With the revelation of of Facebook’s piss-poor handling of the appropriation of 50 million users data, data that possibly facilitated foreign intervention in our elections, the world can finally get a taste of some of my baseline rage.
Last week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat down with CNN to kick off his whirlwind apology tour. The hollowness of his contrition was roundly skewered by the press and public alike. He sounded note-cardy, too-little-too-latey, and, to my growing rage, still flummoxed by what went wrong in the #breachbutnotabreachtechnicallyspeaking. The interview culminated in this, the apex of my rage-listen:
If you told me in 2004 when I was getting started with Facebook that a big part of my responsibility today would be to help protect the integrity of elections against interference by other governments, you know, I wouldn’t have really believed that that was going to be something I would have to work on 14 years later.”
As aggravating as his veneer of affable bafflement at the notion that a multi-billion dollar industry that converts humans into data points could be used for nefarious purpose is, I’m actually more annoyed by the fact that nearly the entire stable of “very serious people” in the media nodded along sympathetically. “How could he have known,” they clucked, “the world has never seen the likes of this before. I mean, who could have predicted that a platform created to publicly rate the physical appearance of Harvard classmates, then launched globally, could go so badly?”
Are you Zucking kidding me?
You know who could have predicted that? Every last fucking person who has consumed a science fiction novel or movie over the past 100 years, that’s who!
Mary Shelley predicted it in 18-freaking-18 when her Frankenstein’s monster served as a cautionary tale about man’s scientific creations out of control. The idea that technological advancement without regard to consequence leads to ruin is a mainstay of the Sci Fi genre. Metropolis, Brave New World, 1984, Logan’s Run, 2001, and Minority Report all warn that technology serves a dangerous tool of propaganda, tyranny, and the surveillance state in the hands of bad, or even indifferent, actors.
As a matter of fact, according to his Facebook profile one of Mark’s favorite movies is The Matrix, a movie that conceives of a world where human brains are plugged into a machine and reduced to data bytes, their bodies reduced to electrical impulses to fuel their robot overlords. Sound familiar? I’m pretty sure that phrase appeared verbatim in FB’s original business plan.
Can’t fight it, might as well annoy the shit out of some people with Farmville requests while I slowly rot from within
So clearly, Mark and all you very serious people, SOMEONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS. Because it has all happened before. Sci Fi has been a crucial medium for grappling with in real life tension between technology and humanity since the modern technological age began. Automation, weaponry, and communications revolutions have all lived to see the promise of quicker, cleaner, better twisted into monstrous inequality, extinction and subjugation. Factory servitude? Leni Riesfenstahl? Nuclear proliferation? Fox News? History abounds with bad actors seeking to use technology to gain power. That Zuckerberg et al believe that their technology will be different, that their solutions are such special snowflakes that the rules of history no longer apply, is pure hubris, and I am not here for that.
In light of the Facebook revelations, Kumail Nanjiani of HBO’s Silicon Valley re-upped this thread about what he observed during his visits with technology companies while doing research for the show:
https://twitter.com/kumailn/status/925828976882282496?s=09
This is chilling. Tech has essentially been existing in a consequence-free zone for 20 years now, with harrowing results. Extremist groups are growing by are accessing a wide audience through Twitter. Ride sharing is creating indentured drivers, toiling to pay off cars purchased with company loans. What other tech-fuckery is lurking out there waiting to blow up in our faces?
Luckily, there’s great news for all you tech execs blind to the bombs lurking within your product! That science fiction that tech geeks are somehow “the only real fans of without understanding any of its central themes” offers a way to dodge disaster with this 4-step program*:
- Hire the Wachowskis.
- Tell them what your app does, how is does it, and where the money comes from
- Ask them to write the scariest fucking movie they can possibly imagine based on this app
- Design safeguards accordingly.
Of course it is impossible to 100% safeguard against bad actors. Like cinematic evil geniuses, they don’t live by the rules the rest of do. But it’s still better than stuffing your ears with $1,000 bills and waiting for the shit to hit the fan!
But the sad truth of the matter, and the truth that cuts to the heart of my rage, is that the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world did not care to know about the dangers inherent in their platform, because the profit mechanisms as designed depend on them not knowing.
So it’s time for you all to get your acts together, and reform your blind faith in your own creations. Because when the cautionary tales of this era are immortalized in the science fiction of tomorrow the Mark Zuckerberg character will not be played by Henry Cavill or one of the Chrises. He will be the villian, and he will most likely be played by this douche:
You have been warned.
What tech company are you mad at today? Is having your data stolen actually a better Facebook experience than arguing with your homophobic Aunt Marcie? How do you plan to welcome our robot overlords?
*Or, conversely, you could hire data ethicists, communications historians, behavioral philosophers, and other people whose actual job it is to figure this stuff out.
