Facepeople

Here’s what we under­stand about Face­book, in no par­tic­u­lar order

You never had any pri­vacy in the first place.

A lot of peo­ple are com­plain­ing that Face­book is too inva­sive. They say that the ser­vice (which is free) is tak­ing too many lib­er­ties with their free­dom and ask­ing too much of its mem­bers, shar­ing every­thing they do and say with every­one else.

Num­ber one: Whuh huh? It was our impres­sion that you choose to do or say what­ever it is you are doing and say­ing on that ser­vice. You’re still on the inter­net, you’re still typ­ing into a com­puter send­ing your words and images across pub­lic util­i­ties onto servers you don’t own or even pay for, elect­ing to do so every time you do it.

What’s the prob­lem? Why are you on there if you don’t want them to broad­cast what you’re doing on there? Isn’t that the point? Why do you stay there? Are you afraid of los­ing touch with all your “friends?” The same “friends” you admit you prob­a­bly don’t want to know every­thing about, just like you don’t nec­es­sar­ily want them all to know every­thing about you?

Idiot.

Num­ber two: Aren’t you the same per­son already broad­cast­ing your sex life over your phone? Aren’t you the same per­son who’s won­der­ing why they might have a prob­lem at work if some­one hap­pens to check their pro­file and dis­cover those pic­tures from that one week in Mex­ico where you “exper­i­mented” with sleep­ing with lla­mas? Aren’t you the same per­son who thinks that all that stuff you’re post­ing all over the web will mag­i­cally dis­ap­pear and be for­got­ten by Google and never ever turn up at the most inop­por­tune moment? Isn’t that you?

You don’t have to join Facebook

Did we miss the memo that came down from the World Gov­ern­ment and the Anti-Christ and the Tem­plars and the group that forces Dan Brown to write nov­els with his feet that said every­one must join Face­book? Was there a dec­la­ra­tion at the bor­der of every coun­try insist­ing no admit­tance with­out mem­ber­ship? Were there armed thugs (hot, shirt­less armed thugs) we missed when they called because we were out get­ting a bagel?

Who said you had to be on Face­book in the first place? And what busi­ness is it of yours what the hell they do with their own ser­vices? What, you want your money back? You thought all this time they were like some “every­thing should be free!” zom­bies using Linux on home-built com­put­ers made of weed and Slurpee cups?

Of course they want your infor­ma­tion! That’s your only value to them! Did you think they want you there because they like you? Face­book is not your grand­mother. Face­book is the fas­cist hoard telling you not to worry because they have every­thing under control.

And no one ever said you had to be a Nazi.

Yes, we drew the Nazi card. Already!

Face­book is run by a douche

What’s your def­i­n­i­tion of a douche? Here’s ours:

Douche. Photo not cour­tesy BusinessWeek.com

Mark Zucker­berg, who likes to be called “Zuck” (which rhymes with both ‘suck’ and ‘fuck’ though we bet you thought that in your own head already) is 26 years old today. Yes, as luck (which rhymes with stuck) would have it, today is the C.E.O.‘s birth­day. Happy birth­day, douche!

You do know, don’t you, that the man is cav­a­lier about nearly every­thing in life, includ­ing other people’s (or, as he calls them, “dumb fucks”) pri­vacy and other people’s ideas. Turns out the dude kind of stole the whole Face­book thing (allegedly) from some of his col­lege douchebag friends (allegedly) and then built the thing on some­one else’s servers before rip­ping it free of Harvard’s clutches and strik­ing out on his own, leav­ing every­one in his wake. And you must also know that Via­com offered him $800 mil­lion for Face­book in 2005, which he turned down because he didn’t need the money.

He only needs your life, and all its details, so he can sell that instead! You’re worth far more than $800 mil­lion, and he’s known that all along.

Zuck, we salute you! If there was ever any­one to take the man­tle of Bill Gates in terms of cold-hearted greedy bas­tards, you win!

Facebook’s days are numbered

Every­thing runs in cycles. Face­book is try­ing damned hard to break out of the ‘next big thing’ cycle that was pre­vi­ously held by such mem­o­rable sites as GeoC­i­ties, Friend­ster and MySpace. Face­book is spread­ing itself far and wide, cast­ing its net around every­thing it pos­si­bly can. It has to be so impor­tant and so vast that you ignore it at your peril, because all the cool kids are there and you won’t be able to see any­thing or read any­thing with­out membership.

But that’s a bit back­wards. You’ve already proved, as men­tioned above, that you love shar­ing every­thing! You want peo­ple to see your pic­tures and your video! You want peo­ple to read your opin­ions! You crave an audi­ence and want to be more pop­u­lar than your friends, or their friends, or peo­ple you’ve never even heard of.

You can’t do that in a fenced-in gar­den unless every­one else is also inside the garden.

But Google kind of already has that ter­ri­tory staked out, the ‘out­side the gar­den’ area, because every­one goes there to find every­thing. And every­thing is usu­ally on Wikipedia or YouTube, any­way. What Face­book has in its arse­nal — the only thing — is a vast mem­ber­ship of will­ing par­tic­i­pants who will start doing every­thing through Face­book (buy things, sign in to things, post things) so they, in turn, can take all those things and all the data about you doing all those things (what’s pop­u­lar? who’s pop­u­lar? what are you buy­ing? what are you watch­ing? what are you talk­ing about?) and sell it.

Because they know you’ll never pay to get access to Face­book. Why would you?

We should point out about now that there’s no use look­ing for us on Face­book. We’re not there. Any­one pre­tend­ing to be us, isn’t. We have no pro­file, we have no inter­est in hav­ing a pro­file, and we trust Mark Zucker­berg about as far as we could throw him, which might actu­ally be about four feet because he’s kind of wiry.

Why do we need Face­book when we have you? And we have this? This is all we will ever need? Peo­ple who want to be here, peo­ple we ask noth­ing of in return, and peo­ple smart enough to know better.

This is glass­dog, the last bas­tion of use­less infor­ma­tion with­out ads plas­tered all over it.