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."

Comments

Define "harm"

[DNS-and-BIND]

Why do I get the idea that the word "harm" actually means "political ideas I disagree with and believe should be censored"? (reads essay: keywords, Trump, TEH ROOSHINS, Nazis) Yup. Pretty much this.

Re: Define "harm"

[DNS-and-BIND]

I believe gay married couples should be able to own guns to protect their marijuana plants. Tyranny?

Our goal in defeating Hillary was to remove the left's hand from our throat, not to put our hand around blue peoples' collective windpipe. We don't care how they live their lives, but leftists care very much how we live ours. Their goal is to lock both hands around our throat and squeeze until we submit to leftist tyranny or die.

We know where the leftists want it to end, with us silenced and subservient forever, toiling to pay taxes for them to redistribute to their clients as they pick at, poke at and torment us. You look at the things we stand for and all of them are about lifting the yoke off of us - cutting taxes, slashing regulations, guaranteeing the Second Amendment, protecting our religious liberty, and safeguarding us from terrorists and illegals. But everything leftists want, everything Hillary ran on, is about clamping the yoke ever tighter around our necks - raising taxes, issuing more regulations, disarming us, limiting our religious freedom, and putting us at risk from terrorists and alien criminals. The whole leftist platform is about putting us down and keeping us down.

I got a solution

[OYAHHH]

If you don't like Facebook's offerings then offer something better.

Re: Maybe youre wrong and Silicon Valley is right.

[alvinrod]

I doubt that very much. If that were the case, no one would volunteer as it provides no social capital, but we recognize and discuss philanthropic activities all the time. A good chunk of Facebook posts are people trying to convince other people how good they are for caring about some cause. Facebook and social media make it easy to look like you care about community without actually caring about it. Look at the Kony 2012 slacktivism campaign for a good example of this in action.

That and if you look at the parts of the world that disallow capitalism or free market principles, it does not appear to me as though they are acting much different or have somehow come together as a community on a large scale. I think it would be a bit of a stretch to lay this at the feet of capitalism, especial as the youth in the west are becoming more socialistic in political belief (see Bernie Sanders rise to popularity) but are not engaging in community-focused behavior either. If you think that the problem is getting worse and countries like the U.S. are becoming less capitalistic, it suggests that the two things are not strongly connected, at least to the extent that you want to suggest.

Exploits

[chris-chittleborough]

Ignore our humanity? Facebook exploits our humanity. Their whole business strategy is to use psychological features that improved survival rates in prehistory to get users to expose ourselves to advertisements.