Surveilled And Controlled
Although I use Twitter, a bit, I’m notoriously grouchy and recalcitrant about use of social networks in general. This is part of the reason why:
The business model of social media platforms is surveillance and behavioral control. The internet’s original protocols and architecture made surveillance and behavioral control more difficult. Once capital became the dominant source of financing it directed investment toward centralized platforms, which are better at providing such surveillance and control, the original platforms were starved of financing. The centralized platforms grew and the decentralized platforms submerged beneath the rising tides of the capitalist web.
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This is not a choice that capitalists made, this is the only way that profit-driven organizations can provide a public good like a communication platform. Capitalist investors must capture profit or lose their capital. If their platforms can not capture profit, they vanish.
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=8174
Also, remember why someone is paying for something that you use to exist, if you’re not. A library is there because the council pays for it, and the council gets that money from rates. Facebook is there because the advertisers pay for access to your eyeballs, and the application (often game) companies pay to get easy access to your clicking.
You’re not one of Facebook’s customers, you’re one of their assets.
All the more reason we need to figure out a way to integrate gift economies and capitalism.