Facebook is a beast, a beast that will devour anything and everything you throw at it. It will chew on every offering, digest even the tiniest morsels, absorbing every last byte of nutrients. It will grow bigger, stronger and hungrier, needing evermore courses to live. So stop feeding the fucker…
Facebook, for the moment, is here to stay. So are it’s kin. Their business model is based solely on harvesting it’s users innermost thoughts, deepest feeling and constant drivel, gleaning magical insight into who you are; packaging and selling this to the many consumers down stream, who in turn use this information to sell you stuff you probably don’t need, or want.
“I bought a shed from Amazon just to put them off the scent. Ha, now Amazon think I have a garden, so maybe I need a spade and fork set. A lawn mower? No, Amazon, you’re wrong. I do’t have a garden, you’re facts on me are incorrect, you pigeon-holing of me has failed. Who’s the loser now…ah, what am I going to do with this shed?”
Keith Prattingfunk, 28, Finningley
This is the main aim of Facebook, Amazon, Google et al, they want to know us better than we know ourselves. They want to be able to tell us what is is that we need before we’ve even considered it. Facebook has the worlds biggest implementation of Hadoop, which is tasked with crunching all the random pieces of information fed to it every day, regurgitating it as a series of inferred statements of truth about who we are. So your favourite film is X, and you’ve just been listening to Y, so it’s clear to us that you really need a wind-up radio with torch function.
Imagine this kind of interaction in the real, offline world. You walk into a shop to buy a sandwich. You’re there, perusing the shelves – prawn and mayo, BLT. cheese salad. what do I fancy, you ask yourself. A shop assistant pops up, Mr Ben style, and starts asking you a series of seemingly irrelevant questions.
“So, do you like Nike trainers? What’s your favourite colour? Who’s your best friend? What’s your partner status? Where did you go for your last holiday? Are you a Nicole Kidman fan?”
“Er….”
“One the basis of your previous questions, we suggest you’d like the blue cheese and pear sandwich on wholewheat. TAKE IT!”
At a basic level there is much to be mined from the data we freely give to these companies, clear patterns that can be extrapolated and given a financial value. We are, however, far more complex than this. We have good days, bad days, totally indifferent days. It’s sunny, so my favourite song is Blisters in the Sun by Violent Femmes, it’s rainy so my favourite song is, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. The point is simple, humans are complicated sacks of hormones and irrationality, and no amount of computing is going to unravel each one of from a series of banal status updates.
Facebook can’t be slain, but we can stop feeding it.