Breaching the Public Trust – Facebook is the Beginning

Breaching the Public Trust – Facebook is the Beginning

Last night I was chatting with a friend while waiting for my daughter. She told me her phone now informs her when her bills are due.  Now, that may not seem like a big deal, but it is when you realize that she never told her phone to do that.

Her phone is scanning her emails and letting her know her when her electric bill is due.

I told her Google likely pushed down an update which she agreed to without realizing it (or getting the opportunity to opt-out of) which authorized them to not only scan her inbox but set up alerts for her.

She was angry about it, and rightfully so.

This is why I don’t use any of the Google apps on my Android phone.  Outlook for email, Opera for my browser.  Office for my productivity apps.  It was a conscious choice.  I moved to Android under protest because Microsoft willfully destroyed Windows Phone.

I know it’s not much better, but at least Microsoft appreciates my business, now, for the first time in their miserable existence.

And I wasn’t willing to shell out $600+ for a comparable iPhone.  Pennywise and pound-foolish, I know, but no one’s perfect.

As a hardware-savvy guy I know when software is over-burdening hardware and why.

And I can tell you the data harvesting on my phone was so out of control by Facebook and Google that it became nigh unusable on wake-up.  Upwards of a minute or two would go by before the phone was usable because so much data was being harvested off it before it would deign to allow me to use it.

I will switch to the iPhone when I can justify the money.

Once I deleted Facebook and all its crap from my phone, it miraculously became almost functional again.  I could answer calls as they came in.  I could reply to texts and approve blog comments/pingbacks.

I will never reinstall Facebook on any device I own.

Harvest This!

I am mostly post-Facebook anyway.  And once I get phone numbers for the few people I contact via Messenger, I’ll likely only log in to get the schedule at my local game shop.

I talked about this phenomenon back in October, presaging the backlash to their current brand-killing troubles.

So, watching people who have made the decision to simply end their relationship with Facebook is fascinating.  Some do so because they are rightfully fearful of Mr. Creepyberg’s weird need to vacuum up all the data about everyone...

The biggest problem with Facebook is it’s all fake intimacy; a pale simulacra of real life interactions with people you are supposed to care about…

The people I truly value mostly feel about Facebook the way I do.

That’s what makes them people I value.

They value the value of their closely-held opinions and don’t dilute it by publicly sharing their banality.  They realize that being friends is more than dropping political stink bombs in someone’s digital living room and saying, “I dare you to not breathe.”

So, here you are on a platform that is supposed to be all about you and the last thing anyone really wants to be on Facebook is … themselves.

Because who has time for that anymore?  Especially when this technology we’re all so addicted to is rendered unusable and the simplest of interactions takes ten times longer than it used to.

And this inconvenience was acceptable when it wasn’t obvious that your soul was being sucked up into the Facebook data vacuum and sold to any John with a fiver hanging out of his zipper.  But it is.

“Hey Mark, there’s an extra ten in it for you if you include their porn preferences.”

But now that that cat is out of the bag, Facebook’s advertisers and competitors can virtue signal and piggy-back on the #DeleteFacebook bandwagon.  Competition and all that.  As a free-marketeer I’m both horrified and vindicated by this.

So, take toxic interactions, politically-biased feed population to heighten anxiety and rapacious data harvesting, shake and stir and the resultant explosion of anger was predictable.

Post-Peak Facebook

Facebook will not recover from this.  In fact, we’ve likely reached peak ‘free’ social media in general.  The blockchain, like Steemit, is our way forward.  This has been brewing for months as the Left and the power-broker class go through the various stages of Post-Election Stress Disorder.

They have increasingly outed themselves as the insectoid monsters we’ve always known them to be.  But, again, we put up with it because we thought their being private companies would give us some control over their worst impulses.

Boy, were we wrong.

What started as a great thing to bring people together to communicate in an increasingly fragmented society has turned into an evil, Orwellian monstrosity feeding the power fantasies of the worst people on Wall St. and K Street.

Facebook, Google and Twitter are the epicenter for The Culture War being foisted on us by the psychotic and the powerful.  And their products have to be rejected for us to have any chance regaining control of the narratives that circumscribe our lives.

Use them for your own purposes, but not one inch further.  If Facebook is still good for your business, stay with it.  I’ll use YouTube for as long as they’ll let me.  But, I have no illusions about making money off the platform directly.

To me YouTube is nothing more than a repository of my screeds against it and everything the people who own and operate it stand for.

In this month’s issue of the Gold Goats n’ Guns Investment Newsletter I explained why we’ve reached this tipping point in a piece entitled, Slouching Towards Oceania:

In the open market of ideas, they have lost. As long as this didn’t have profound
political consequences they were okay with making money off of our discontent.

So, while they [social media companies] weren’t built with the intention of shutting out those who weren’t down with the plan of frogmarching us towards global oligarchic control, they have that power now.

And they are using it, revealing the ugly, authoritarian mindset that was always there, masked by a thin veneer of civility, safe in the knowledge that the power rested with them.

And then Trump won.

Faust-book

That’s the real reason for the outrage at Facebook’s casual attitude towards our data.  We knew this was being used against us.  But, it was a Faustian bargain.  We get ‘free’ communications, they get our data.

But, to then silence us because that data didn’t help elect Hillary and complete the circle of salt to trap us demons within, the gloves came off and we were to be punished for our sins against their ideas of decency.

Creepyberg’s mea culpa on CNN didn’t see him taking any true responsibility for this.  He never cared about his customers.

Facebook was always a propaganda platform and government intelligence agency masquerading as a social network.  So is Twitter.   So is Google.  Why do you think the Chinese and Russians banned them from their countries and fostered their own analogues?

It’s powerful stuff this big data in the global game of Control the Narrative.

They also represent the worst kind of real Fascism — the merging of corporate and state power — because it’s personal.  It uses your personal faults and kinks, your moments of weakness and short-comings as weapons to bind you down, keep you from making a living, marginalize you and, ultimately, un-person you.

And if Creepyberg and the vampires on Madison Avenue think they can recover their business after such a sincere violation of the public’s trust they are in for one hell of a rude awakening.

And that’s the real irony here.  For while Antifa and the left scream about how Trump is destroying the media and with it our democracy,  the truth is the legacy and social media companies are destroying themselves by thinking they are immune to the anger of their users.

The Clinton Ouroborous

But the big question is why this scandal?  And why this scandal now?  The outing of Cambridge Analytica may be payback for them helping elect Trump.  Creepyberg and Facebook are past their peak with those Democrats need to win elections — younger voters — so turning on them makes a certain kind of sense.

The Clintonistas/Obama-babies, under pressure from failing to destroy Trump, regain control of the narrative and preserve the status quo, are turning on each other now.

Like sharks in a feeding frenzy markers are being called in left and right, silences are breaking, confidences betrayed (Oh, the delicious irony of that!).

Nikolas Sarkozy was indicted for profiting off of destroying Libya?  Cambridge Analytica going down?  Now Facebook?  All in a span of a few days since Andrew McCabe was fired on Friday?

People like this don’t get outed unless there are major changes happening behind the scenes.  Hillary’s statements last week while she was stumbling around India may have finally been the last straw for those she failed so completely in November 2016.

And it’s time to cut her loose.  And in order to do that, the people complicit in her crimes are being thrown to the wolves to satisfy our anger and soothe the restless natives pre-mid terms.

I’ve been saying for months that Hillary’s popularity would have to drop below a certain critical threshold for her to be indicted.   That she would have to become a true liability to the cause of globalism for the sharks to finally feed in the grandest breakdown of the Prisoner’s Dilemma the world has ever seen.