My second Facebook thoughtcrime in two weeks!

[Steve Kinney]

On 4/20/19 3:01 PM, Punk wrote:

[...]

>> I got a Facebook account for maybe seven or eight years ago.  Since then
>> I have used it to find and hook up with local activist orgs; get
>> feedback on propaganda materials (handbills, flyers, etc.) in production
>> and distribute the finished products to people who used them IRL; do
>> volunteer intelligence work for activist orgs; picked up a few paying
>> gigs; and I managed to seriously blow about a dozen minds that I know
>> of.  On the whole, The Facebook has served /my/ purposes adequately; the
>> question of whether that's "good" depends who you ask.
> 
> 
> 	I too had an account in a previous life and used it to do some of the things you mention. But as time went on the costs of using an NSA weapon designed to attack us outweighted any perceived benefit. 
> 
> 	For instance, it should be kinda self-evident that what you see inside facebook and which people you get to 'meet' is (heavily) manipulated. 

No question:  The Facebook presents as a 'computer dating service' of
sorts, profiling users' interests and personalities and pulling users
into echo chambers populated by "their own kind."  To a lesser extent
The Facebook also exposes users to "opposite" personalities and
messages, to encourage conflict and polarization - because that drives
user engagement and, in the long run, promotes our rulers' "divide the
conquered" agenda.

The Facebook primarily works to find users' existing biases and magnify
them; their business model includes "changing minds" with regard to
consumer purchasing preferences and frequency.  In the sphere of
political ideology, The Facebook spots, classifies and reinforces the
users' already established patterns, enhancing their predictable
responses to targeted political propaganda.

> 	Then you have rampant censorship at the hands of the asshole users themselves. So the vast majority of groups are heavily censored and just echo chambers. 

Yup.  However, those echo chambers do have their potential uses:  One
must always preach to the choir, else how will they get on the same page
and work together effectively at show time?

As an example, The Facebook has enabled me to distribute hundreds of
copies of this package of documents to receptive readers:

http://web.archive.org/web/20190110192354/http://pilobilus.net/strategic_conflict_docs_intro.html


I think that alone makes screwing around with The Facebook a net win.

> 	Then you're running tons of javascript malware, including a keylogger. Because of course the whole point of facebook is to automatically spy on you with milliseconds resolution. 

Javascript?  Optional.  Replace the www in any Facebook address with m,
for the legacy mobile version.  I learned this exists when searching for
a convenient way to download videos posted directly on The Facebook - in
the mobile version, just right-click and save-as.  Since then, mobile
has become my default mode.

The "fancy" version of The Facebook requires JS from facebook.com and
fbcdn.com ["facebook content distribution network"].  Block Javascript
from all other sites while on the facebook.com domain and the thing
works faster and better, without 3rd party user tracking.  NoScript does
the deed quite conveniently.  AdBlock plasters over some of the cracks
that may be left.

Another tracking feature:  Links to posted URLs displayed in The
Facebook do not point to the targets advertised, but to The Facebook
itself, with PHP arguments appended; when clicked on, these links result
in a fast redirect to the target site, with a Facebook tracking code
appended, again as a PHP string.  As far as I know, nobody has made a
browser plugin to automagically sanitize this process; but the real link
does appear in the on-page Facebook link; users can extract the real
link, to kill that component of Facebook user tracking.

The Facebook's pages load a keylogger?  I would like to hear more about
that; so far I have seen no evidence of one.

> 	It should also be self-evident that nobody is ever going to be able to use a NSA-govcorp bulletin board to attack NSA-govcorp in any meaningful way. While you managed to inform a dozen people about the real nature of the society they live in, govcorp used facebook to disinform and manipulate 12 million people (or some such ratio between benefits and harm caused).

That strikes me as a case of "making the perfect the enemy of the good."
 All the better State sponsored dissident groups do that, both to assert
their acolytes' moral superiority and to discourage anyone from doing
anything that might have unwanted real world political impacts.  As I
said before, "It's a piss poor pitiful anarchist who's too stinkin' good
to use the State's resources against the interests of the State."

I would stack up the long term social and political impact of the dozen
or so minds The Facebook may have helped me ruin forever up against any
12,000 or so Normal People made more Normal by The Facebook itself, and
call it a net win.  The Facebook enables talent spotters to establish
one on one comms channels on demand, a resource that presents as an
exploitable weakness in the opposition's infrastructure.  Anything you
say can and will be used against you in political warfare, but knowing
that in advance removes any real hazards.  All of "us" got spotted IRL
years ago, typically starting with MMPI* tests administered in public
school.

"Where have you been?  It's all right, we know where you've been." - The
Pink Floyd, Welcome To The Machine.

As the global collapse of economic and natural ecosystems continues to
accelerate, so will public demand for radical solutions.  The networks
enable exponential propagation of ideas and activities 'whose time has
come', and we ain't seen nothing yet.  Manipulating the initial
conditions of the onset of the end of the world as we know it now, can
produce greatly amplified effects later.

It's an ill wind that blows no minds.

:o)


*[Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a shotgun psychological
classification tool centrally scored at the University of Minnesota,
thereby becoming part of any respondent's Permanent Record.]

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