Facebook and its enigmatic custodian Mark Zuckerberg suffered their biggest hit to date this week when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica— which self-describes as a political and commercial service that “uses data to change audience behavior”– pulled the personal data from 50 million Facebook users, without their permission, and used it to advance Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign and the Brexit Leave campaign. This isn’t “new” news, really. It was first reported by the Swiss magazine Das Magazin in December 2016 and then again by Motherboard in January 2017, but it wasn’t until Christopher Wylie blew his whistle to The Guardian a few days ago that everyone sat up and took notice.
People are pissed. Rightly so. This is a massively important story, and neither its impact nor its reach should be underestimated. We need to talk about the extent to which data is (or isn’t) “property” and the extent to which we do (or don’t) “own” our personal data. We need to talk about what social media sites like Facebook are– utilities? marketplaces? businesses? communities? archives?– as well as whether and how they should be regulated. We need to talk about the ever-diminishing borders between business, politics, advertising, entertainment, and social networks. We need to commit ourselves to making digital literacy a priority. To the extent that the public anger surrounding this story motivates citizens to motivate legislators and industry leaders to have more serious, more transparent, more actionable conversations about all of the above, their outrage will be well-spent.
Alas, that’s not what I see outraged people on my Facebook feed saying. I see them threatening to quit, or actually quitting, Facebook. (Also on my Twitter feed. See: #DeactivateFacebook) Some of them might be genuinely committed to their Deactivate Decision, but I know and you know– we all know, this is not our first rodeo, after all– that most will be back within a few hours, a few days, a few weeks. Max.
The problems with opting for the Deactivate Decision are many and varied, I think. Chief among them is that it evinces not only a kind of naivete about, but also a fundamental misunderstanding of, how massive aggregators of data (like Facebook) both function and profit. If you think that deactivating your Facebook account is going to “stick it” to Mark Zuckerberg, or if you think that deactivating your Facebook account is going to give you more ownership and control over your personal data, you are woefully mistaken.
Maybe it’s true that if a critical number of people– and we’re talking about well over a BILLION people here– withdrew from Facebook simultaneously and en masse, that might constitute a fatal blow to the most populous social network in human history. Maybe. There are plenty of reasons to think that would be a good thing, and just as many reasons to think it would not. What that sort of action definitely would NOT do, though, is “stick it” to Mark Zuckerberg or to Facebook investors in any financially devastating sense. And, most importantly, even an unprecedented, collective, revolutionary action like that wouldn’t address the real problem at the heart of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, namely, that all of the personal data we have already shared and already relinquished control over now resides in the databanks of hundreds of thousands of different corporations and agencies, across an almost limitless swath of industries, who are using using it and sharing it and selling it over and over and over again.
Here’s the thing about digitized information: It is iterable. It is recordable. It is simple, immaterial, but very easily monetizable. And it is practically immortal. As the old adage goes: Nothing is ever deleted from the internet. Deactivating your Facebook account is like trying to unring a bell.
Thinking of leaving Facebook? Go ahead. You won’t be missed. You won’t even be “gone.”
The “digital you” will still be there on Facebook after you deactivate. Your photos, your comments and conversations, records of your likes and your views and your activities, a million un-erasable traces of you will remain. The digital you that made those traces at one time on Facebook has already been analyzed and assessed and sold by Facebook to a million of its partners, who will analyze and assess and sell you again to a million of their partners, and so on, and so on. You are already a infinitesimally small part of a million algorithms that shape the contours of the IRL world that meatspace-you, deactivated-you, stick-it-to-Zuckerberg-you will still have to navigate, despite your protests.
Yes, we should have thought more about the complicated nature of securing digital privacy, about the permanence of data, and about the implications of our laissez-faire attitude toward its oversight and regulation. We should have thought long and hard about our complicity with the “terms and conditions” every single time we reflexively clicked “I agree” to the terms and conditions over the last two decades. We should have thought about the consequences of allowing engineers to build things they didn’t yet understand, allowing financiers to monetize things they didn’t fully understand, allowing corporations to profit off of things they didn’t care to understand, allowing all those algorithm analysts to reductively mathematize things that almost no one understands. And I mean “understand” in the deep, philosophical sense. In the messy, nuanced, multivalent sense. In the sense that takes time and cooperation and insight and argument.
We should have thought more about sacrificing the humanities at the altar of STEM. We should still think about that.
Your data is out there already on the market, whether you leave Facebook or not. So is mine. So is everyone’s. You don’t own it. You’re not getting it back. That ship has already sailed. What we can do now, what we should do now, is exercise more prudence going forward. Because if you’re frightened or outraged by how unreflective, myopic, and naive we were in thinking about Facebook before it became the 800-lb gorilla, I’ve got two words for you:
Artificial. Intelligence.
I’m not saying that there aren’t good reasons to quit Facebook. For many people, it’s an addiction, or a time-consuming distraction, or a source of anxiety/insecurity, or just noise without a signal, and those are all good reasons to exit. If you’re older than 65 or younger that 18, Facebook may be largely pointless, as the so-called “social network” it houses isn’t populated by your people. But for the rest of us 18-60 year old adults, it has become a practically indispensable resource, like it or not. Facebook has bested every potential usurper (WhatsApp, Google+, Diaspora, Signal, et al) so far. It’s the 800-lb. gorilla now, and it’s not going anywhere soon.
Not without being subpoenaed, anyway.
So, sure, we can execute our (largely symbolic) protest and #DeactivateFacebook, but unless we ALL do it together, that accomplishes almost nothing. We need to think about better strategies going forward. I think it’s long past time to expand the Presidential Cabinet to include a Secretary of Technology. (Our current Appointer-in-Chief notwithstanding). We need to start thinking about a national “tech policy” in the same way that we think about domestic policy and foreign policy. We need #NetNeutality back immediately. We need to formalize in law that the internet is a public utility, and we need to revise our treatment of it as such, by law. We need to establish a Congressional Oversight Committee for the Regulation of Digital Privacy. (We also need to get some actual philosophers and actual scientists back into the Congressional advisory offices!) We need to make Digital Literacy a core requirement in primary and secondary education. Just for starters.
And while we’re at it, let’s go ahead and #SubpoenaZuckerberg, too.