Slashdot Mirror
Is Facebook Ignoring Our Humanity? (qz.com)
"Facebook really is evil," writes Quartz reporter Nikhil Sonnad. "Not on purpose. In the banal kind of way. Underlying all of Facebook's screw-ups is a bumbling obliviousness to real humans..." An anonymous reader quotes Sonnad's essay:
The imperative to "connect people" lacks the one ingredient essential for being a good citizen: Treating individual human beings as sacrosanct. To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to "people" but to "users," collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.
There are certain things you do not in good conscience do to humans. To data, you can do whatever you like.... With Facebook, "life is turned into a database," writes technologist Jaron Lanier in his 2010 book You Are Not a Gadget... Silicon Valley culture has come to accept as certain, Lanier writes, that "all of reality, including humans, is one big information system".... The problem, says Lanier, is that there is nothing special about humans in this information system. Every data point is treated equally, irrespective of how humans experience it. The essay argues Facebook's value system "has diverged from that of the rest of society," adding that Facebook "seems to be blind to the possibility that it could be used for ill."
Facebook needs to "check their instinctive technological optimism against the realities of human life. Absent human considerations, Facebook will continue to bring thoughtless, banal harm to the world."
There are certain things you do not in good conscience do to humans. To data, you can do whatever you like.... With Facebook, "life is turned into a database," writes technologist Jaron Lanier in his 2010 book You Are Not a Gadget... Silicon Valley culture has come to accept as certain, Lanier writes, that "all of reality, including humans, is one big information system".... The problem, says Lanier, is that there is nothing special about humans in this information system. Every data point is treated equally, irrespective of how humans experience it. The essay argues Facebook's value system "has diverged from that of the rest of society," adding that Facebook "seems to be blind to the possibility that it could be used for ill."
Facebook needs to "check their instinctive technological optimism against the realities of human life. Absent human considerations, Facebook will continue to bring thoughtless, banal harm to the world."
Facebook is a corporation. They care about money.
Our humanity? Only as far as it makes them money.
Ethics? Only the minimum necessary to keep making money.