In the last several weeks, Facebook has undergone massive privacy-related changes that seemed to have triggered a wave of shock, outrage and, most importantly, blog posts worldwide. While most Facebook users are largely ignorant of the changes and most bloggers foam at the mouth and panic away at this blatant misuse of users' privacy, I think that both groups are in the wrong.

Facebook should not be used, period. Not because of privacy changes or deliberate experiments done by the company in an attempt to see how naughty they can get before getting spanked on their e-tush. There is a number of far simpler, more fundamental reasons. Now, let me tell you why you should not be using Facebook.



Reason 1: Because everyone else is

You don't want to be a mindless borg. Being average is the worst curse that can befall a thinking person. Unless you wish to wear Crocs all your life and pay off the mortgage for your dream home, you should rethink your habits vis-a-vis what the plebes are doing. If everyone else is using Facebook, you have an opportunity to be unique and not use it. This automatically makes you special and unique. Just like running Linux.



Reason 2: Friendship is a cosmological constant

Just like momentum and energy, friendship is a finite quantity. According to unshakable rules of physics, the more friends you have, the less of friends they are. It is physically impossible to have many friends. By definition, the number of friends you ought to have is equal or less than the number of kidneys you are willing to donate to save someone else's life, in this case, the above-mentioned friends - family and spouses excluded.
Having 3,422 friends on Facebook means you have approx. 3,420 would-be friends too many. This also means that you treat relationships as a mouse click, which is, well, kind of sad. Furthermore, think about the energy you invested approving friend requests from those 3,420 people. Even if you wasted as little as 10 seconds going through each one, you have still spent approx. 10 hours of your life on bureaucracy. Oh, humanity.



Reason 3: The law of spam

90% of all mail is spam. Not because someone is deliberately trying to poison the wires with fraud and junk, but because people by nature generate 90% waste for whatever they might be doing. The same applies for any human effort. 90% of workforce in any one place is surplus and the real work is done by the remaining few heroes. Similarly, 90% of whatever you are doing on Facebook, at the very least, is going to be a pure waste, equal to mail spam in every way. Wall messages, stupid games, e-presents, quizzes, tagging photos, it's all a horrible waste of effort. Instead, you could spend the time doing sports and meeting real people.





Reason 4: Long-term benefit of Facebook = zero

I must admit I did have a Facebook account for a brief time. I opened the account with a clear purpose of finding my elementary school friends, some 20 years after we've lost all touch with one another. It worked. I managed to find pretty much everyone.

At first, there was great joy, lots of nostalgia and enthusiasm. But after a few weeks, things got back to normal, that is we forgot about one another, more or less. As is the way of all things in life bounded by physics, things gravitate toward their natural minimal state of energy. There was a reason why these friendships did not last beyond what they lasted. Because they were not meant to, and even Facebook could not change that. Forcing friendships works as well as using castor oil to gain weight.

After these few weeks, I realized that there was no point in my Facebook account and deleted it. End of story. If anything, I learned that people cannot step out of their microcosmos, even when goaded with technology and wonders of the Internet.

Now, you may say that my personal example is not relevant for every Facebook user. Possibly. But for a vast majority of people, Facebook contacts are nothing more than an outlet to boredom. In the long run, beyond the initial excitement of rediscovering friendships, which probably will not last long, you are creating a shallow, superficial, un-candid world of cheesy scripted blogonography, with Facebook as your portal.

Reason 5: Get a life

Reason 5 is the extended, more radical version of reason 4. Writing every little thing you do on your Wall is what girls aged 13 do with their pink diary. Playing online quizzes to discover your inner personality, as opposed to your outer personality, your favorite goat cheese and how unsuccessful you are in a relationship means you have serious life issues so far unresolved by parental crowbar and social rejection. Furthermore, it may be cheaper than going to a certified psychologist, but there's a reason why people have to go to school for a few years before being allowed to play Freud.



Every minute spent co-blogging with your artificial friends on Facebook is a minute you could spend doing real stuff, like reading a book, hiking, volunteering in an animal shelter, etc. Or maybe learning PHP so you could one day become a programmer that writes this kind of stuff and makes big money from other people's vapid existence.

Reason 6: MySpace

There used to be a social beast called MySpace, although it suffered from AOL syndrome of GUI design and was intended for people with an odd number of chromosomes and/or IQ less than 100 and/or MTV fans. It used to be immensely popular. It was the thing. If you did not have a MySpace account, you were nobody. And where's MySpace now? Gone with the wind, just like any new hype invented lately.

Facebook people have learned from MySpace and redid the GUI to suit more normal, but not necessarily normal, people, including those above the age of 11. But like MySpace, Facebook is a social fad doomed to fad-e away. In a few months or years, another monster will come and take everyone for a spin. Someone will cash in their new exciting social startup and that the hourglass will turn one more time.

So what's the big deal and excitement. A social network, ok. And? There'll be another.

Reason 7: Facebook logo reads facebook (lowercase)

Do you really want to be using a technology that has a lowercase logo? I can understand UNIX/Linux tools using lowercase, since typing on the command line can be frustrating with too many caps or alphanumeric characters, but a logo of a social networking? Well, it must be kewl, right?



Reason 8: Privacy? Boring!

By the way, the privacy thingie, is, as usual, overplayed. Pure, simple sensational media. No one forces you to write down the name of your high-school or use a real one. It's a virtual, fictitious world, so what's the big deal? Oh, there are all kinds of options in the menu settings, but no one reads those, it's too complicated. We can accuse Facebook of being the evil overlord of data harvesting, now that Google is no longer chic. In fact, I'm kind of excited to see what everyone will do. Most likely moan a little and then get to being addicted to growing e-tomatoes, chatting to their e-friends and complaining about how their lives are exposed wide to the public without realizing the cruel paradox in their words.



You can setup your account to be private and anonymous and whatever. So what's the big deal? Too challenging for the average Facebook user to perform no less than three mouse clicks to get their old settings back?

Conclusion

As you see, it has nothing to do with privacy, identity theft, security, or anything like that. It's about what Facebook offers you, in the short and long term. If you think carefully, there's a page that displays your life stats and scores from a handful of Flash games, plus a collection of badly spelled, semi-rant, semi-lunatic writings by your e-friends, who won't be there when you need the transplant. They might send you an e-kidney, but that won't really do any good, now, will it? Not really exciting, is it?

Social is all about society. And society is not online, despite the best efforts by media to depict the revolution of broadband into a sort of an exciting, less harsh alternative to real life. If I unplug your network cord from the wall, your e-friends are gone. No more FarmVille, no more Wall. It's as simple as that.

There you go. The real reasons why not to use Facebook.

Some people really do make things easy for the plod don't they ?

I thought this was some sort of disinformation designed to get people to sign up via FB so the cops could harvest their details but no it's real (SHAC list it on their website) so I assume that either SHAC is unaware of the links between Facebook and GCHG/NSA or they don't care.

I urge everybody to support SHAC but not via Facebook, that is just asking for trouble.

I joined Facebook in September, 2007. My 'timeline', when I studied it for the last time yesterday evening, indicated very little activity until around April, 2008, at which point I, began posting frivolous status updates about my personal life, my tribulations and thoughts, roughly once a week. A style began to emerge over the coming months, one that was hardly original, but, I believe, still above average in the craft and care put into it.

I alternated between displays of grand, bullshitting erudition --one early update was a variation on a Latin motto from Leibniz, transformed for the social-networking age: Qui me non nisi renovationibus status mei in Libro Vultuum novit, non novit ('Whoever knows me only through my Facebook status updates, does not know me')-- and the confessional mode, which I had the presumption to call 'Montaignean'.

I received my first 'like' in February, 2009. I did not understand what it was, or how it got there. I was in Australia, and it was from someone I had known in high school in California.

I'll skip over some history. By 2010 I had an iPhone, and I had taken to checking for likes every minute or so while walking down the street; I learned even to check for them, surreptitiously, while teaching.

Once the put up a firewall, and rather than pay the money per month required to get around it, I preferred to rely on links posted by my friends: I had 640 of them after all, and collectively they surely made up a reliable team of journalists (I'd estimate 30 to 40 of them were in fact professional journalists; another 200 or so were amateur journalists).

A few weeks ago I decided to get back to the four volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu that remained after I miraculously got through the first three a decade or so ago. But when one attempts to divide one's attention between (i) page 801 of the Gallimard edition of Proust's chef d'oeuvre, and (ii) one's ever-refreshing newsfeed: which do you imagine wins? It is cognitively impossible, I believe, not to prefer the newsfeed. It is glowing and changing, and it doses out what it has to give in easily swallowed, sweet little bits.

That was rock-bottom. I had to cut it off, and set about rewiring my brain, to get it back to the way I know it used to be.

I hasten to add that Facebook is among the most remarkable innovations in human history. In the sweep of centuries it, and the variations that emerge from it, will prove to be more important than books. Books were never themselves fundamental to human learning; in fact their massive proliferation in the Renaissance and early modern periods was at the same time an usurpation and a destruction of established and wonderful technologies of learning-- in particular, practices of memorization that would put Julien Sorel to shame.

So it is not that I am sticking with what is true and right, against what is vulgar and corrupted, but only that there are certain projects that I came to value given the precise historical moment of my birth and earliest education, and these projects had come under serious threat as a result of this mighty usurper.

There are other reasons, too, which I would like to list here, from the more personal ones, unique to my own case, to the more general. Some of these have to do with what Facebook had done to me as a user; others with what I see as the troubling failure of Facebook to live up to its real potential.

I am by nature a melancholic person, and for a long time I asked myself whether Facebook alleviated or exacerbated this condition. I finally determined it was the latter. I like to write and to share what I write, and I like it when what I write receives acclaim. But when this cycle of expression-and-gratification is reduced to a few hundred characters followed by a dozen or so 'likes', it becomes a parody of the creative process, and impedes any real engagement in that process. It calls to mind this painful indictment from Pascal's Pensées, written just as if he could foresee the invention of the 'like' button:

We are so presumptuous as to wish to be known by all the world and even by those who will arrive when we are no more. And we are so vain that the esteem of five or six people who surround us amuses us and renders us content.

Typically what I have to say takes about 1500-3000 words; anything short of that is a compromise. I would never have dreamt of sinking into the swamp of Twitter-speak, where one is required by some arbitrary rule to substitute 'u r' for 'you are', and to indulge in other such adolescent vulgarities. But Facebook only partially enables its user to steer clear of texting code. Again, it is not that I do not want to receive gratification from what I have to say, but only that the formal constraints of the status update do not permit me to say it.

Not only for my ability to read, but for my ability to write as well, I began to fear that Facebook was draining away much of the thinking that could have gone into real essays, articles, books. I work in two distinct modes, both academic/scholarly and essayistic/belle-lettristic, and I came to fear that both of them were more stagnant than they might be if I could just pull myself away from the endless exchange of sweet little bits in my social network. But I emphasize that I am really not certain about my final determination that Facebook was an impediment, any more than I am certain that it exacerbated my melancholy: for quite often I had the experience of writing a status update that would then get some thoughts percolating, that would then transform into a blog post, that would ultimately issue in a book review or even, on at least one occasion, a successful book proposal. It's really hard to say whether on balance it was harmful or helpful. I suppose I just need, now, to test the alternative mode of working, and to see what happens when that all-too familiar, all-too inviting salon is no longer open to me.

Another source of frustration, about which I am much more ambivalent, has to do with the nature of the community one forges on Facebook. A few deep and genuine friendships have emerged out of my years there; some genuinely inspiring intellectual encounters have happened there; some rather mundane but necessary networking has taken place there. It would be dishonest for me to deny the good that has come of it, yet recently it dawned on me that I have a number of important connections with people who are not on Facebook, both intellectual and emotional connections, and in no sense do I feel like they are missing something of me, or I of them. Often, when someone I knew on Facebook wanted to discuss something important with me, they would send me an e-mail instead of a Facebook chat message, as if to signify the importance of the communication by moving into this other forum. I expect this sort of communication will continue.

I've said before that I don't think there's anything more 'real' about so-called real-world friendships. Those, too, come and go, and the truth is I have little interest in finding drinking buddies, or coevals to pursue hobbies with. That's not my concern, not my existential mode. All I really want to do is exchange ideas with people; Facebook was often fairly useful for this, but as I've said I began to fear that the ideas were reduced by the medium, and the nature of their exchange, based as it was in the perpetual ejaculation of short witty insights, often made a mockery of the sort of exchange that was held out as an ideal.

(Am I just getting too serious? In my updates I aspired to be funny. But what is funny in this here eulogy?)

I was comfortable all along with the equivocity of the concept of friend: I had 640 of them, call them what you will, and some of them were in truth my friends. Some others fulfilled other functions, and some did nothing at all but contribute to my tally. Fine. But again, it strikes me now that it was all somewhat like attending a very long summer camp: people come and go, and if anything worth preserving and cultivating should come about, then this will continue once the summer has drawn to a close.

I have mentioned that some of my reasons for leaving Facebook have to do with my own personal concerns, my projects and the way Facebook perhaps fails to facilitate them. I also mentioned that in my view Facebook is failing to live up to its potential. Recently, when I looked at my wall, it was as if 'Family Circus', 'Marmaduke', Penny Saver and Reader's Digest were spilling right off of Gutenberg's own press: such a wonderful and promising technology, descended into pure idiocy just after its first appearance in the world.

I have in mind in particular this new innovation, whereby whatever trashy meme some friend (in a highly equivocal sense) deems worthy of liking, ends up in my own newsfeed with the purported explanation that such-and-such friend has just deemed it like-worthy. Thus, after having fought so hard to banish Farmville and Cityville and shit like that from my wall, I was now being bombarded with misspelled slogans insisting that Marilyn Monroe's curves are in fact more beautiful than Lindsay Lohan's skin-and-bones, or that Obama is alright because he fist-bumps janitors, while Romney by contrast likes to get shoeshines on airport tarmacs (something I truly doubt, by the way). And most recently George Takei, likeable enough in himself, has entirely drowned out, with his good-spirited and sassy mash-ups, any possibility of using that social network for that higher aim for which it briefly held some promise: the exchange of well-thought-out ideas.

All the way back in 2007 there was something about this endeavor that rubbed me the wrong way: it was born of the dormitories, and to some extent it draws us all back into them. Or perhaps I should not say 'back': I was a commuter, to a state school, and I lived with my mother. I never lived in a dorm, and I never showed up in a yearbook, to be judged for my hotness or my plainness. The culture that produced Facebook is one that I never knew, and do not like. An image of that culture invaded, and invades, my mind every single time I hear the name of Mark Zuckerberg's venture, and every time I hear the name of Mark Zuckerberg.

I still believe Internet-mediated social networks will prove to be more important in human history than printing presses. But my social network will not be Facebook.

Well I suppose everything else that SHAC has tried has failed so once last short in the dark via Facebook is probably worth a punt.

I'm sure HLS is terrified of all those 'likes' you are going to get.