More Emojiis than Emotions

So many of us have spent a decade or more (or less) inside Social Media bubbles like Facebook it's hard, at least for me, to imagine what we did online before they existed. The continuing dull roar about who did what to whom and how in the US Presidential elections of 2016 didn't actually shock me so much as give me cause for pause before heedlessly continuing to plunge ahead.

I expect even more pause after Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg testifies later this week before Congress who are wrought and perhaps more than a little overwrought at what platforms like Facebook may know about each of us and what they do with that information we gave them.

Here's a hint: they sell it for money because they are a business providing a less than fully defined service "Belonging," "Kindred Spirituality" "I'm Not Alone" for cold, hard cash. We did this to ourselves with every survey we take, with every thumbs up or angry face we offer in reaction to whatever postings make up our news feeds. 

For those in DC intending to hold Zuckerberg's thumbs and other appendages to the fire, I'd suggest 'be careful with that ax, Eugene.' Yes, you may think as an elected official you have some power and perhaps you do but to FB you are ones and zeroes with preferences and predilections that are on file someplace and with someone preserved forever.

If I'm Zuckerberg, I'm showing up with a folder on everyone sitting across from him at the table with an assistant ready at a moment's notice to hand him a file on that second-from-the right querulous bastard who keeps hammering him about Cambridge Analytica, yeah that folder, labeled "Lithe Lithuanian Leather Ladies" and how often they visited that group and how long the visits lasted. 

And that inquisitor who has way too many questions about Russian bots and how they subverted and perverted our election process? Maybe there will be a strategic moment where he can mention how they're in a closed Facebook group supporting Amazonian Ammosexuals if nothing else just to level the playing field and turn the heat down a little bit.

Privacy is just another commodity masquerading as a concept that we blithely gave away as this brave new world order of the 21st Century took wing and flew away. There are sins of omission and commission both venal and mortal and insisting we didn't know the cost will not diminish or decrease in any way the price we'll pay for having committed them.
-bill kenny