Howard Rheingold is leaving Facebook

As many of you know, Howard’s been in the vanguard of thinking about and building online communities since the 1980s – see the online version of his 1993 book, The Virtual Community. He was teaching at Stanford when Facebook was founded, with membership restricted to Harvard, Princeton, and – you guessed it – Stanford. So he signed up. Why not?

In a new piece on Medium Howard goes on to note, “I was there when students were shocked that their drunken Facebook postings and photos affected their graduate school and employment prospects.” Whoops! Didn’t see that coming.

Didn’t see a lot of things coming.

He didn’t like FB’s rigid format – nor do I, but, like Howard and many others, I work in other online spaces. But that’s small potatoes.

As I have noted here before, I wrote in the mid 1990s about coming massive dataveillance — and very very few people seemed to care. I knew that Amazon was using data collected about my purchases and interests to suggest books to me, and although I recognized it as creeping dataveillance, I was one of many who not only didn’t care — I welcomed the convenience. When Facebook ads started trying to sell me things that I had looked at via other websites, that was creepy. But I did not comprehend what has come to be known as “surveillance capitalism” and the degree to which extremely detailed dossiers on the behavior of billions of users could be used to microtarget advertising (including, it turns out, to use gender and racial criteria to filter job and housing advertisements), and I don’t think anybody understood how that microtargetting could be joined with armies of bots and human trolls to influence public opinion, sow conflict, and (probably) swing elections.

Then there were the data breaches. It’s become clear that Facebook didn’t understand their inability to control such detailed surveillance of so many people, and to keep such a huge, widespread, and complex mechanism secure. It will never be secure. There will be breach after breach. [...] And most recently, I learned that Facebook had sold my phone number to spammers after I had provided it (privately, I thought) to use to retrieve my account in case it was hacked.

And so, despite the fact that FB has allowed him “to stay in contact with people’s lives — many of whom would fall off my radar otherwise”, and to have fun in many ways, Howard’s decided to leave it behind sometime before the election.

I intend to stick around for awhile. But Howard’s right about FB’s limitations and about the dangers it presents “to the public sphere and individual privacy.” FB is the Borg. The corporatized internet is the Borg.

How do we change it?