Please, Unfriend Me

For several months now I have avoided opening Facebook. I reported back in the fall that I had spent over four hours in a couple of frustrating sessions trying with no success to delete my Facebook account. I got entangled in a closed loop of password-guarded steps where my password first worked to give me access to the delete process but then was declared invalid for confirming that I choose self-exile from the little, billionaire bastard’s empire.

Over coffee with one of my new Pratt board friends, Bonita told me she has over 4,000 followers — all over the world. She depends on Facebook to keep up with family, former associates in France where she has lived and worked, colleagues, and people she’s never met face to face but feels akin to. She posts every day, at least once. I voiced my concerns. “There’s no such thing as privacy anymore.” she responded; “How will you keep in touch with your family?”

Valid point; good question. Since then, I have resolved to call family more regularly (a resolution still being worked on, for before I know it many days go by between calls) and to persist in not opening Facebook or Instagram. That latter resolution has been easy — I do not open Facebook.

But what exactly is my beef?

• I disrespect Zuckerberg and his me-too Sandberg for lacking any sense of right or wrong. They just act out of immediate self-interest. Washing his hands of enabling hate speech and falsehoods; hiring a company to smear George Soros as the source of antipathy to Facebook — this is ethical? If you believe that a sense of right and wrong is inherent in humans, that it stems from inherent empathy, which I believe, then Zuckerberg and Sandberg are flawed, deficient humans.
• I disdain their intentional dissembling. “We do not sell data” Zuckerberg earnestly testified to Congress, in answer to the question about sharing private data with other companies. The weasel weaseled. He does not sell data on us, he gives it away! Then those to whom he has gifted us pay him for access to us.
• And perhaps my biggest beef: I resent his making billions on me and millions of others who innocently want to keep in touch with their families and friends.

So, my Facebook account still exists. But, I have unfriended all my followers and friends. And now I ask you, when you open Facebook, take a moment to Please, Unfriend Me.

I know, he already has used the connections in my account, to you and others. But the account will lie dormant, its linkages progressively obsolete, its few photos of no value

Until 

• Zuckerberg and Sandberg abdicate in favor of someone who demonstrates ethics and a sense of morality, and
• until that someone agrees to pay me a residual each time my data is used, just as a singer or actor earns a residual on each replay,
• until then, my account lies dead. 

Fat chance, you say? Probably so . . .

. . . but in the meantime, Congress must continue to debate how to regulate social networks and their use of data. There are only four resources one can call on to accomplish something — time, energy money and information, and of these, information is king. In this era of big data and AI, the use of and access to information is critical to sustaining our democratic republic. I’m not smart enough to know how society should regulate use of information, but I know it must. I have some confidence that a marketplace, paying me for use of data on my behavior and associations, is one way of establishing that I, the millions of I’s who use Facebook, have a stake and a say in how we, in turn, are used.

Not likely, you say? Perhaps. But what other path is there except into an Orwellian future of autocracy and mercantile serfdom?

Alarmist, you charge? Guilty. Please become alarmed with me.

PS: Perhaps I'm inspired, today being the 243rd anniversary of Thomas Paine’s publication of his small pamphlet, Common Sense. It sold 120,000 copies in its first three months, into a population of but two and a half million, and fired the revolutionary spirit; think on that. I surely am no Paine, but someone out there may pick up the thought: use common sense and Please, Unfriend Me.

PPS: Today, at lunch, my Olympic Club buddies dissected intemperate speech, leading me to review my strong words herein. They duly stand reviewed.