Why I deleted my Facebook account?
Craic. You may not have heard of that word before. It’s Irish and pronounced like the drug that was popular in the 90s and the thing that plumbers have—crack. Wiktionary defines it as “fun, especially through enjoyable company, a pleasant conversation.”
Limerickman, podcaster, and professor of hot takes, Blindboy Boatclub, will often open episodes with “what’s the craic?” sort of like people in the United States might say, “what’s good?” The thing I like about ‘craic’ is that you can use it as a noun, as in “I had coffee with an old friend of mine, it was good craic.” If you’re an Irish reader, I hope I don’t come off like a gowl for using a bit of your language. It’s just such a perfect word, and there’s not an English equivalent.
HEY! If you tend to check out after two paragraphs, read this
I don’t want to overwhelm you with name-dropping, but before I lose the people who only read the first two paragraphs, I want to mention the names of some drop-dead brilliant people for having the guts to write thoughtfully on Facebook and the surveillance capitalism era of the Internet. I would encourage everyone to search for what Jaron Lanier¹, Shoshana Zuboff², Chamath Palihapitiya³, Douglas Rushkoff⁴, and Roger McNamee⁵ have said on the topic of Facebook, Google and other companies that make money as Facebook and Google do. They’re the real experts on this topic, I’m just an aging autodidact. Do yourself a favor and have a look, there are some links at the bottom.
Back to the craic…
When you post something on Facebook, you never know what context it will appear in on other people’s news feeds. In a friend’s news feed, your post may follow something like happy birthday photos, it may follow a scathing article about a person or institution your friend dislikes, or it may follow a targeted ad funded by a politically-motivated billionaire trying to change your friend’s mood to serve some ideological end. If they arrive at your post, they’ll arrive primed by whatever the previous posts they saw recently and with the cumulative priming of what they usually do on Facebook.
We know that Facebook tries to increase engagement (activity on their platform) and that it’s easier to keep people engaged by creating negative emotions than creating positive emotions because creating negative emotions is cheaper. This produces an environment more prone to captiousness and schadenfreude (that’s fault-finding and taking pleasure in the misfortune of others) than dignity and mudita (taking pleasure in the well-being of others).
Facebook wasn’t always this way, and it’s still not all bad. I had a lot of great craic on Facebook from when I created an account in 2006, and even some until just before I left in January. Without Facebook, I likely wouldn’t have met my wife! I think of Facebook, and other companies like them, like Silicon Valley Citizen Kane stories.
Like Charles Foster Kane, in the beginning, Facebook was like an entirely sympathetic character with good intentions who only made honest mistakes trying to do good work. Then, also like Charles Foster Kane, they slowly become unrecognizable versions of their former selves. Kane goes from being a kid that likes to sled, to a man of means trying to do good work through journalism, to a bitter recluse shielding himself from reality. At some point in his meteoric career, it becomes obvious that his power and popularity just make him hungrier for more power and popularity. He pursues power and popularity with a deficit of self-awareness and other-awareness — a deficit of how his actions impact people around him. Around the time in the film that he runs for office (that’s his campaign poster), it dawned on me that nothing good could come from the direction his life was heading. (Spoiler) He dies a wealthy but lonely man, incapable of creating emotional well-being for himself and his loved ones despite his incredible financial success.
You can tell a very similar story about Facebook. In the mid-2000s, I was onboard with the direction they were going; I didn’t mind more of my life being public if that meant it would be easier for me to connect with real people who had similar interests. Maybe that would be good craic. I didn’t mind targeted ads if they were more relevant to me than the kinds of ads I would happen across accidentally. I’d rather see ads for new energy drinks I might like then for, say, black pudding. I thought that Facebook would be good data stewards because it seemed to me that their business model required user trust to operate. If Facebook did something that made users lose trust in them, why wouldn’t they just go to other competitive platforms running in the mid-2000s like MySpace or Friendster or LiveJournal or whatever? Why wouldn’t the market favor the most trustworthy user-friendly company?
I didn’t anticipate things like network lock-in effects, where you stay on Facebook because all of your friends are on Facebook and all of their content is on Facebook, so no one wants to move to a platform where they’ll be alone. I didn’t anticipate there would be companies and software design practices established to make applications addictive. I didn’t anticipate that targeted advertising would turn in to deranged forms of behavioral modification enabled by smartphones that nudge and herd humans towards desired outcomes. I didn’t anticipate that Internet advertising would be used to make specific demographics of people feel more despondent on election day and less likely to vote.
In my own case
I started observing that when I would go to post something on Facebook it was hard to stop thinking about all the different angles someone could take on it, how other people reading it might respond to those takes, and how it would affect me if any of that transpired on a post. It was like moving a chess piece, lingering with a finger on while I asked myself if it was really a smart thing to do, and then wondering for hours or days later if it was or wasn’t. That was anxiety-provoking and craic-reducing. To some extent, this is endemic to anything you share anywhere. It’s more salient on Facebook as its business model encourages captious user behavior.
What I want is a Craicbook, it would be like Facebook but with algorithms and a business model that encourages people to give each other craic instead of giving them face — to use the parlance of the 90s.
I’ll give you one example, some months ago I saw the original 1962 version of The Manchurian Candidate. In an otherwise exceptionally competent film, Frank Sinatra has three plot-irrelevant scenes that must have been added as part of a rider to help cement his reputation as a lady’s man and a tough guy. In one scene, it’s established that even while Frank Sinatra is having a nervous breakdown on a train, he’s still so irresistible that an attractive young woman will strike up a conversation with him and give him her address and phone number within a few minutes. In another scene, that same woman picks him up at a police station after a fight and tells him on the way home that she just left her fiancé for him.
Who was that fight with? An actor named Henry Silva. All five feet and seven inches of Frank Sinatra fights six foot two Henry Silva. Of course, Sinatra wins after breaking some furniture and very sincerely making inept karate-like gestures. As the plot goes, Sinatra’s character has no clear motivation to fight Silva’s character so they add in some ADR to try and explain his thought process, but the ADR audio overlayed on the audio recorded from the set is like someone shouting in your ear compared to someone talking to you across the dinner table.
If you’re reading this, I know you’re too young to have seen that scene before. Okay, maybe I’m not certain, but I’m pretty certain. So this should be new to most people, it’s funny in a way that it wasn’t intended and it contains at least one actor that you’ve almost certainly heard of before. Sharing this should make for good craic, yeah?
At the risk of painting the devil on the wall, I’ll tell you what my hesitations were. In an era where people are rehashing the capitalism vs socialism debate, this is a film about communist espionage in the United States with some Mccarthyesque themes. Someone might think I was sharing to make some political or economic point or might just use the plot to segue into their own take on economics. The relationship between Angela Lansbury and the actor who plays her son, Laurence Harvey is very… Freudian. Not to mention, Henry Silva was Sicilian and Portuguese but the character he plays in the film is East Asian. All of this seemed like a plausible setting for an elaborate fight in the comments.
There are things I could have done to reduce the likelihood of craic-derailment by making the content more Facebook-friendly. It’s a big ask, relatively speaking, for someone scrolling through their Facebook news feed to watch a two-minute long YouTube video of a 57-year-old film. I could have edited it, punched it up a bit, and uploaded a new video to Facebook. Replay some parts in slow motion. Add a picture-in-picture thumbnail video of me reacting to and commenting on the fight scene. Maybe I would add some 8-bit Nintendo Super Mario sound effects, or maybe add some Bat-Fight words? CRASH! KAPOW! FLRBBBBB! ZGRUPPP! HUGLAGHALGHALGHAL! I could set it to the former UFC anthem, Face the Pain by the Nu Metal band, Stemm. I could throw in some Dragon Ball Z — make Sinatra go Super Saiyan! Then give it an appropriately clickbaity title like “Frank Sinatra goes SUPER SAIYAN and DESTROYS Henry Silva with KARATE!!! REAL. Ultimate. Power.”
The truth is I’m about eight years too old to know what Super Saiyan means, and if I successfully made an entertaining viral version of that fight scene it would have the equally disastrous outcome of eating up a lot of my time to make money for Facebook.
A second option would have been to unfriend or restrict anyone who was likely to disagree with me. I resisted doing that as I was already worried about being in an algorithmic filter bubble based on likes and other reactions without building one of my own design. What I want is a Craicbook, it would be like Facebook but with algorithms and a business model that encourages people to give each other craic instead of giving them face — to use the parlance of the 90s.
Why just Facebook?
It’s harder than you might think to delete a social media account. With Facebook, you have to not log in for 30 days after you set your account to be deleted. Several times I almost logged in just out of a strange kind of muscle memory impulse. I’m still on Instagram and WhatsApp, and yes I know they are owned by Facebook. I find that it’s harder for people to argue on Instagram. WhatsApp is still pretty useful to communicate with people outside of the United States (although Signal and Telegram are viable alternatives). I still have a Google account, Amazon account, Twitter account etc. There are people that try to live without using products and services from all these companies, they’re sometimes called digital vegans. Facebook struck me as the worst offender, but you may see that I vanish off some of these other services in the future.
Where to find me now
For now, I’m on plenty of things that are built on business models that rely less on surveillance and behavioral modification. Here are the ones that start with the letter ‘m’: Mastodon, Medium, MeWe, Minds.
What to do
Litigation is not a bad idea but companies like Facebook and Google are so wealthy, fast and smart they’ll generally outmaneuver governments and large law firms.
We really need better business models and designs to replace the ones we’re using now. The two key concepts I believe we’ll need are provenance (knowing the origin of where data on a network comes from and how it got to you) and micropayments. You can check out my recent article on micropayments. I largely stole these ideas from Jaron Lanier, but Jaron stole them from Ted Nelson.
If you watch one thing from each of these people, here are my recommendations.
- The exchange Jaron Lanier has on Virtual Futures from about 23:30 to 30:00 on the topic of how Facebook and Twitter create engagement and how it sabotages social causes is eye-opening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDRN_dZNJUM&t=23m30s
- Shoshana Zuboff wrote the book on Surveillance Capitalism but if you don’t have time to read that, her interview on Hidden Forces is a great one. https://www.hiddenforces.io/podcast/shoshana-zuboff-surveillance-capitalism
- This an exceptional five minutes of Chamath Palihapitiya speaking as a Former Facebook Executive at Stanford University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6e1riShmak
- The points Douglas Rushkoff makes around 1:02:40 regarding the unnecessarily high valuations of social media companies and taxing capital gains vs taxing dividends are simple but profound ones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YKd873nRy4#t=1h02m40s
- Roger McNamee’s interview with jason on This Week In Startups is the best Roger McNamee interview on this topic. https://thisweekinstartups.com/roger-mcnamee-part2/