networks is that people carry over short snarky commenting style to places on the net where you expect people to post more thoughtful comments. Or technical forums where your trying to have a detailed conversation and solve problems. It can really add unnecessary noise to otherwise productive boards. I really wish people would take a breather and slow down before posting outside of those services. They also seem to be more of a time sink then anything else where people can procrastinate from doing more productive or important things. I suppose I'm guilty of doing the same thing on HN on occasion.
- AznHisoka 11y ago
  One of my pet peeves on Twitter is people posting sarcastic posts about an upcoming news event like the results of a primary. Sorry, but it's not funny and I don't care - I just want to hear the real news not your lame attempt at a joke.
arrty88 11y ago
I put all of the social media apps into a folder on my iPhone and dragged it to a few home screens away. I don't use them much anymore.
maus42 11y ago
I don't do FB. The problem is, at least the community here at campus seems so saturated with it that about every interaction I have with new people begins with inquiry about it or some other social media thing. I decide to look into some new club or political group or about anything? Primary communication method: FB. This monopoly over our communication they have, I think it sucks for non-users. edit.addendum. I realized monopoly is poor choice of word because it is not total: Instagram and Snapchat and whatever is the social media thing du jour exist. However, as alternatives they are quite similar. I wonder how young adults used to socialise, say, a decade or two ago?
- tfgg 11y ago
  A decade ago? Facebook. I think it's interesting that despite Facebook being vastly uncool, it still fundamentally meets its original need, which is socialising in a university environment.
- mosquito242 11y ago
  I recently found a newsfeed eradicator extension that hides the newsfeed whenever you visit Facebook but still let's you check groups, message, and see notifications. I've found it to be a pretty happy balance between continuing to use facebook as a communication tool and not letting it suck me in time-wise. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator-for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
- sotojuan 11y ago
  I'm in college and Messenger has pretty much replaced texting unless it's something urgent/an emergency. I've recently made friends with some people (a few weeks) and I still don't know their number. I just talk to them on Messenger. It's honestly an interesting shift.
  - id 11y ago
    It's either Messenger or WhatsApp. You can't escape Facebook and they paid US$19 billion for that.
jorgecurio 11y ago
I have no facebook or linkedin or twitter accounts or instagram or tinder or snapchat. I can never go back after 2 years.
Jerry2 11y ago
I quit Facebook last year because it started ruining my family relationships. I started seeing the side of people that I never saw before and I didn't like it. I saw family & friends say and do things that were done to grab other people's attention. I also saw people, that I knew very well, pretend to be something they were not. I saw friends become enemies over pointless arguments. In short, people I was interacting with on Facebook were, most of the time, not the people I knew in real life. After I quit Facebook for 6 months, I attended family reunions and everything was back to the way it was. I stopped looking at them through the lens that Facebook presented them as and I felt no animosity or disdain towards them. Maybe this is just my experience.
- threatofrain 11y ago
  But in your description, Facebook is simply the mediating variable, not the cause -- the cause is the unpleasantness generated by your family.
  - mentat 11y ago
    Human relationships have always been about selective ignorance.
    - dhj 11y ago
      Do not reveal our surveillance, Gorlock!
    - mtviewdave 11y ago
      Mark Zuckerberg believes that presenting differing personas to different audiences displays "a lack of integrity"[1] and thus Facebook is deliberately engineered to encourage an individual to present their "true" self to all "friends" equally. [1]http://www.michaelzimmer.org/2010/05/14/facebooks-zuckerberg-having-two-identities-for-yourself-is-an-example-of-a-lack-of-integrity/ http://www.michaelzimmer.org/2010/05/14/facebooks-zuckerberg...
      - 11y ago
dominotw 11y ago
Is it possible to live life without internal conflict? Is it possible to examine the root of what we consider a vice so that we have to suppress the urge with pure willpower which is going to run out sooner or later.
askafriend 11y ago
I think there is a difference between utility driven social media like LinkedIn or Nextdoor (and to an extent messaging apps like WhatsApp if you consider that social media) and apps like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram which are less utility driven and more entertainment driven. Of course, one can derive utility from the entertainment driven apps, but it's often disproportionate to the gravity of the entertainment and naval gazing that they are optimized for. Go on LinkedIn or Nextdoor and you see much less of this type of naval gazing. People might be trying to find a job, gain insight into an org, keep their resume updated, with LinkedIn. Or they might be trying to find a babysitter, sell an item, or offer a service/recommendation to their neighbors on Nextdoor. Yes, both platforms have their flaws, but at the end of the day they are indeed driven by and based around a utility rather than naval gazing. But those too, you have to be careful with in how you use them. I'm not quite sure where I was going with this comment, but I wanted to point out that a distinction and difference does exist between types of social media.
- Pxtl 11y ago
  Navel. Sorry, you did it twice. Bellybuttons, not warships. Edit: also, I've never heard of Nextdoor. Craigslist w Higher-granularity of location?
  - mbrock 11y ago
    "Belly buttons, not warships." Words to live by.
    - Pxtl 11y ago
      http://www.glasswings.com.au/comics/ozyandmillie.au/2002/om20020527.html http://www.glasswings.com.au/comics/ozyandmillie.au/2002/om2...
  - cholantesh 11y ago
    Not really; it seems like it's for getting people within a neighbourhood to get to know each other. And, apparently, racial profiling (http://fusion.net/story/106341/nextdoor-the-social-network-for-neighbors-is-becoming-a-home-for-racial-profiling/ http://fusion.net/story/106341/nextdoor-the-social-network-f...).
argonaut 11y ago
My FB news feed is almost as good as Twitter. How? There is an easy solution to being inundated with things you don't want to see. Unfollow anyone who regularly posts things you don't want to see. I've done this. I've unfollowed pretty much everyone on Facebook, except for a few people / groups. I also hide posts that I don't like, but come from people I still want to hear from (I've heard this gets fed into FB's ranking algo for you). Now my feed is mostly interesting news stories / interesting commentary / educational content / conversations on Facebook groups related to my interests. My FB news feed is actually better than Twitter now, albeit with 30x less content. Tangentially, this is why I appreciate the Twitter algorithm change. Now I spend less than 20 minutes a day on Facebook. I don't get why people feel the need to delete the account altogether.
- eachro 11y ago
  This is exactly what I've done with my FB newsfeed. You really do have to be ruthless with unfollowing people. But now my feed is just a stream of stories from the Times, Economist, Atlantic, etc. Some public figures post interesting stuff to: Yann Lecunn, etc.
- chm 11y ago
  I don't get why people feel the need to delete the account altogether. Can I ask how old you are? Growing up, Facebook was not just an aside: for a brief moment in my life, Facebook was life. It's where things happened. I'm now 25 and glad I've never stepped foot on Facebook soil since I was halfway past 18. My personal experience is that it was a vile substitute for social life and I don't miss it one bit. So my point is that depending on the demographics, Facebook can mean a totally different thing. For a young man growing up, no Facebook meant no girls, no parties, no fun - and that is a travesty. Edit: I don't understand how my comment is controversial - it's an anecdote. To the risk of sinking even further: would downvoters care to express themselves?
  - sanre6 11y ago
    Your 1st sentence could have given a condescending vibe :)
moultano 11y ago
I appreciate that there is probably more substance to his beliefs than what is presented here, but reading these preposterous claims without any support made this a really irritating interview to read.
beachstartup 11y ago
i only use hn and reddit and group email threads. gave up all the rest many years ago because i recognized the negative patterns it was reinforcing in my own life and others'. if you're thinking about it, do it. you're recognizing that there's a problem in your own life. if you've never thought about it, you're probably fine.
sotojuan 11y ago
How I fixed my Facebook: I unfollowed everyone I don't want to see but have to keep as a friend for whatever reason. I never see them, ever. But they're there if I need to contact them through Messenger. You could go a step further and unfollow everyone and just use Messenger (which 99% of the people I come in contact prefer/use). But that's just my use case: Messenger remains the best way to get in contact with people, and group chats are very fun (been on some that are nearing their third year anniversary!).
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
aaronchall 11y ago
I recently attended a talk about the growth in volume of rides in NYC that Uber has been providing. It was contrasted against a mostly flat (if slightly declining) volume for yellow cabs (remember, they're not making any more medallions). He blogged about it here: http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc-taxi-and-uber-trips-with-a-vengeance/ http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc-ta... - chart here: http://toddwschneider.com/data/taxi/uber_vs_taxi_pickups_brooklyn.png http://toddwschneider.com/data/taxi/uber_vs_taxi_pickups_bro... He deplores those poor cabbies? I deplore all those poor riders who couldn't hail cabs and had to choose between worse and worst options because of the cabbies' government imposed monopoly. (What do you do when you can't hail a cab? Wait for hours? Walk? Ride for hours on public transit that goes everywhere but your destination? Give up on going where you need to go?) Just like (apparently) most others here, I seem to use Facebook mostly to keep in touch with my family and (close?) friends. I unfollow pretty much everyone but my mom and wife. Facebook turned me on to adblock when they kept showing me ads for a degree when I had already earned that same degree from a better local school (and put it in my info on Facebook - so they were basically shamelessly ripping of the advertiser.) Those things make Facebook about a weekly experience now for me. I keep in touch professionally on LinkedIn. For better or worse, I get my news on Hacker News moreso than any other place. I don't really even bother with the New York Times or Wall Street Journal any more. Everything in the news lately seems designed to appeal to outrage, and I don't want to participate in that anymore.
- eric-hu 11y ago
  > For better or worse, I get my news on Hacker News moreso than any other place. I don't really even bother with the New York Times or Wall Street Journal any more. Everything in the news lately seems designed to appeal to outrage, and I don't want to participate in that anymore. I've done the same for news. I can attest that I'm generally happier for it. I can sometimes see when someone is looking to talk to me with news induced outage. I'm learning how to give neutral answers that don't feed any fires, unless I believe I'll actually get a thoughtful and considerate conversation.
- chippy 11y ago
  Regarding Uber, his argument wasn't so much "poor cabbies" on its own, but seemed to be more like "look at where the money is going, it's going out of the economy and into investors, growth". So, poor cabbies is one thing, but it would be more about the redistribution of wealth from a community of people to a company. Uber is not a ride sharing service, it's a business model. The article makes clear his view: If we think short sighted that it's only good for getting rides - we are missing the point. And he says that much about digital natives - they miss the point.
p4wnc6 11y ago
Early last year I unplugged from all social media sites, and for me personally it has been a very healthy choice. I'm still pretty easily able to read anything I want to read on Twitter without having an account or installing the app. There is no worthwhile content on Facebook or LinkedIn, so eliminating those was pure gain. I never had an account with Instagram, Pinterest, or others. I've occasionally applied for jobs either directly with social media companies or with companies that make products or services that augment social media experiences, and they often ask why I would be interested in working for them if I am not myself a consumer of social media sites. I try to explain that even if I don't personally get much value out of it, I can still appreciate that other do (or at least believe they do) and at the end of the day I'm interested in engineering problems that help customers. Sometimes these places don't want to talk further with me because they seem to believe it's just not possible to empathize with a social media user or customer unless you yourself are one. Some other places don't seem to care about that at all. I do worry that as the ubiquity of Facebook rises, people will try to unfairly accuse non-Facebook people of "having something to hide." I always want an individual's ability to choose to not interact to be highly socially respected and not come with downsides that are in the slightest bit meaningful in terms of that person's life goals, and I fear that a social media culture damages that. I talk to my much younger sister about it sometimes. She is just starting to reach an age where our parents will consider letting her have an account. She's very precocious and asks me all the time why I don't have an account. But when I explain my reasons (e.g. I don't like ads, I don't like sharing data about my personal connections, I don't want to feel like the service is adaptively responding in some ways to optimize itself against my behaviors) she doesn't understand. To her, Facebook is life. Without Facebook, in her social circles even in middle school, you're a nobody and can't possibly have functional circles of friends. You just miss out on all the inside jokes, stories, photos, etc., that everyone will be talking about at school. I feel bad for her. I'm at a point in my life where I couldn't give less of a fuck about that kind of stuff, and most of the close friends I have are the same and would never exclude me just because I didn't see their vacation photos on Facebook. But for her, it's very much like she does not have an actual choice. Functional social experiences are necessary for healthy development, and it's getting to a point where kids can't have functional social experiences without Facebook. This frightens me and makes me want to use my choice to not have an account as a tiny, laughably insignificant market signal that maybe we should stop, and maybe we don't actually get the value out of this concept that we think we do.
mathgenius 11y ago
"Corporations are like these obese people, they suck money out of our economy and store it in the fat of share price." Wow, writers get to have so much fun.
mbrock 11y ago
Social media is bad when it spams your mind with cheap garbage and bullshit propaganda, exactly as with any other form of media. When I get a snapchat from an old friend, whom I don't see much of anymore because they're in another city, that doesn't ruin my life. It makes me happy. It strengthens our connection in a nice and simple way. The business model of that company is independent from my experience. Presumably mail couriers and telephone operators suffer from the same effects of rent based economics and growth targets. Yet we see them as neutral carriers—the way Facebook would like to be. Yes, social media is to some extent an ecosystem of brands that exist only to extract value from the already existing Internet. They are also the most compelling use of the Internet thus far. They've managed to create products that people actually use in their daily lives. They've sparked a few political revolts. They've allowed new forms of organization. The charges of banality read to me like expressions of boredom. I remember in 2008 after my initial college Facebook period had faded into something less exciting, I said "Facebook isn't as fun anymore" and my friend—who didn't use it—said "well, how are you using it? Are you contributing anything fun?" A couple of days ago I was on WhatsApp talking to a friend in Australia. I know her because she's the friend of another person I met through social media. We have some stuff in common and like to chat. She was at home having pretty bad anxiety. I couldn't fix it but I could offer a conversation, some diversion, a bit of cheering up. This is what I think about when I think about social media. People who get into writing books and stuff turn their social media accounts into tools for self promotion. Always tweeting about their book tours and stuff. If they used it to make meaningful connections with new people, maybe their articles about social media would have a different tone. Media people in general, including authors and journalists, seem to both thrive in the social media realm, and to be drained by it. A Swedish podcast with two such men had their previous episode be all about how they uninstalled social media apps for a week and discovered things about themselves. Like how they were using the buzz of the Twittersphere as a shield against emotions and situations. How social media hooked them into this judgmental world of obsessive gossip. But this isn't all of social media. The negative feelings some people have about social media, I have them about all kinds of media. Look at television. Holy fuck, what a disaster. Newspapers, I can't stand them and their incessant political editorializing, their failure as social institutions, their pompous social engineering, their creation of Donald Trump. So there are much deeper problems with large scale human communication in general. Howard Rheingold didn't seem to me like a hippie utopian. His book on virtual communities was more of a set of case studies of the idiosyncratic ways different people and communities used different network tools to bond and share. That's still happening every day. The varieties of networked experience. This kind of anthropology is needed to actually understand social networks. Not just more and more reactionary opinions.
pshc 11y ago
His talk on "Present Shock" just expanded my mind a little bit. Embedded in the article: https://vimeo.com/65904419 https://vimeo.com/65904419 "We recast this digital renaissance--this ability to really program our lives, to get slack [free time]--we recast this as a new opportunity to somehow pump more steroidal life into the NASDAQ stock exchange." "Human time is where we're trying to expand our markets... but it's all because we're basing our entire model of society and economics on an obsolete 13th-century-printing-press economic OS!" Not sure I agree--I'd prefer growth to steady state--but things start to make sense when I'm aware of the "theorem" underpinning a system.
adventured 11y ago
I've noticed over the last two to three years that everyone on my Facebook has begun posting less and less content of substance. They no longer talk politics, they no longer debate things, they post a lot fewer personal updates, and about 10% of my friends have turned their profiles off / gone dark. My theory is: during the first several years of the mass adoption wave of Facebook, people socially splurged. That resulted in endless fights, arguments, hurt feelings, learning too much about friends (lesser friends, casual friends), seeing too much drama out of family and friends, and so on. Now my FB feed is like the old MySpace, it's mostly trash posts, with some life photos thrown in (photos are the sole thing people update that have substance now), friends have dramatically pulled back on posting anything that might draw ire or cause tension. In my FB feed, almost all of the substance has been wiped out. I had been using FB on a daily basis for nearly a decade, and now I simply no longer care about the product. I actually look forward to going dark on FB, sometime this year whenever I get around to 'deleting' everything off of it.
- plasticchris 11y ago
  I view social media as a kind of Pascal's wager. If I post something potentially controversial I risk major harassment, in exchange for a tiny benefit. Social media is enabling mob justice with a chilling effect on real discourse.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
Great interview. I am going to buy his latest book. This hit me:"What’s most pernicious about it is that we are developing companies that are designed to do little more than take money out of the system – they are all extractive." I have been trying to avoid feeding the beasts, but it is difficult. I am trying to condition myself to jump on GNU Social,instead of Twitter and G+. It is working somewhat; today about 3/4 of the hour I spent on social media was on GNU Social and even though it lacks some convenience I am able to find good things to read and meeting interesting people. Substituting a small company like duck duck go for Google is fairly easy. Try to support local stores in preference to Amazon is difficult, even knowing that shopping on Amazon reduces my local shopping options in the future. Somehow we need to support local economies, support people creating products with either no middlemen or at least fair marketplaces that perhaps only taking away 5% fees from producers. The game is rigged for large corporations, but we can still "win" if even a small minority of people participate in local economies and non corporate web properties. Catherine Austin Fitts has a saying that I like: "There are people who make pies, and people who steal other people's pies." (Ref: solari.com)
- schizoidboy 11y ago
  There are a lot of GNU Social servers - any recommendations?
  - mark_l_watson 11y ago
    I went with loadaverage.org, but that was a random choice. Nice guy who runs it and since he pays for the server himself I sent him a donation and marked my calendar to do the same 6 months from now.
- mark_l_watson 11y ago
  BTW, I went to buy his latest book and I could save about $10 buying it on Amazon, save about $6 buying it from a physical bookstore that would mail it to me, or save $0 using the http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781617230172 http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781617230172 site listed on the author's web site. In the end, I went to my local library's web site and put a hold on two of his other recent books. This seems more in spirit of avoiding large companies.
skyhatch1 11y ago
I couldn't easily jump off Facebook, mainly because of a large contingent of overseas family. Also, a lot of private social events are purely shared on Facebook. Easiest thing to do was unsubscribe to literally everybody except said overseas family and 'Like+Follow' work-related fan pages (or whatever they're called these days.
oniMaker 11y ago
This is the most alarming and interesting point for me: "Facebook will market you your future before you’ve even gotten there, they’ll use predictive algorithms to figure out what’s your likely future and then try to make that even more likely. They’ll get better at programming you – they’ll reduce your spontaneity. And they can use your face and name to advertise through you, that’s what you’ve agreed to." The order in which you are presented with items in your feed, which likes by which friends you see, your previous actions (most of which you cannot likely recall, but all of which facebook has a perfect memory), and many other details are not only used to advertise to you - they're used to build you into the type of person that will be more susceptible to advertising in the future. Molding and shaping opinion and personality is nothing new, but it has never been this precise, this interactive, and this pervasive. The stimulus, response, and reward loop has never been tighter. Those who use these services are being trained to exhibit particular valuable traits and behaviors, and the level of control over these manipulations will only improve as data is collected and algorithms are refined. If you've been using a service like Facebook for several years, they know who you have been at each point in time. Imagine you've traversed states A, B, and C and are predicted to be moving toward D. If state F or Z is more valuable (and can be arrived at from state D), then perhaps through several months of training you can be led to it instead. If you're not continually aware of each small nudge in a particular direction, then your mind is absorbing and adjusting to these changes without you knowing about it. I'd love to read more about this, and am sort of morbidly fascinated by the methods by which these mechanisms operate, and just how powerful these types of control can get.
- jqm 11y ago
  That's certainly the hope. But I'm not sure it will turn out as intended though. The thing about people on Facebook is that they are people on Facebook. It might capture some of who they are (or who they want people to think they are anyway) through the lens of social networking. But it's going to be at best a one dimensional view and I'm not sure how effective at summarizing or manipulating people (that part is coming later:).
- marincounty 11y ago
  I would like to say I don't use FB. I do, but only give them my mug with big sunglasses on. Big sunglasses! I only give up an email address. I never go to that account. That account is for "the one that got away". It didn't work out as planned. To be perfectly honest, I don't like my picture taken, or even asked for. I gave it to DMV, and reluctantly gave it to Costco. (Costco will never get another picture. I only utilize their pharmacy, and that doesn't require a membership picture.) I have another fake FB account, and gave them a fake picture--Eddie Haskel's head shot. I only use at as a convent way to enter certain websites. Once FB is gone--it's going to be deactivated. I have a feeling I'm older than most of you. Giving up my picture, and personal information is very hard. I used to think it was because I was sensitive over my appearance. I look like Shrek. Big Irish head. I don't think that's the reason. I'm just a private person, and honestly don't like being photographed? And even more important, I don't like being pigeonholed by FB, or any marketing website. I hope people in the future refuse to give up their image, and personal likes/dislikes. Or, demand complete control over all data they give up.
matthewwiese 11y ago
This ain't news to me; I'm sure just about most self-aware persons are capable of (or already have) come to the conclusion that social media is cancerous for a positive mental state. That's not even mentioning the data mining and privacy issues that arise from such high profile companies having access to such thorough personal information. For them, it's business as usual and a rather understandable response. If you have such info at hand, why not use it to further expand your business? Unfortunately this thought process results in active harm to users (disregarding purposeful malice altogether). I am so thankful that I ditched social media consumption back in high school.
Animats 11y ago
You can overdo anything. Living in Silicon Valley, I get the impression that teenagers are looking at their phones less than they were five years ago. A few years ago, I'd have to dodge people on sidewalks and in store aisles who had completely lost track of their surroundings. That seems to have stopped. I see teenagers pull out a phone, interact with it briefly, then put it away. Also, everybody seems to be in vibrate mode now; I seldom hear a ringtone.
- Johnnybe 11y ago
  Are people talking to strangers more in coffee shops now too?
  - Animats 11y ago
    No, coffee shops are full of people on laptops. Starbucks seems to be able to make money on this, even though people camp for a long time.
known 11y ago
It's not plausible; Every website now has an element of social media;
abalone 11y ago
"Uber has nothing to do with helping people get rides in towns." I may be simpleminded here, but didn't Uber make it a lot easier to get rides by making app-based hailing work reliably? Instead of standing on a street corner and waving?
- RickHull 11y ago
  Yep, it's a ridiculous assertion. No one would have ever heard of Uber if they weren't extremely good at helping people get rides in towns. That's what they do.
narrator 11y ago
The thing about Facebook is you should assume it's public.
jondubois 11y ago
It feels like advertising should be regulated by the government... Just like smoking, alcohol, drugs and gambling. It has gone too far. I can relate to every point in this article on a personal level. People don't think for themselves anymore - All we do is follow and give praise - And social media decides for us who is deserving of that praise!
- oniMaker 11y ago
  All non-Facebook jobs would allow you to say the same thing. If you truly find it morally reprehensible, please let me encourage you to pay attention to your inner compass. There are many, many other places for a software engineer to work.
- magicGLASSman 11y ago
  Yeah, because having the goverment regulate something makes it stop. That is like saying no one is using drugs now because of the war on drugs.
  - jondubois 11y ago
    Anti-smoking regulation has been extremely successful in places like Australia. Very few young adults smoke there - Especially when compared to Europe. Regulation is extremely effective if done correctly and full-heartedly. The problem isn't regulation - It's that the government doesn't actually want to fix certain issues and so it implements half-ass "regulation" just to satisfy the public on a superficial level - This is certainly the case with the gambling industry which the government actually depends on for tax dollars and funding political campaigns. That's the point I'm trying to make; the government should start caring about its people and implement serious regulation to protect them.
Simorgh 11y ago
Facebook made the internet a home for a billion people. Mr Rushkoff is certainly an important voice, but I'll play devil's advocate. We can never know the initial motives or future designs of Zuckerberg et al, nonetheless these actors have built products/services that people demand. They have introduced advanced technology to vast swathes of people, familiarised them with computers, and drawn them into (the periphery of) hacker culture. Hypothetically, more intelligent/predictive advertising should decrease the quantity of ads we see, and work in the favour of local firms. AI (including predictive-advertising) has the potential for good. People want to support local businesses. With the introduction of localised / native advertising, there is the potential for the business next door to 'get you' as a customer, as opposed to Amazon etc. The 'last mile' problem might work in the favour of small firms.

301 points by jedwhite 11y ago

The man makes a good point. I quit Facebook for lent, and frankly, I don't miss it... And feel better for it. One way or another, it has stopped being fun for me and started becoming a drag. Too much politics, too much inane nonsense. Yet I feel compelled to go there.

tajen 11y ago
Should we consider HN as social media and should we quit it?
- bobwaycott 11y ago
  Yep.
- generic_user 11y ago
  You shouldn't if your commenting and getting information on programming. But unfortunately HN is overrun with mostly popular mainstream news nowadays. So its hard to justify unless you check maybe once or twice a day and only read the useful bits.
- rcconf 11y ago
  I'm starting to just read the comments on HN and I don't even look at articles anymore. I suppose this behaviour is similar to what I do on social media. The good part is that I have become a significantly better programmer from the articles and comments on HN. Although, most of the improvements came from the first year of using HN and then it's started to taper off since. I should probably use HN less, but I think it has genuinely improved my life more than any other social media website.
  - rchaud 11y ago
    > I'm starting to just read the comments on HN and I don't even look at articles anymore. I suppose this behaviour is similar to what I do on social media. But this is pretty damaging, wouldn't you say? Not too long ago, I would follow several consumer tech blogs, and jump right into the comments, because the stories were increasingly page-view driven garbage that needed 8 separate blog posts of ~200 words each to describe one story. The comments tended to provide much more insight than the actual "article". With HN, (which I've been visiting for <2 years), I'm noticing that the articles posted tend to be long-form and generally thought-provoking. I make an effort to read the article, collect my thoughts on them, and only then view the comments.
    - bostik 11y ago
      For my part, I've found that a good chunk of technical blog posts (whether they are hosted on blog engines, personal sites or even pushed out to Medium) now assume that they will be discovered via HN. And I cannot be objectively sure about this, but I feel that these blog posts have been increasingly targeted to HN lurkers. They may touch technically very good topics, but the aggregate content, in my eyes, has become shallower. It's almost like the HN crowd is being systematically baited with superficially interesting tech posts. (A very enjoyable exception: nautil.us - for me the posts are either entirely irrelevant, or readable and interesting with a high probability. I don't remember experiencing much of a middle ground yet.) So, when my time is limited, I tend to check the discussion before hitting the link. Usually the first few posts are enough to confirm whether the link itself is worth visiting or not. And sure enough, a primary motivator for this is that finding non-clickbaity titles is increasingly rare. HN thread activity and tone acts as a pretty decent bloom filter.
- danjoc 11y ago
  I am considering it. I already removed this site from my bookmark bar and landing page. If I had to list my top three reasons: HN has the "anything that's interesting" policy, which means I see a lot of stuff that only serves to distract me. I waste too much time reading newsy posts here or I catch myself following clickbait titles. I want to stay on top of the latest tech and that's all really. I've started using reddit more these days. Following subreddits gives me links that are more focused. Two, I find it far too easy to be downvoted into oblivion here. I frequently type up a post, just to close the window before I hit reply. I know I'm just going to get downvoted/hidden/deleted for having a point of view that is from somewhere outside the primary demographic here. I then realize I've wasted my time and additionally I feel ostracized as well. And the third.. this may seem kinda silly to most here.. is the name: Hacker News. Completely innocuous to computer programmers, but if "normals" see someone browsing a site named Hacker anything, it raises eyebrows. I was recently blocked from visiting this site in a foreign country, and I really can't describe the sort of sinking feeling I had when that happened. I suddenly realized where I was. My inner monologue went something like: "So now I'm going to be dragged to some foreign dungeon, for visiting a site that doesn't really care for my voice, to read articles that just distract me from focusing on my true interests. Why am I so stupid?" Yeah, I'm calm now that I'm back home, but I'll sorta worry when I have to go back there again. (I very nearly closed the window again. Hitting reply this time. You should hear the truth occasionally. Even if it's only a fleeting glimpse before I am deleted.)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
wdewind 11y ago
> Too much politics, too much inane nonsense. Yet I feel compelled to go there. A valid criticism of facebook, but that's not at all what he's talking about. He's saying that to the extent that he uses facebook for his career (ie: marketing his books), he feels that he's giving away the contents of his book and that is ultimately hurting sales: Professionally, I’m thinking it may be good for one’s career and business to be off social media altogether. Chris Anderson was wrong. “Free” doesn’t lead to anything but more free. Working for free isn’t leverage to do a talk for loads of money; now they even want you to talk for free. What am I supposed to do? Join YouTube and get three cents for every 100,000 views of my video? That is crap; that is insane! It's a completely ridiculous notion that's contrary to what anyone who is making money in the digital economy has figured out: digital content is marketing for stuff you can charge for. The fact that Rushkoff can't find stuff to charge for is indicative of a painful truth that he should consider: he's actually not creating that much value. He complains about getting 3c for every 100k youtube views, but never at all considers justifying why people should listen to him, simply that it costs him time to create this content. It's actually a pretty marxist philosophy (the labor theory of value), and it has huge limitations in terms of describing our economy.
- id 11y ago
  Besides that there are quite a few Youtubers making a decent living. Also it's more like $100 for every 100k Youtube views.
  - adrusi 11y ago
    If you choose to put preroll ads on your video. Thats not always the best idea when you're making videos for reasons of marketing, as he would be.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  That's a rather ill-informed view of Rushkoff. Rushkoff has been charging for stuff since before Eternal September. He has a track record of making things happen that dates back to a time before "startup" was a word with an online scene associated with it. >never at all considers justifying why people should listen to him, simply that it costs him time to create this content. I suspect he's done a lot more considering than many HN readers have. It's true that Rushkoff is making - and has always made - the dissenting point that perhaps the Internet should be more than a machine for extracting cash and attention from the people who use it. In fact he's suggesting that the most useful models are the ones that contribute to users instead of trying to battery farm their time - and also that "creating shareholder value" really isn't the most sophisticated or interesting of all possible social and economic goals. I don't doubt some people find his views threatening. Personally, I don't see any reason to dismiss them out of hand without at least trying to understand them first.
tomjen3 11y ago
Unfollow and hide posts. That takes care of about almost all of it. The last part is people with interesting stuff that you want to know, and insane ramblings; for them I don't have a good solution. This isn't a facebook problem, I have done the same with Twitter and would do it with HN if I could.

exolymph 11y ago

Facebook and other social media are priceless promotion tools for unknown writers who want their work to be read.

sehr 11y ago
This is discussed in the article fwiw
AznHisoka 11y ago
Not exactly. That's like saying the App Store will help your app be seen millions of times.

generic_user 11y ago

One of the things I dislike about social networks is that people carry over short snarky commenting style to places on the net where you expect people to post more thoughtful comments. Or technical forums where your trying to have a detailed conversation and solve problems. It can really add unnecessary noise to otherwise productive boards. I really wish people would take a breather and slow down before posting outside of those services. They also seem to be more of a time sink then anything else where people can procrastinate from doing more productive or important things. I suppose I'm guilty of doing the same thing on HN on occasion.

AznHisoka 11y ago
One of my pet peeves on Twitter is people posting sarcastic posts about an upcoming news event like the results of a primary. Sorry, but it's not funny and I don't care - I just want to hear the real news not your lame attempt at a joke.

arrty88 11y ago

I put all of the social media apps into a folder on my iPhone and dragged it to a few home screens away. I don't use them much anymore.

maus42 11y ago

I don't do FB. The problem is, at least the community here at campus seems so saturated with it that about every interaction I have with new people begins with inquiry about it or some other social media thing. I decide to look into some new club or political group or about anything? Primary communication method: FB. This monopoly over our communication they have, I think it sucks for non-users. edit.addendum. I realized monopoly is poor choice of word because it is not total: Instagram and Snapchat and whatever is the social media thing du jour exist. However, as alternatives they are quite similar. I wonder how young adults used to socialise, say, a decade or two ago?

tfgg 11y ago
A decade ago? Facebook. I think it's interesting that despite Facebook being vastly uncool, it still fundamentally meets its original need, which is socialising in a university environment.
mosquito242 11y ago
I recently found a newsfeed eradicator extension that hides the newsfeed whenever you visit Facebook but still let's you check groups, message, and see notifications. I've found it to be a pretty happy balance between continuing to use facebook as a communication tool and not letting it suck me in time-wise. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator-for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
sotojuan 11y ago
I'm in college and Messenger has pretty much replaced texting unless it's something urgent/an emergency. I've recently made friends with some people (a few weeks) and I still don't know their number. I just talk to them on Messenger. It's honestly an interesting shift.
- id 11y ago
  It's either Messenger or WhatsApp. You can't escape Facebook and they paid US$19 billion for that.

jorgecurio 11y ago

I have no facebook or linkedin or twitter accounts or instagram or tinder or snapchat. I can never go back after 2 years.

Jerry2 11y ago

I quit Facebook last year because it started ruining my family relationships. I started seeing the side of people that I never saw before and I didn't like it. I saw family & friends say and do things that were done to grab other people's attention. I also saw people, that I knew very well, pretend to be something they were not. I saw friends become enemies over pointless arguments. In short, people I was interacting with on Facebook were, most of the time, not the people I knew in real life. After I quit Facebook for 6 months, I attended family reunions and everything was back to the way it was. I stopped looking at them through the lens that Facebook presented them as and I felt no animosity or disdain towards them. Maybe this is just my experience.

threatofrain 11y ago
But in your description, Facebook is simply the mediating variable, not the cause -- the cause is the unpleasantness generated by your family.
- mentat 11y ago
  Human relationships have always been about selective ignorance.
  - dhj 11y ago
    Do not reveal our surveillance, Gorlock!
  - mtviewdave 11y ago
    Mark Zuckerberg believes that presenting differing personas to different audiences displays "a lack of integrity"[1] and thus Facebook is deliberately engineered to encourage an individual to present their "true" self to all "friends" equally. [1]http://www.michaelzimmer.org/2010/05/14/facebooks-zuckerberg-having-two-identities-for-yourself-is-an-example-of-a-lack-of-integrity/ http://www.michaelzimmer.org/2010/05/14/facebooks-zuckerberg...
    - 11y ago

dominotw 11y ago

Is it possible to live life without internal conflict? Is it possible to examine the root of what we consider a vice so that we have to suppress the urge with pure willpower which is going to run out sooner or later.

askafriend 11y ago

I think there is a difference between utility driven social media like LinkedIn or Nextdoor (and to an extent messaging apps like WhatsApp if you consider that social media) and apps like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram which are less utility driven and more entertainment driven. Of course, one can derive utility from the entertainment driven apps, but it's often disproportionate to the gravity of the entertainment and naval gazing that they are optimized for. Go on LinkedIn or Nextdoor and you see much less of this type of naval gazing. People might be trying to find a job, gain insight into an org, keep their resume updated, with LinkedIn. Or they might be trying to find a babysitter, sell an item, or offer a service/recommendation to their neighbors on Nextdoor. Yes, both platforms have their flaws, but at the end of the day they are indeed driven by and based around a utility rather than naval gazing. But those too, you have to be careful with in how you use them. I'm not quite sure where I was going with this comment, but I wanted to point out that a distinction and difference does exist between types of social media.

Pxtl 11y ago
Navel. Sorry, you did it twice. Bellybuttons, not warships. Edit: also, I've never heard of Nextdoor. Craigslist w Higher-granularity of location?
- mbrock 11y ago
  "Belly buttons, not warships." Words to live by.
  - Pxtl 11y ago
    http://www.glasswings.com.au/comics/ozyandmillie.au/2002/om20020527.html http://www.glasswings.com.au/comics/ozyandmillie.au/2002/om2...
- cholantesh 11y ago
  Not really; it seems like it's for getting people within a neighbourhood to get to know each other. And, apparently, racial profiling (http://fusion.net/story/106341/nextdoor-the-social-network-for-neighbors-is-becoming-a-home-for-racial-profiling/ http://fusion.net/story/106341/nextdoor-the-social-network-f...).

argonaut 11y ago

My FB news feed is almost as good as Twitter. How? There is an easy solution to being inundated with things you don't want to see. Unfollow anyone who regularly posts things you don't want to see. I've done this. I've unfollowed pretty much everyone on Facebook, except for a few people / groups. I also hide posts that I don't like, but come from people I still want to hear from (I've heard this gets fed into FB's ranking algo for you). Now my feed is mostly interesting news stories / interesting commentary / educational content / conversations on Facebook groups related to my interests. My FB news feed is actually better than Twitter now, albeit with 30x less content. Tangentially, this is why I appreciate the Twitter algorithm change. Now I spend less than 20 minutes a day on Facebook. I don't get why people feel the need to delete the account altogether.

eachro 11y ago
This is exactly what I've done with my FB newsfeed. You really do have to be ruthless with unfollowing people. But now my feed is just a stream of stories from the Times, Economist, Atlantic, etc. Some public figures post interesting stuff to: Yann Lecunn, etc.
chm 11y ago
I don't get why people feel the need to delete the account altogether. Can I ask how old you are? Growing up, Facebook was not just an aside: for a brief moment in my life, Facebook was life. It's where things happened. I'm now 25 and glad I've never stepped foot on Facebook soil since I was halfway past 18. My personal experience is that it was a vile substitute for social life and I don't miss it one bit. So my point is that depending on the demographics, Facebook can mean a totally different thing. For a young man growing up, no Facebook meant no girls, no parties, no fun - and that is a travesty. Edit: I don't understand how my comment is controversial - it's an anecdote. To the risk of sinking even further: would downvoters care to express themselves?
- sanre6 11y ago
  Your 1st sentence could have given a condescending vibe :)

moultano 11y ago

I appreciate that there is probably more substance to his beliefs than what is presented here, but reading these preposterous claims without any support made this a really irritating interview to read.

beachstartup 11y ago

i only use hn and reddit and group email threads. gave up all the rest many years ago because i recognized the negative patterns it was reinforcing in my own life and others'. if you're thinking about it, do it. you're recognizing that there's a problem in your own life. if you've never thought about it, you're probably fine.

sotojuan 11y ago

How I fixed my Facebook: I unfollowed everyone I don't want to see but have to keep as a friend for whatever reason. I never see them, ever. But they're there if I need to contact them through Messenger. You could go a step further and unfollow everyone and just use Messenger (which 99% of the people I come in contact prefer/use). But that's just my use case: Messenger remains the best way to get in contact with people, and group chats are very fun (been on some that are nearing their third year anniversary!).

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

aaronchall 11y ago

I recently attended a talk about the growth in volume of rides in NYC that Uber has been providing. It was contrasted against a mostly flat (if slightly declining) volume for yellow cabs (remember, they're not making any more medallions). He blogged about it here: http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc-taxi-and-uber-trips-with-a-vengeance/ http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc-ta... - chart here: http://toddwschneider.com/data/taxi/uber_vs_taxi_pickups_brooklyn.png http://toddwschneider.com/data/taxi/uber_vs_taxi_pickups_bro... He deplores those poor cabbies? I deplore all those poor riders who couldn't hail cabs and had to choose between worse and worst options because of the cabbies' government imposed monopoly. (What do you do when you can't hail a cab? Wait for hours? Walk? Ride for hours on public transit that goes everywhere but your destination? Give up on going where you need to go?) Just like (apparently) most others here, I seem to use Facebook mostly to keep in touch with my family and (close?) friends. I unfollow pretty much everyone but my mom and wife. Facebook turned me on to adblock when they kept showing me ads for a degree when I had already earned that same degree from a better local school (and put it in my info on Facebook - so they were basically shamelessly ripping of the advertiser.) Those things make Facebook about a weekly experience now for me. I keep in touch professionally on LinkedIn. For better or worse, I get my news on Hacker News moreso than any other place. I don't really even bother with the New York Times or Wall Street Journal any more. Everything in the news lately seems designed to appeal to outrage, and I don't want to participate in that anymore.

eric-hu 11y ago
> For better or worse, I get my news on Hacker News moreso than any other place. I don't really even bother with the New York Times or Wall Street Journal any more. Everything in the news lately seems designed to appeal to outrage, and I don't want to participate in that anymore. I've done the same for news. I can attest that I'm generally happier for it. I can sometimes see when someone is looking to talk to me with news induced outage. I'm learning how to give neutral answers that don't feed any fires, unless I believe I'll actually get a thoughtful and considerate conversation.
chippy 11y ago
Regarding Uber, his argument wasn't so much "poor cabbies" on its own, but seemed to be more like "look at where the money is going, it's going out of the economy and into investors, growth". So, poor cabbies is one thing, but it would be more about the redistribution of wealth from a community of people to a company. Uber is not a ride sharing service, it's a business model. The article makes clear his view: If we think short sighted that it's only good for getting rides - we are missing the point. And he says that much about digital natives - they miss the point.

p4wnc6 11y ago

Early last year I unplugged from all social media sites, and for me personally it has been a very healthy choice. I'm still pretty easily able to read anything I want to read on Twitter without having an account or installing the app. There is no worthwhile content on Facebook or LinkedIn, so eliminating those was pure gain. I never had an account with Instagram, Pinterest, or others. I've occasionally applied for jobs either directly with social media companies or with companies that make products or services that augment social media experiences, and they often ask why I would be interested in working for them if I am not myself a consumer of social media sites. I try to explain that even if I don't personally get much value out of it, I can still appreciate that other do (or at least believe they do) and at the end of the day I'm interested in engineering problems that help customers. Sometimes these places don't want to talk further with me because they seem to believe it's just not possible to empathize with a social media user or customer unless you yourself are one. Some other places don't seem to care about that at all. I do worry that as the ubiquity of Facebook rises, people will try to unfairly accuse non-Facebook people of "having something to hide." I always want an individual's ability to choose to not interact to be highly socially respected and not come with downsides that are in the slightest bit meaningful in terms of that person's life goals, and I fear that a social media culture damages that. I talk to my much younger sister about it sometimes. She is just starting to reach an age where our parents will consider letting her have an account. She's very precocious and asks me all the time why I don't have an account. But when I explain my reasons (e.g. I don't like ads, I don't like sharing data about my personal connections, I don't want to feel like the service is adaptively responding in some ways to optimize itself against my behaviors) she doesn't understand. To her, Facebook is life. Without Facebook, in her social circles even in middle school, you're a nobody and can't possibly have functional circles of friends. You just miss out on all the inside jokes, stories, photos, etc., that everyone will be talking about at school. I feel bad for her. I'm at a point in my life where I couldn't give less of a fuck about that kind of stuff, and most of the close friends I have are the same and would never exclude me just because I didn't see their vacation photos on Facebook. But for her, it's very much like she does not have an actual choice. Functional social experiences are necessary for healthy development, and it's getting to a point where kids can't have functional social experiences without Facebook. This frightens me and makes me want to use my choice to not have an account as a tiny, laughably insignificant market signal that maybe we should stop, and maybe we don't actually get the value out of this concept that we think we do.

mathgenius 11y ago

"Corporations are like these obese people, they suck money out of our economy and store it in the fat of share price." Wow, writers get to have so much fun.

mbrock 11y ago

Social media is bad when it spams your mind with cheap garbage and bullshit propaganda, exactly as with any other form of media. When I get a snapchat from an old friend, whom I don't see much of anymore because they're in another city, that doesn't ruin my life. It makes me happy. It strengthens our connection in a nice and simple way. The business model of that company is independent from my experience. Presumably mail couriers and telephone operators suffer from the same effects of rent based economics and growth targets. Yet we see them as neutral carriers—the way Facebook would like to be. Yes, social media is to some extent an ecosystem of brands that exist only to extract value from the already existing Internet. They are also the most compelling use of the Internet thus far. They've managed to create products that people actually use in their daily lives. They've sparked a few political revolts. They've allowed new forms of organization. The charges of banality read to me like expressions of boredom. I remember in 2008 after my initial college Facebook period had faded into something less exciting, I said "Facebook isn't as fun anymore" and my friend—who didn't use it—said "well, how are you using it? Are you contributing anything fun?" A couple of days ago I was on WhatsApp talking to a friend in Australia. I know her because she's the friend of another person I met through social media. We have some stuff in common and like to chat. She was at home having pretty bad anxiety. I couldn't fix it but I could offer a conversation, some diversion, a bit of cheering up. This is what I think about when I think about social media. People who get into writing books and stuff turn their social media accounts into tools for self promotion. Always tweeting about their book tours and stuff. If they used it to make meaningful connections with new people, maybe their articles about social media would have a different tone. Media people in general, including authors and journalists, seem to both thrive in the social media realm, and to be drained by it. A Swedish podcast with two such men had their previous episode be all about how they uninstalled social media apps for a week and discovered things about themselves. Like how they were using the buzz of the Twittersphere as a shield against emotions and situations. How social media hooked them into this judgmental world of obsessive gossip. But this isn't all of social media. The negative feelings some people have about social media, I have them about all kinds of media. Look at television. Holy fuck, what a disaster. Newspapers, I can't stand them and their incessant political editorializing, their failure as social institutions, their pompous social engineering, their creation of Donald Trump. So there are much deeper problems with large scale human communication in general. Howard Rheingold didn't seem to me like a hippie utopian. His book on virtual communities was more of a set of case studies of the idiosyncratic ways different people and communities used different network tools to bond and share. That's still happening every day. The varieties of networked experience. This kind of anthropology is needed to actually understand social networks. Not just more and more reactionary opinions.

pshc 11y ago

His talk on "Present Shock" just expanded my mind a little bit. Embedded in the article: https://vimeo.com/65904419 https://vimeo.com/65904419 "We recast this digital renaissance--this ability to really program our lives, to get slack [free time]--we recast this as a new opportunity to somehow pump more steroidal life into the NASDAQ stock exchange." "Human time is where we're trying to expand our markets... but it's all because we're basing our entire model of society and economics on an obsolete 13th-century-printing-press economic OS!" Not sure I agree--I'd prefer growth to steady state--but things start to make sense when I'm aware of the "theorem" underpinning a system.

adventured 11y ago

I've noticed over the last two to three years that everyone on my Facebook has begun posting less and less content of substance. They no longer talk politics, they no longer debate things, they post a lot fewer personal updates, and about 10% of my friends have turned their profiles off / gone dark. My theory is: during the first several years of the mass adoption wave of Facebook, people socially splurged. That resulted in endless fights, arguments, hurt feelings, learning too much about friends (lesser friends, casual friends), seeing too much drama out of family and friends, and so on. Now my FB feed is like the old MySpace, it's mostly trash posts, with some life photos thrown in (photos are the sole thing people update that have substance now), friends have dramatically pulled back on posting anything that might draw ire or cause tension. In my FB feed, almost all of the substance has been wiped out. I had been using FB on a daily basis for nearly a decade, and now I simply no longer care about the product. I actually look forward to going dark on FB, sometime this year whenever I get around to 'deleting' everything off of it.

plasticchris 11y ago
I view social media as a kind of Pascal's wager. If I post something potentially controversial I risk major harassment, in exchange for a tiny benefit. Social media is enabling mob justice with a chilling effect on real discourse.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

Great interview. I am going to buy his latest book. This hit me:"What’s most pernicious about it is that we are developing companies that are designed to do little more than take money out of the system – they are all extractive." I have been trying to avoid feeding the beasts, but it is difficult. I am trying to condition myself to jump on GNU Social,instead of Twitter and G+. It is working somewhat; today about 3/4 of the hour I spent on social media was on GNU Social and even though it lacks some convenience I am able to find good things to read and meeting interesting people. Substituting a small company like duck duck go for Google is fairly easy. Try to support local stores in preference to Amazon is difficult, even knowing that shopping on Amazon reduces my local shopping options in the future. Somehow we need to support local economies, support people creating products with either no middlemen or at least fair marketplaces that perhaps only taking away 5% fees from producers. The game is rigged for large corporations, but we can still "win" if even a small minority of people participate in local economies and non corporate web properties. Catherine Austin Fitts has a saying that I like: "There are people who make pies, and people who steal other people's pies." (Ref: solari.com)

schizoidboy 11y ago
There are a lot of GNU Social servers - any recommendations?
- mark_l_watson 11y ago
  I went with loadaverage.org, but that was a random choice. Nice guy who runs it and since he pays for the server himself I sent him a donation and marked my calendar to do the same 6 months from now.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
BTW, I went to buy his latest book and I could save about $10 buying it on Amazon, save about $6 buying it from a physical bookstore that would mail it to me, or save $0 using the http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781617230172 http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781617230172 site listed on the author's web site. In the end, I went to my local library's web site and put a hold on two of his other recent books. This seems more in spirit of avoiding large companies.

skyhatch1 11y ago

I couldn't easily jump off Facebook, mainly because of a large contingent of overseas family. Also, a lot of private social events are purely shared on Facebook. Easiest thing to do was unsubscribe to literally everybody except said overseas family and 'Like+Follow' work-related fan pages (or whatever they're called these days.

oniMaker 11y ago

This is the most alarming and interesting point for me: "Facebook will market you your future before you’ve even gotten there, they’ll use predictive algorithms to figure out what’s your likely future and then try to make that even more likely. They’ll get better at programming you – they’ll reduce your spontaneity. And they can use your face and name to advertise through you, that’s what you’ve agreed to." The order in which you are presented with items in your feed, which likes by which friends you see, your previous actions (most of which you cannot likely recall, but all of which facebook has a perfect memory), and many other details are not only used to advertise to you - they're used to build you into the type of person that will be more susceptible to advertising in the future. Molding and shaping opinion and personality is nothing new, but it has never been this precise, this interactive, and this pervasive. The stimulus, response, and reward loop has never been tighter. Those who use these services are being trained to exhibit particular valuable traits and behaviors, and the level of control over these manipulations will only improve as data is collected and algorithms are refined. If you've been using a service like Facebook for several years, they know who you have been at each point in time. Imagine you've traversed states A, B, and C and are predicted to be moving toward D. If state F or Z is more valuable (and can be arrived at from state D), then perhaps through several months of training you can be led to it instead. If you're not continually aware of each small nudge in a particular direction, then your mind is absorbing and adjusting to these changes without you knowing about it. I'd love to read more about this, and am sort of morbidly fascinated by the methods by which these mechanisms operate, and just how powerful these types of control can get.

jqm 11y ago
That's certainly the hope. But I'm not sure it will turn out as intended though. The thing about people on Facebook is that they are people on Facebook. It might capture some of who they are (or who they want people to think they are anyway) through the lens of social networking. But it's going to be at best a one dimensional view and I'm not sure how effective at summarizing or manipulating people (that part is coming later:).
marincounty 11y ago
I would like to say I don't use FB. I do, but only give them my mug with big sunglasses on. Big sunglasses! I only give up an email address. I never go to that account. That account is for "the one that got away". It didn't work out as planned. To be perfectly honest, I don't like my picture taken, or even asked for. I gave it to DMV, and reluctantly gave it to Costco. (Costco will never get another picture. I only utilize their pharmacy, and that doesn't require a membership picture.) I have another fake FB account, and gave them a fake picture--Eddie Haskel's head shot. I only use at as a convent way to enter certain websites. Once FB is gone--it's going to be deactivated. I have a feeling I'm older than most of you. Giving up my picture, and personal information is very hard. I used to think it was because I was sensitive over my appearance. I look like Shrek. Big Irish head. I don't think that's the reason. I'm just a private person, and honestly don't like being photographed? And even more important, I don't like being pigeonholed by FB, or any marketing website. I hope people in the future refuse to give up their image, and personal likes/dislikes. Or, demand complete control over all data they give up.

matthewwiese 11y ago

This ain't news to me; I'm sure just about most self-aware persons are capable of (or already have) come to the conclusion that social media is cancerous for a positive mental state. That's not even mentioning the data mining and privacy issues that arise from such high profile companies having access to such thorough personal information. For them, it's business as usual and a rather understandable response. If you have such info at hand, why not use it to further expand your business? Unfortunately this thought process results in active harm to users (disregarding purposeful malice altogether). I am so thankful that I ditched social media consumption back in high school.

Animats 11y ago

You can overdo anything. Living in Silicon Valley, I get the impression that teenagers are looking at their phones less than they were five years ago. A few years ago, I'd have to dodge people on sidewalks and in store aisles who had completely lost track of their surroundings. That seems to have stopped. I see teenagers pull out a phone, interact with it briefly, then put it away. Also, everybody seems to be in vibrate mode now; I seldom hear a ringtone.

Johnnybe 11y ago
Are people talking to strangers more in coffee shops now too?
- Animats 11y ago
  No, coffee shops are full of people on laptops. Starbucks seems to be able to make money on this, even though people camp for a long time.

known 11y ago

It's not plausible; Every website now has an element of social media;

abalone 11y ago

"Uber has nothing to do with helping people get rides in towns." I may be simpleminded here, but didn't Uber make it a lot easier to get rides by making app-based hailing work reliably? Instead of standing on a street corner and waving?

RickHull 11y ago
Yep, it's a ridiculous assertion. No one would have ever heard of Uber if they weren't extremely good at helping people get rides in towns. That's what they do.

narrator 11y ago

The thing about Facebook is you should assume it's public.

jondubois 11y ago

It feels like advertising should be regulated by the government... Just like smoking, alcohol, drugs and gambling. It has gone too far. I can relate to every point in this article on a personal level. People don't think for themselves anymore - All we do is follow and give praise - And social media decides for us who is deserving of that praise!

oniMaker 11y ago
All non-Facebook jobs would allow you to say the same thing. If you truly find it morally reprehensible, please let me encourage you to pay attention to your inner compass. There are many, many other places for a software engineer to work.
magicGLASSman 11y ago
Yeah, because having the goverment regulate something makes it stop. That is like saying no one is using drugs now because of the war on drugs.
- jondubois 11y ago
  Anti-smoking regulation has been extremely successful in places like Australia. Very few young adults smoke there - Especially when compared to Europe. Regulation is extremely effective if done correctly and full-heartedly. The problem isn't regulation - It's that the government doesn't actually want to fix certain issues and so it implements half-ass "regulation" just to satisfy the public on a superficial level - This is certainly the case with the gambling industry which the government actually depends on for tax dollars and funding political campaigns. That's the point I'm trying to make; the government should start caring about its people and implement serious regulation to protect them.

Simorgh 11y ago

Facebook made the internet a home for a billion people. Mr Rushkoff is certainly an important voice, but I'll play devil's advocate. We can never know the initial motives or future designs of Zuckerberg et al, nonetheless these actors have built products/services that people demand. They have introduced advanced technology to vast swathes of people, familiarised them with computers, and drawn them into (the periphery of) hacker culture. Hypothetically, more intelligent/predictive advertising should decrease the quantity of ads we see, and work in the favour of local firms. AI (including predictive-advertising) has the potential for good. People want to support local businesses. With the introduction of localised / native advertising, there is the potential for the business next door to 'get you' as a customer, as opposed to Amazon etc. The 'last mile' problem might work in the favour of small firms.