What power was Zuckerberg hoping to accrue for himself? If it's not for money and it's not for girls, what is it for? With Zuckerberg we have a real American mystery. Is it possible he just loves programming? No doubt, the filmmakers of "The Social Network" considered this option, but you can see their dilemma: how to convey the pleasure of programming — if such a pleasure exists — in a way that is both cinematic and comprehensible? Movies are notoriously bad at showing the pleasures and rigors of art-making, even when the medium is familiar. Even if we spent half the movie looking at the busy screens of programmers close to the main character, most of us would be none the wiser.
Watching this movie, even though you know the director wants your disapproval, you can't help feel a little swell of pride in this 2.0 generation. They've spent a decade being berated for not making the right sorts of paintings or novels or music or politics. Turns out the brightest 2.0 kids have been doing something else extraordinary. They've been making a world.
The New Internet
In this new, open, internet, we will take our real identities with us as we travel through the Internet. This concept seems to have some immediate Stoical advantages: no more faceless bile, no more inflammatory trolling: if your name and social network track you around the virtual world beyond Facebook, you'll have to restrain yourself and so will everyone else. One the other hand, you'll also take you likes and dislikes with you, your tastes, your preferences, all connected to your name, through which people will try to sell you things.
Maybe it will be like an intensified version of the Internet I already live in, where ads for dental services stalk me from pillar to post and I am continually urged to buy my own books. Or maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous. For all these reasons I quit Facebook about two months after I'd joined it. As with all seriously addictive things, giving up proved to be immeasurably harder than starting. I kept changing my mind: Facebook remains the greatest distraction from work I've ever had, and I loved it for that. I think a lot of people love it for that. Some work-avoidance techniques are onerous in themselves and don't make time move especially quickly: smoking, eating, calling people up on the phone. With Facebook hours, afternoons, entire days went by without my noticing.
The New Us
Master programmer and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier (b. 1960) is not of my generation, but he knows and understands us well. Lanier is interested in the ways in which people "reduce themselves" in order to make a computer's description of them appear more accurate. In Lanier's view, there is no perfect computer analogue for what we call a "person." In life we all profess to know this, but when we get online it becomes easy to forget. In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is a degradation. Lanier argues this degradation is "based on [a] philosophical mistake...the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do."
We know the consequences of this instinctively; we feel them. We know that having two thousand Facebook friends is not what it looks like. We know that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others. We know what we are doing "in" the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is it possible that what is communicated between people online "eventually becomes their truth"?
Lanier wants us to be attentive to the software into which we are "locked in." Is it really fulfilling our needs? Or are we reducing the needs we feel in order to convince ourselves that the software isn't limited?
Finally, it's the idea of Facebook that disappoints. If it were a genuinely interesting interface, built for these genuinely different 2.0 kids to live in, that would be something. It's not that. It's the wild west of the Internet tamed to fit the suburban fantasies of a suburban soul.
