Facebook - a shining example of humanity

I have to admit, I'm a little overtaken by the success of facebook.  It almost seems like yesterday when I retired my ICQ account, jumped on the MSN bandwagon, and saw the future unfold.  I blink a couple times and I'm having to get a gmail account and myspace was cool.  BAM, facebook time.

What a great idea!  How grand, I can put all my info up on the site provided by such a nice group of people who I will trust.  They even so generously provide me with a way of giving them my email account password, so they will tell all my contacts to join too... so I don't have to! WOW.

I mean, why wouldn't anyone trust these people?  Sure they've had a few "shady" (and believe me, I'm using that without the slightest bit of defamation), but what giant corporation that represents people over profit doesn't have a few moments of "did they just seriously...?".  Sure they're no Apple Inc, but give em a bit and I'm sure they'll push a head.

Okay, so I'm a tad bit on the sarcastic side, and can you blame me?  Seems most people don't care.  Apathy has taken full grasp of society.  So fuck it, who cares if facebook sells your info to giant corporations, atleast we're still not shopping at Walmart anymore, are we?

Oh wait, Walmart and Facebook both share a board member (or former board member), Jim Breyer?

I found this comment on a discussion of Google vs Facebook, and their battle over the future of the Internet: "Zuckerberg may be the cute face to front Facebook, but we all know
that the (only) two other board member's Peter Theil and Jim Breyer are
humanists of the highest degree.

Yes! because Thiel's extreme
vision of capitalism where corporations control the whole world is
'humanizing'. TheVanguard.Org and 'The Diversity Myth' are humanist
projects, not neoconservative? Support for the rich using offshore tax
havens...that's the ethical human thing to do!

Jim Breyer's time on the board of Walmart, why, I'm sure he's helping Walmart become more caring, personal, and humane.

Greylock Venture Capital's ties to the CIA are also of no concern, I'm sure.

Can
you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of
national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is
profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in
relationships that were happening anyway.

I think It's pretty insane that people present their personal details in public via social networking."

It concerns me, that out of the many intelligent, strong, and progressive individuals I know, most are on facebook.  Infact, its even more disconcerting, that the activist scene seems to have migrated its organizing to facebook groups (perhaps not exclusively, but still, come on!).  

I guess I'm not surprised.  I've seen very similar attitudes (read: apathy), when I look at mailing lists such as the LAN, or whatnot, and see the large number of hotmail accounts.  Or sit in a fair trade coffee shop and play "count the macbook".

But I digress.  I'm just tired of technology being seen as insignificant when it comes to world changing issues.  When in reality, its technology that is changing the world, just not in the ways it should be.  More people are buying into Apple's Reality Distortion Field everyday, I guess Facebook has developed its own.  (I don't want to get into why Apple is such a large hinderance progressive change, maybe buy me a few double rums and I'll loudly explain)

I guess I'm just sick of it all.. With all the talk of online privacy, Net Neutrality, and copyright violations in the media, I'm shocked at how low priority this has been.  On a possitive note, it seems as though Canada is steering away from our own version of the DMCA.  Yet its still not nearly enough.