Emergence/Convergence

I woke up this morning (at 12:40:22 p.m., apparently) to a text message from the eminent Mr. Neyfakh:

Um facebook?

Um indeed. I've just now received this dispatch from the redoubtable Mr. Kasavin:

Eric Britton joined the group What Ever Happened To Privacy. 1:43am

Seth Anagnostis joined the group Facebook has gone overboard. Way too stalkerish now. 9:28pm

Eli Blashkovsky and Lauren Meyer joined the group Wow the new facebook blows. 7:12pm

My own "Feed" offers similar news:

Will Dizard created a group. 1:48am
NEW FACEBOOK BLOWS

Brittany Castaneda joined the group FACEBOOK REDESIGN SUCKS -- PASS IT ON. 11:35pm

Abe Riesman created a group. 12:12pm
FACEBOOK REDESIGN SUCKS -- PASS IT ON

And, somewhat bewilderingly,

Shane Wilson added "my name is earl" to his favorite tv shows. 7:44pm

I did?

Of course, the Facebookers must have expected a negative reaction, at least initially, but I wonder if they had any idea of the speed with which the discourse has gone meta. What fraction of total News Feed items, do you think, have been designed specifically for News Feed consumption and comment exclusively on the News Feed itself — all within a few hours of its materialization?

It's interesting how many of the responses carp about privacy. Come to think of it, up till now, Facebook has mostly operated on an old-school keyhole model: the orifice was symmetric; the same interface that allowed outbound scrutiny of others also necessarily allowed inbound scrutiny of you. Of course, one could opt to make oneself invisible to different degrees, and one still can, but most people don't; they seem to enjoy walking the tightrope of personal disclosure, toying with the sensuous particulars of self-revelation. The naïve profiles of yore, many of which merely listed favorite music/movies/etc., have given way to minimalist, cryptic sketches and long, rambling data dumps, with both models often making mockeries of the profiles' built-in semantics (which, in the long run, might undermine Zuckerberg's efforts to "monetize" the information churned out by his grand experiment — will marketers want access to a list of the favorite movies of X University students once they realize how many profiles consist entirely of lies or jokes?).

The point, though, is that all this identity construction has heretofore gone on under the auspices of a basic contract: I can peep in on other people without their knowing it, and they can do likewise to me. You can't (legitimately) decouple one possibility from the other. The keyhole that hides is also the keyhole that reveals. But however immaterial Facebook-peeping really is, it retains a touch of the physical. It takes a bit of work to research people. You can read what they've written; you can peruse their walls; you can look at their photo albums and the photos tagged with their names; you can look up their friends; you can see what groups they've joined. But of course these last two activities immediately become recursive, as do the others, quite frequently; you follow an unending sequence of connections, never exhausting the available information, spying on the friends of friends of friends. What regulated "stalkerish"ness, in part, was the effort required to do adequate stalking. It was a bit like rifling through the archives, a bit like knocking on doors and hitting the pavement and burning (gum)shoe-leather and elbow grease. In fact, it's that level of personal investment that makes the sleuthing seem "stalkerish"; a normal, non-pathological person, the thinking goes, wouldn't try so hard to investigate his or her peers.

But the redesign goes a long way toward making research unnecessary, replacing investigation with omniscience. It doesn't just enable obsessive monitoring, which, arguably, Facebook has done from the beginning; it foists obsessive monitoring upon us. We don't have to leave our rooms to look through our neighbor's keyhole; our neighbor's keyhole, I don't know, parasitically downloads itself into our mind-brains. The whole real-world metaphor breaks down. Facebook has made us gods, and our first reaction is to be scared and whiny about it.

This does not bode well for the Singularity.

See also: homeland security, Total Information Awareness, eye in the pyramid. What if the solution to government surveillance of private citizens is private surveillance of government officials (maybe a.k.a. journalism)? Get those bastards on the Facebook asap. Give me their interests & pokes. I would also like to know who they are it's complicated with.

And I defy anyone to rewrite that sentence elegantly while preserving the meaning.