Don’t Fix Facebook. Replace It.
Web Publication: New York Times, by Tim Wu
Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia University, has done a good job of looking into the heart of Facebook and declared it rotten to the core. I don’t disagree. While Facebook proclaims the lofty goal of connecting the world, a feeling I am sure is sincere, it is also subservient to the power and the glory and the money, vested unto Mark Zuckerberg, forever and ever, Amen.
How should I know what Mark Zuckerberg feels? I just watch what he says and does, the ever-shifting narrative that can be construed as lies or probably in his mind, the daily existential necessity of shifting all faults to the ‘past’ (O, we turned off that feature last year), and the eternal promise that the future will be different.
Wu is blunt, Facebook is irredeemable; “The right question: What comes after Facebook?” So he gives his take on how we can somehow get past our dependence of Facebook. He notes, it is not a technology problem. To sum up his idea on a fix, there needs to be a replacement that is able to achieve critical mass. Perhaps a wiki would serve the purpose, perhaps an effort could be funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. While I can appreciate the thought, a social media wiki won’t do. Pulling in public broadcasting (essentially, government) as an answer sort of belies Professor Wu’s orientation. Irony here, I bet his students aren’t allowed to use Wikipedia…but I digress. Wikipedia is actually a truly wonderful entity that rivals Facebook in its scope, but with a diametrically opposite working model. I suppose if we were OK carrying on our social media life in black and white text, we’d be set, but let’s just say we’ve moved on and are in a different place. The bandwidth and agility of Facebook are several magnitudes ahead of Wikipedia. I have a different suggestion.
First, let’s let Facebook be Facebook, but impose one stipulation on them and all social media that come after: Our data is not just ours, but it’s also exportable, intact, to any subsequent social media platform that comes along afterwards. We have the technology for this as well. The web runs on a whole stack of open source code standards. We add one more, a platform to bundle and migrate all social media content to a new nest that’s already configured to receive it. To that, we apply decentralized block chain technology to validate absolute and perpetual ownership of that data.
Imagine. I get tired of my data being exploited by Facebook. I have a choice; maybe I set up an account and hit the release button over at Facebook, and the new steam-lined service that promises to not spy on me receives my whole ten years of social media feed. Then imagine this; what if social media platforms could talk to one another and I can still see my old friends there, but Zuck can’t see my data over at the new place?
So yes, what if the World Wide Web Consortium and the IEEE sat down and hashed out standards for private social media content ownership? If you want enhanced service, yes, go ahead and pay for it. If you want a free clean service that just works on a different model, go there. If you want to stay with Zuck over at Facebook for free, you like his features, and you and him are both OK with scraping your data, well then be my guest. I suspect an effort this big would be enough to start a new gold rush of economic activity and web technology advancement. So yes, there is life after Facebook, but the best thing is that global social media will not be so beholden one company and one person. We’re ripe for evolving.
Lee Jones