Fwd: <nettime> living under algorithmic governance

[Steve Kinney]

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On 09/09/2016 09:26 PM, Mirimir wrote:

> I don't know, but just complaining about Facebook seems pointless.

+1

The great unwashed publick actually believes that "free speech" means
privately owned publishers have to let them say whatever they want, on
the given publishers' dime.  Isn't that cute?  Meanwhile, playing the
game of publishing arbitrary propaganda "for free" through social
media outlets is a whole 'nother thing.  Weasels ride for free, but
others may need to launch Big Stories (ahem) that would trigger the
Streisand Effect if they were taken down.  As illustrated in the
thread above.

Meanwhile, this seems to provide an excuse to get out my soap box.
The Facebook, as any good CPunk should know, is one of the twin crown
jewels of U.S. domestic mass surveillance, the other being Google.

The Facebook's national infrastructure was capitalized by DARPA's
financiers, and soon afterward propagandized with front page
placements in "student" newspapers throughout the U.S. (local sports
hero asserts The Facebook is life vs. death in campus social scene,
same template from coast to coast).  That worked brilliantly.  As soon
as its infrastructure was built out to accommodate really explosive
growth, The Facebook started accepting subscribers without .edu e-mail
accounts.  Given the identity of its de facto owners, this makes The
Facebook a classic study in large scale covert political warfare.

Then someone read The Facebook's terms of service and privacy policy,
and started talking.  In summary, by signing up one agreed to be
placed under ongoing surveillance through every vector available to
The Facebook; to allow The Facebook to integrate all intel collected
against the user and offer it for sale to all comers; and of course
granting The Facebook a non-exclusive but unlimited license to publish
any and everything submitted by the user, in a wrapper (c) The
Facebook, forever and ever amen.

The great unwashed publick was shocked - shocked, I tell ya! - and The
Facebook's terms and conditions were promptly amended to obfuscate the
surprisingly honest (insider sabotage?) original, and mitigate
whatever damage it did.  Meanwhile, under the radar, The Facebook
enabled NSA to outsource tons of collection and pre-processing for its
Rumsfeld-given Total (er, I mean, Terrorist) Information Awareness
program, /and/ made that service pay for itself.

Since then, widely publicized and briefly influential articles and
videos documenting the U.S. intelligence community's controlling
interest in The Facebook have gone down the memory hole.  So have the
early Facebook TOS docs:  I went digging for both a few days ago and
abracadabra, no trace of either turned up.  I am sure that a more
determined effort would find hot leads in old list archives & etc;
"Big Brother, Big Facebook," "Orwellian Social Network," and similar
strings might be productive.

I have an account on The Facebook.  I was a very late adopter; my only
initial interest was in testing promotional tools integrating websites
with The Facebook:  The "liek" buttons scattered like JS land mines
across millions of seemingly harmless websites; my own versions of
same that do not phone home to Zuckerberg unless deliberately
activated by the visitor; the uses and abuses of company Facebook
pages; and etc.  "The customer gets what the customer wants."

But eventually I decided to start using The Facebook to distribute
propaganda; it's not like this tells Big Brother anything about me
that's not already being collected.  Depending the propaganda you pump
out and the audience you cultivate, The Facebook can give productive
results - especially if you are interested in engaging IRL with
political activists, organizers and radicals.  The Other Side has
already spotted you; might as well let Our Team do so as well.

The Facebook is an environmental condition; a pervasive fungus on the
networks that is only as toxic to the user as the user's ignorance
enables it to be.

And that's all I have to say about that.

:o)













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