The Facebook Outage A Foreboding Of Things To Come

Empathy a human trait we all possess in abundance has been ebbing away since "Social Media" came into the scene - arguably. Embracing new technology is what we humans do. We have come a long way from creating fire with the help of some flint and friction ( the latter a physical process we've now become accustomed to in a subject matter called physics). So when you hear people labelling someone technophobe because they genuinely feel social media is causing more harm than good, you should be very careful and cautious of snake oil salesmen. It is impossible to halt the progress of technology- it is what drives us. Social media is just a foreboding of a catastrophic failure waiting in the wind if we do nothing. The outage that happened on 06-10-2021 and the ramifications from that (short spell) is a warning we need legislation now rather than later that governs how these oligopolies should operate. Rebranding is an old trick we should not fall for - Social Media to a Metaverse. Virtual reality is what it is. The hype about digital worlds and augmented reality pops up every few years, but usually dies away. Humans are social beings just leave it at that.

I still avoid using emoticons in formal and informal correspondence. I can not see the relevance. Just as I can not see the relevance of social network platforms. Do not get me wrong I am not stipulating an equivalence here. Let me explain - my cautious use of the social networks has nothing to do with paranoia about privacy and yes to a certain extent, I welcome the unprecedented transparency and connectivity that these services can empower. But what’s increasingly becoming so scary is the wider social and political cost of our ever-greater enmeshment in these proprietary networks - whose only raison d'être is to sell our own written personal content and keep the money(sic).

“When you’re young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff,” formerPresident Obama warned high-school students in Virginia a couple of years ago. “Be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age whatever you do will be pulled up later somewhere in your life.” He’s damn right. Maybe he was thinking of his two young girls - shouldn't we all. One thing people are not fully appreciative of is the permanency of the internet - anything posted online might come to haunt you, yet all of us need space to grow. The media (print and screen) is full of stories of people whose lives have been turned apart because of petty jokes and classroom banter they did with friends at primary and secondary schools on their social media pages. Imagine some of the stuff you now have on your profile as a 19-year-old university student, would you like those things to be still associated with you intact 10, 20, 30 years hence? To err is human used to be so sacrosanct. We forgive and be forgiven has always been a human trait. What are we doing to humanity?

The Rwandan genocide occurred between 7 April and 15 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. This was pre-social media. Can you imagine that happening now where everyone has a broadcasting platform in their hands (smartphones)? In a way, some would argue that it could have helped to expose what was going on a lot quicker to the outside world. Well, the counterargument to that is - these platforms are not neutral. The recent tiff between Twitter, Facebook, and the former USA president, the Nigerian President, and a host of others just goes to show they can be very political and become complicit in events with far-reaching consequences.

It is not just politics - the Instagram influencer Nigerian Hush Puppi who scammed and swindled 100s of millions from all and sundry and now languishing in prison only after the FBI got involved is a lesson to be learned. He preached how he was so blessed that God was sending him all this cash for him to look immaculate and with the best wardrobe money can buy, he duly obliged. Be circumspect of blessed souls in a human carcass. They might show some sign of perspicacity but by and large, they are perfidious. Did Instagram or its parent company Facebook ever question how he was making all this dosh? No, because they were making their cuts and by extension also blessed. You have to wonder who the hell is this deity throwing blessings around willy-nilly. Satan the devil maybe?

Take your political hat off for a moment - Is Joe Biden being treated in the same way they treated the previous incumbent? They acquiesce with everything he says or does even though anyone with two brain cells can see the obvious bias. The current human catastrophe masquerading as an orderly queue in the southern borders is even worst than the shambles to leave the airport in Kabul a couple of weeks ago. What have these guardians of moral rectitude (social, screen and print media) said about it? Leaving Afghanistan with no pre-planning was a disaster in every way you care to look at it. When you have got a situation where the actual foot soldiers are showing their disgust about how the elites (armchair generals et al) have handled the situation and in so doing, get locked up in prison for not following orders, you might just also come to the assertion that "the most dangerous of all falsehoods a slighted distorted truth". Exigency comes to the fore. This complicity is fracturing the fabric that holds the nation together.

Facebook (WhatsApp, Instagram), Twitter, and Google (YouTube) (the latter may be to a lesser extent) exist to make money, by selling advertisers the means to target you with ever greater precision. That explains the endless series of “privacy” headlines, as these unregulated businesses push boundaries to make it easier for paying third parties to access your likes, interests, photos, social connections, and purchasing intentions. That’s why Facebook has made it harder for users to understand exactly what they’re giving away — why, for instance, its privacy policy has grown from 1,004 words in 2005 to 6,830 words today (by comparison, as the New York Times has pointed out, the U.S. Constitution is 4,543). Founder Mark Zuckerberg once joked dismissively about the “dumb fucks” who “trust me”. I admire the business Zuckerberg et al have built, but do I trust any of them? The answer is an unequivocal NO.

What is Good for the Goose is also good for the Gander: Information you supply for one purpose will invariably be used for another. Phone up to buy a pizza, and the order-taker’s computer gives her access to your voting record, employment history, library loans — all “just wired into the system” for your convenience. She’ll suggest a beefy pork pizza as she knows about your 42-inch waist, she’ll add a delivery surcharge because a nearby robbery yesterday puts you in “a red zone” — and she’ll be on her guard because you’ve checked out the library book Dealing With Depression. This is where the Council for Civil Liberties sees consumerism going — and it’s not too hard to believe. Already surveys suggest that 35 percent of firms are rejecting applicants because of information found on social networks. What makes you think you can control what happens to your personal data?

And besides, why should we let businesses privatize our social discourse? Some day you should take time to read those 6000 and over words of Facebook privacy rules. it’s Facebook that owns the right to do as it pleases with your data and to sell access to it to whoever is willing to pay. Yes, it’s free to join — but with over 3.5 billion of us now using it to connect, it’s worth asking ourselves how far this “social utility” (its own term) is really acting in the best interests of society.