Here’s what I posted as my last long message to Facebook.
Folks, as previously announced, tomorrow will be my #DeletionDay for Facebook. It’ll be the last day I’ll post here, and I’ll begin the process for the permanent removal of my account. (Among other things, I’ll make a copy of my data and my friends list.) I’m sorry to those who want me to stay, but there are too many reasons to quit.
Let me explain again, more tersely, why I’m quitting.
You probably already know that I think this kind of social media, as fun as it undoubtedly can be, undermines relationships, wastes our time, and distracts us. I also agree, as one guy can be seen saying on virally-shared videos, that social media is particularly bad for kids. All I can say is, it’s just sad that all that hasn’t been enough for me (and most of us) to quit.
But in 2018, it became all too clear that Big Tech—which is now most definitely a thing—is cynically and strongly committed to using social media as a potent tool of political control, which it certainly is. They like having that power. For companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple, reining in wrongthink is a moral imperative. And they’re doing the bidding of the Establishment when they do so. It’s very scary, I think.
The only thing that gives them this awesome power over us and our free, voluntary conversations is that we have given them that power. But notice the thing that empowers them: we give them our data to manage. It’s not really ours. They take it, sell it to advertisers, repackage it, and show it back to us in ways they control. And they can silence us if they like. That’s because we have sold our privacy to them for convenience and fun. We’re all what Nick Carr aptly called “digital sharecroppers.” I now think it’s a terrible deal. It’s still voluntary, thank goodness; so I’m opting out.
Another thing is that I started reading a book called Cybersecurity for Beginners (no, I’m not too proud to read a book called that) by Raef Meeuwisse, after my phone (and Google account and Coinbase) were hacked. This finally opened my eyes to the very close connection between privacy and security. Meeuwisse explains that information security has become much more complex than it was in the past, what with multiple logins, multiple (interconnected) devices, multiple (interconnected) cloud services, and in short multiple potential points of failure in multiple layers.
[Adding now: Someone recommended, and I bought and started reading, another good privacy book called The Art of Invisibility by Kevin Mitnick. Mitnick is a famous hacker. Meeuwisse is a security professional as well. The Mitnick book is much more readable for savvy Internet users, while the Meeuwisse book is a bit drier and might be more of a good introduction to the field of information security for managers.]
The root cause of the increased security risks, as I see it (as Meeuwisse helped me to see), is our tendency to trust our data to more and more centralizing organizations (like Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple). This means we trust them not only to control our data to our benefit, but also to get security right. But they can’t be expected to get security right precisely because social media and cloud services depend on their ability to access our data. If you want robust security, you must demand absolute privacy. That means that only you own and control your data.
If we were the gatekeepers of our own data (if it were delivered out of our own clouds, via decentralized feeds we control, as open source software and blockchains support), then we wouldn’t have nearly so many problems.
Maybe even more fundamental is that there are significant risks—personal, social, and political—to letting corporations (or governments) collectivize us. But precisely that is what has been going on over the last ten years or so.
It’s time for us to work a new technological revolution and decentralize, or decollectivize, ourselves. One reason I love working for a blockchain company is that we’re philosophically committed to the idea of decentralization, of personal autonomy. But it’s still early days for both open source software and blockchain. Much remains to be done to make this technology usable to grandma.
While we’re waiting for viable (usable) new solutions, I think the first step is to lock down your cyber-life and help create demand by just getting rid of things like Facebook. You don’t have to completely unplug from everything; you have to be hardcore or extreme about your privacy (although I think that’s a good idea). You can do what you can, what you’re able to do.
I won’t blame or think ill of you if you stay on Facebook. I’m just trying to explain why I’m leaving. And I guess I am encouraging you to really start boning up on digital hygiene.
Below, I’m going to link to a series of relevant blog posts that you can explore if you want to follow me out, or just to start thinking more about this stuff.
Also, I hope you’ll subscribe yourself to my personal mailing list, which I’ll start using more regularly tomorrow. By the way, if you might be interested in some other, more specialized list that I might start based on my interests (such as Everipedia, education, libertarianism, or whatever), please join the big list.
Also note, especially if your email is from Gmail, you will have to check your spam folder for the confirmation mail, if you want to be added. Please move any mails from me and my list out of your spam (or junk) folder into your inbox so Google learns I’m actually not a spammer. 🙂
There, that’s me being “terse.”
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