Why I don't use Facebook (or thinking about Social Media)

I don’t use Facebook but did a long time ago. My reasons for ditching at the time were not particularly concrete. I was studying philosophy and doing a small dissertation on technology. I examined what Facebook gave me and came to a conclusion that it wasn’t an aid to my life and that I might try disabling it for a while to see what happened[1]. I never returned. My reasons have since become more coherent to me and I'd like to articulate what keeps me out.

Some of it is pretty uncontroversial at least as much as I think there’s general agreement on things that are wrong: Facebook is very intrusive into a persons life, its very obvious they are in the business of mass data collection and they’ve began to accumulate power over politics that should worry everyone. Where I think there’s disagreement is what, if anything can be done about these things.[2]

The most obvious reason to leave is to protect ones privacy. If you’re not comfortable with what Facebook asks for, don’t use the service (this is protection only be degrees, given Facebook's shadow profile system).

You could also leave as a form of boycott. At the very least as a solution it is simple, because it no longer contributes to Facebook’s data collection program, doesn’t add to their business and removes a (small) reason for others to use the network. The problem with this, at least as a matter of action in inducing change, is that it’s often small scale and Facebooks numbers are so large that the loss of users is probably not something they experience as a difficulty. Even so, its hard to see how the action would make the situation worse and at least as an individual action, serves to protect ones privacy.

I think these are good reasons to stay out of it. Yet these aren’t only my reasons for not using Facebook and in fact were the bad things mentioned so far to change (say via strong regulation or reform) I don’t believe I would go back. In fact I’m not sure I’d join any social network now, not at least a system like Facebook. My rejection comes down to the fact I see social networks as things that tend naturally towards monopolisation, both in a business sense, but also in terms of human attention, membership and society. The first is pernicious and bad, but the second to me is terrifying.

Is this what a social network must be like, by necessity? I’m not sure, so I’m going to draw a distinction here: between ‘totalising’ social networks and ‘limited’ ones. Totalising ones are designed, or motivated to draw in as many users as possible. A limited one does not. Social networks draw their utility from the fact they contain users. We might class a ‘limited’ one as one that has some members and isn’t actively trying to draw more in.

We could say of a limited network that by nature they are going to need users to be of use, but they may not need all possible users. One can imagine that particular social networks could form around a group, or a hobby, or a community and will not need to expand beyond that. That has particular utility to that set of people, but probably doesn’t need more members then those that declare themselves part of it.

This definition is a little pernicious (I struggle to think of a network that we can call limited as I’ve described it. And its possible that under Capitalism, a network is forced to become totalising. They may well exist though).

Facebook is a totalising network. What Facebook wants is connectivity for everyone, always and everywhere and that is, to put it lightly, not a neutral proposition. Whatever you may think of it, its not a simple matter of a technical benefit, but a way of structuring the world, of enforcing a set of values upon it. This I contend effects behaviour in ways that are damaging. I’m not sure the narcissism that seems prevalent isn’t simply enabled by the sheer degree of access involved in such connectivity (although Facebook seem to encourage narcissism by design too).

I also think, that routing everything through one particular provider of a service can be dangerous in ways that we don’t expect.

Imagine, as I think it’s easy to imagine, that everything was ran through Facebook or something like it. We insisted that it was the only method of communication (or the principle one). We insisted that people conducted business through it, that they found love through it, that we managed social security through it - that as much as of life as we could run digitally was run through this network.

I imagine such a world would be supremely convenient and easy. I also imagine that, if say for instance someone had a difficult with the way the networks was ran, or plain disagreed with the degree of interaction involved, or objected on ecology grounds to the immense use of power to run it - or some other reason to simply reject the use of such a system, that such centralising inherent to it would be a problem for them. To some degree they’d be compelled to use the system. And a bit of me thinks, that without really thinking its easy to set up life to be like this, to create groups that only use Facebook or Twitter as its sole medium, or to have friends be limited by what is available through this network, to assume by default that all life should be managed in this manner.

To draw an example from life, when I left Facebook, people would tell me of things that I missed out on, events that were going on locally that I was simply not aware of. I was missing out. I've never complained about this and still don't, its simply an obvious consequence to my choice. But again, this is a sort of simple thoughtlessness, going for the simplest method. In a way its letting Facebook shape what is accessible to you.

I've also criticised a group for using Facebook solely to communicate and actually had this said to me in response: that if you dislike the sole way in which a group or organisation communicates, well, that’s your problem. You don’t have a choice when the majority choose a method to communicate. It was akin to complaining that so much of life is mediated through email.

I think the response revealed a lot about how we think about technology. One is the equivalence with email, which doesn’t stand. I have a choice of email provider, which I don’t have with Facebook and I can pick an email provider that doesn’t steal my data. But also, there's the insistence that I - we - should structure our lives by what is convenient, for myself and for others. And I believe this is a horrible criteria for making choices by.

Social Network’s are manifestations of Network effects. The convenience of access to others is the draw. So its no surprise that a lot of the innovation in Facebook is in addictive effects or user capture. If we put those aside though, the point is, the utility comes from the fact that everyone is on it. So a supposed, public service/cooperative/ethically ran version of this still has to gain its utility by getting everyone on it, and as I’m trying to detail above, this can be compulsive even without the Skinner Boxes. Society tends to force its technology onto people, but the way in which it forces it is not always obvious (not always the result of something from above, if you like). To some degree its churlish to have no means of being communicable and then complain that no one tells you anything, to some degree society makes these choices for you, but we really should see where this is done without thought. In this thoughtlessness we tie ourselves into things that aren’t great for us and more dangerously admit only one “choice”, which isn’t good for anyone[3]. Thinking that email displaced mail (or should) is wrong. Thinking that credit/debit cards displace cash (or should) is wrong[4]. A multitude of means is healthy, frankly.

What I’m trying to tease out is the differences, which come back to that ‘totalising’ definition between these forms of technology. Email serves to connect people in society and admits alternatives. Facebook, in a sense, seeks to be the society (could you have more then one network like this? Probably not, in so much as they’d compete for the same space. You’d have to put things in two places and no one wants to do that). And so my problem, is that this has a lot of buy in and marginalises alternatives and dissenters. And is by and large a concentration of power. Even in a well run network, done on different principles, this problem of power remains. And I think, possibly the wisest response to this is to not allow the problem to come up in the first place rather then pretend that any kind of mediation or mechanism can possible account for it.

In so much as we are embracing certain ways of doing things, its a mindfulness that they can come with a requisite way of restructuring our own lives, or the lives of others. And so it is, that if we want a totalising network, even ran as a public good by moral people with a system of accountability, I cannot see that from its very nature it wouldn’t become problematic.

[1]: I read Langdon Winner’s Autonomous Technology at the time and I can’t help but wonder if I was influenced by a suggestion he makes near the end of the book:

“One step that might be taken, for example is that groups and individuals would for a time, self-consciously and through advanced agreement, extricate themselves from selected techniques and apparatus… The emerging “needs”, habits or discomforts should be noticed and thoroughly examined. Upon this basis it should be possible to examine the structure of the human relationships to the device in question. One may then ask if those relationships should be restored and what if any, new form those relationships should take.” (pg.332)

[2]: When Trump came to power, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out, there was a lot of conversation about how to challenge Facebook’s power. A lot of discussion was had as to whether people should stay on the platform. The general tenor was that one should, that there was value in staying and fighting fake news, that there was a need for visibility and that if one left this was to simply abandon a platform to its worst elements and allow them flourish. Its an argument that makes sense, although I don’t feel the morals are clear cut (clearly if I agreed I’d be using the platform). The self-damage that these platforms cause and the difficult moral quandary this can leave people in is pretty well argued for by L.M. Sacasas.

But I also think that any movement that considers itself above being damaged by use (and this now extends beyond Facebook to its foul cousin Twitter) are fooling themselves. To use a tool is to be shaped by it. In a way that is perhaps not predicted, politics has shaped itself to use these things more effectively. This leaves unchallenged the claims these systems make about what is good for a person and for people in general. Use simply props them up. Even complaining about them within their own system is to simply acknowledge the power they have.

I am not saying that one should not use the tool: its too big a world to do that. I cannot make judgements about every person using Facebook. But I will say that they should be used discriminatingly, with an eye to the disorientations, to the way they exploit people and return back what one is concerned with changed. This seems a good first step. To be aware and conscious of the dangers involved.

The arguments about the impotence of boycotts came about because they focus on the individual users and politics as a manifestation of individuality (this in itself a partial product of Social Media). Where as in fact, acting as a group could quite easily damage them. A mass of users agreeing to withdraw would cause problems, even if the numbers aren’t particularly large. This is where I predict the next forms of resistance to these things are going to come from. This already to some degree happened in India, but I suspect that communities and groups are going to have reason to revolt and withdraw. If you like, Facebook may end up like the Sun newspaper in Liverpool: offending the sensibilities of an entire place or people so badly that they refuse your product. And the reason for that might even be beyond challenging their power (I can’t say that the Liverpool boycott threatened the Sun beyond readers, but its been self-sustaining now for a while and has no sign of dying out).

[3]: At least on a utility level, on a matter of technical innovation for the user, I don’t actually think Social Networks like Facebook are that advanced. Email existed and exists as a matter of connecting others across vast distances. Online Messengers existed for a long time for the purposes of real time communication and still do. Platforms existed: covering many different needs and wants, philosophies, political ideologies, hobbies and these weren’t even necessarily things constructed in a manner that was insanely hard to find. Livejournal was one, MySpace in fact another (consider what you could do with your own page on MySpace and what you can do with Facebook profiles - the degradation of choice and expression that occurs between the two should make you pause, even if the majority of MySpace profiles were ugly).

Now to circumvent misunderstanding, I am not saying that a lot of technical innovation did not go into Facebook, because that is blatantly nonsense. Facebook created a lot of things, really technically impressive things in order to manage the scale of what they were doing. At least in my own realm, React is fantastic, attempted nonsense with licensing aside.

[4]: I mean this point about money vs cards with some seriousness. Cash as a technology is anonymous and requires far less infrastructure and centralisation to deploy then credit cards and the banking system. The security and certainty of it comes from the methods used in blocking forgery (the only centralised aspect of it) and once made is flexible, easy to use and importantly, allows no observation and surveillance by state or by corporation. A cashless society, aside from the horrible effects it would have on the homeless, would allow immediate capture of this information. Cashless alternatives I think are great, and frankly should exist as viable alternatives, but I reject the notion it should be the only option. This is perhaps the only time you’ll hear me praise cash.