nettime Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium, Part One, Section 6,
Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium And this is not all: identities are constantly evolving. At 15, fast and furious rebelion against one's parents is the thing to do, but at 30 this doesn't make very much sense - and if still the case, the symptom of something much more serious dooms up, typical a person whose growing-up process hasn't been particularly smooth. Our mates from primary school, at least those we haven't lost of sight altogether (only to find them back on Facebook of course) all remember a very much different persons. In the same vein, our first loves may in retrospect see us as the sunshine in their lives, while our ex-partner hates our guts because of the alimony that has to be vired every month. Which we repay in kind by showing only coldness and ill temper: love is over, everything's different, Baby! We change, we have changed and our social relations reflect the change that makes us alive. We'll give here a few examples to show how perverse are the mechanisms of fixed identity/identification that are proposed, or rather imposed, by Facebook. These examples, admitedly a bit simplified, and which we have set in the feminine gender, are unfortunately fast becoming, or have become, reality. Example 1, abusive dismissal: A very competent young female teacher, adored by her students, is filmed being seriously plastered at a party among friends. Explicit pics and clips are circulating in no time on Facebook, posted and reposted by 'friends' of 'friends' of 'friends' ... till they reach her director and the college's boeard. Upon which she is no longer allowed to apply for tenure, and gets a severe reprimand. Her plea that her private life has nothing to do with her work as teacher is dismissed, and she herself gets the sack for being a bad example to her students. Example 2, violence at home: A mother tries to protect her child against her violent husband, gets beaten up, and then raped in the process. After untold sufferings, she manages to escape her tormentor. She moves to another, far-away city and starts her life afresh, together with her son. Crisis over - so she thinks. But there is Facebook. Her tormentor finds her out, either simply by reading her messages, or by checking out on an application she sometimes uses, and which gives away the user's exact location. In order not to be found out, this woman, will have to close her acount, whatever she tries otherwise. In her case, being on Facebook can put her life in peril. Example 3, suicide: A young woman is capptured on video by 'friends' while she's cock-sucking her boy-friend in the college's toilet. The clip is instantly on line, and in no time everyone knows about her private, but now very public skills, which are profusely commented on Facebook. She tries to defend herself, switches educational institution, but to no avail: her new pals are also on Facebook, and are very well clued in on 'what kind of girl she is', thank you. She is constantly ridiculed, insulted and marginalised. You did it, so now you get what you deserve is the backdrop, but also often explicit attitude, which convinces her that her life is longer worth living. She slashes her arteries in her bathtub after having written 'I am not like that' on her Facebook wall.[28] (end of section 6) (section 7) Privacy no more. The ideology of radical transparency. Facebook, in its first five years of 'public' existence (2005 - 2010) has increasingly narrowed the private space of its users [29] Facebook centers its public relations drive around transparency, or even, radical transparency: 'our transparency with regard to machines shall make us free' [30]. We have already deconstructed the assertion that you can't be on Facebook without being your authentic self [31a]. The 'authentic self', however, is a tricky concept. Authenticity is a process whereby one is oneself with others, who in their turn, contribute to one's personnal development. It is not an established fact, fixed once and for all. But the 'faith' of/in Facebook is a blind faith, an applied religion, impervious to reason. Indeed: Members of Facebook's radical transparency camp, Zuckerberg included, believe more visibility make us better people. Some claim, for example, that because of Facebook, young people today have a harder time cheating on their boyfriends or girlfriends. They also say that more transparency should make for a more tolerant society in which people eventually accept that everybody sometimes does bad or embarassing things. The assumption that transparency is inevitable was reflected in the launch of the News Feed in September 2006. It treated all your behaviour identically[...] [31b] The fact that 'behavioural' social networks and 'affinity' ones are merged together online, is, as we have seen before, the cause of serious problems in daily life, when not of very real dangers. Yet the merger is one of the main credo of Facebook, and this for very precise, commercial motives:
Re: nettime Finn Brunton: A short history of spam (LMD)
How could they have missed this? from http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html RMS's reaction is priceless. Reaction to the DEC Spam of 1978 Possibly the first spam ever was a message from a DEC marketing rep to every Arpanet address on the west coast, or at least the attempt at that. If you came first to this page you may first want to check out the history of spam or my reflections on the 25th -- now 30th -- anniversary which contains some notes from my interview with Thuerk, the sender. Below is the spam itself. After it you will find a sampling of some of the reaction it generated -- not unlike the reaction to spam today. Look for the celebrity spam-defender! (Of course that was decades ago.) Einar Stefferud, who was one of the recipients of the spam, provides this note of explanation: It was sent from SNDMSG which had limited space for To and CC and Subject fields. The poor soul that typed in the announcement, also (in those days) had to type in all the addresses, and this person was not trained in the use of SNDMSG. So, she/he started typing addresses into the Subject which overflowed into the TO header, which overflowed into the CC header, and then into the Body, and then the actual message was finally typed in;-)... So, lots of intended recipients did not receive it, including me as I was then STEF@SRI-KA. Obviously here was no such thing as quality control in play. Thus it is some kind of classic example of early screw ups... But the reaction was the same as today's reaction to SPAM ...\Stef The sender is identified as Gary Thuerk, an aggressive DEC marketer who thought Arpanet users would find it cool that DEC had integrated Arpanet protocol support directly into the new DEC-20 and TOPS-20 OS. I spoke with him to get his reflections on the event. DEC was mostly an east coast company, and he had lots of contacts on the east coast to push the new Dec-20 to customers there. But with less presence on the west coast, he wanted to hold some open houses and reach all the people there. In those days, there was a printed directory of all people on the Arpanet. Gary spoke to his technical associate, and arranged to have all the addresses in the directory on the west coast typed in, and then added some customer contacts in other locations, including people at ARPA headquarters who did not, according to Thuerk, complain. The engineer, Carl Gartley, was an early employee at DEC who had been called in to help with promoting the new Decsystem-20. They worked on the message for a few days, going through a few rewrites. Finally, on May 3, Gartley logged on to Gary's account to send the mail. As you see below, the mail program would only accept 320 addresses. The rest overflowed into the body of the message. When they found some recipients had not gotten it, they re-sent the message to the rest of the recipients. According to Thuerk, they were unaware of the address file function in the mail program that would have enabled a mailing list. Thuerk thought, and maintains to this day that he didn't think he was doing anything wrong -- even though he gets a moderate amount of spam on his current E-mail account. He felt the Dec-20 was really relevant news to the Arpanet community, the first major system with Arpanet software built into it. Indeed, some of those who commented on the message felt it was definitely more of interest than other small mass mailings they had seen, with baby announcements and personal trivia. Nonetheless, he knew there would be some negative reaction. He primed his boss to be ready for complaint, though he didn't anticipate how strong it would be. The Defense Communications Agency (DCA) which ran the Arpanet, called Thuerk's boss, a former Air Force officer to register a strong complaint. Amusingly, SpamAssassin scores this as spam. Partly for being in all upper case, but also because the headers of 1978 are now considered invalid. One user from the University of Utah complained the spam had shut down his computer system. Thuerk says only 3 copies were sent to that system, so it was simply an unlucky coincidence that his mailbox disks were very near full when the message arrived. In those days of 56kb links, the thousands of copies of this message were not an insignificant load, however. Some who didn't get the message felt left out, oddly enough, since it became such a topic of conversation. Thuerk continues his career selling systems today, but his spam career was very short lived. In many ways, the negative reaction to that spam probably made sure the problem did not arise again for many years. Here is the message. Mail-from: DEC-MARLBORO rcvd at 3-May-78 0955-PDT Date: 1 May 1978 1233-EDT From: THUERK at DEC-MARLBORO Subject: ADRIAN@SRI-KL To: DDAY at SRI-KL, DAY at SRI-KL, DEBOER at UCLA-CCN, To: WASHDC at SRI-KL, LOGICON at USC-ISI, SDAC at USC-ISI, To: DELDO at
