This was originally posted on blogger. Several days ago, I hiked the Berkeley Fire Trails with two close friends as an end to our semester. We walked for an hour up the trail… through the dark paths, avoiding knotted roots and murky puddles. As we approached the top, the narrow path we had hiked opened to a wide, grassy clearing. San Francisco was in full view, with its tall towers and bright lights, cars relentlessly zooming by. Even on our midnight hike, a respite from the busy semester, it seemed impossible to escape from the rage of urban life. We looked out onto the City – the hub of the Silicon Valley – and it felt at that earnest moment that real life had been trumped by a virtual world.

From our vantage point, I thought about Mark Zuckerberg’s words: It was built to accomplish a social mission – to make the world more open and connected. I suppose this is the guiding principles of Facebook (if they employ any principles at all). Our world looks connected, yes. We are connected in an economic sense, buying things from across the country that can reach our doorstep the next day, wearing shirts made from a factory in Cambodia, and handling a device that was assembled in China. In a social sense, we have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook, we can text others every moment of every day, and news is given to us every minute.

Such connection – particularly the social aspect – seems ripe for prosperity and social change. Buying our goods from far-away, it is said, graces us with affordable purchases while giving employment to those less privileged. Social media seems like the breeding grounds for activism. By having so many digital connections, we can form online communities of a size and strength previously not possible. We can support other groups by “liking” the pages and thus easily form coallitions. On online forums, we can engage in direct action and challenge others in a public way (while remaining safe behind our keyboard). It seems the key parts of a social movement – community, coallitions, and direct action – are easily attained online.

I don’t think I challenge these ideas in an abstract sense. Online communities have been a large part of my life, especially the earlier days of Youtube (with creators like VlogBrothers or Numberphile) and different forums on Reddit (like /r/likeus, /r/oddlysatisfying, or the interesting and hilarious /r/outside) (and I myself am writing on a blog-post!) Of course, there are other projects of brilliant scale: the development of GNU Linux and the creation of Wikipedia, for instance, have both democratized computing power and information in an incredible way.

But social networks are a different beast. Facebook may have started as a garage-based experiment with software, but suddenly it has entrenched itself into our society. It has grown to the scale of billions of people – beyond what any one person can imagine, and certainly beyond what it was originally conceived to be. But this expansion has not happened with the best of intentions. In our age, Facebook’s primary purpose is not to host informed discussions or let you talk to your grandma – it’s to turn a profit. This type of software is proprietary, not open-source; it has hundreds of developers, psychologists, and business-people working to seize your mind to make money.

Even if we think we are using Facebook as a tool for another cause, it undeniably attacks us in a array of dimensions. Notifications on Facebook are designed to distract our focus, working beyond the point of helpfulness and causing wide-spread cases of addiction and depression. Facial recognition software turns our harmless posts of photos into a dataset for recognition, expanding the reach of the American surveillance state. We all heard about the catastrophe in 2018, when Cambridge Analytica used our profile information to predict our political views, potentially helping wreck havoc on liberal democracy. In short, Facebook treats us like Big Ag considers animals – not as people, but as objects to be used and exploited.

These tendencies should be disturbing for anyone – particularly an activist. I would argue that because of these incentives, any capabilities Facebook (or other social networks controlled by malicious corporations) has to aid activism is not to be trusted. Anything that resembles legitimate discussion will soon be over-run by trolls and demagogues. Any messages sent on such a platform can be intercepted by the government when it’s most crucial. If any information is sent online, we should not fight for “engagements” or attention on a platform that is designed to exploit us. The Revolution simply won’t happen online.

Cliff Stoll, a retired astrophysics professor and online educator, wrote an essay in 1995 on this topic. He was a lonely voice of dissent in a world of techno-optimists. I was struck by this paragraph:

“What’s missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth. A poor substitute it is, this virtual reality where frustration is legion and where—in the holy names of Education and Progress—important aspects of human interactions are relentlessly devalued.”

I believe in so many ways, we have seen Professor Stoll’s predictions come true.

It’s worth it to consider how activism has happened in the past. It was done when people went door-to-door and canvassed against destructive companies. It was done through in-person meetings, hashing out campaign strategy on a blackboard. It was and is done through confrontation: looking others in the eye and showing that you care. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t write his Letter from Birmingham Jail in a tweet – he wrote it in a prison cell, in solitude. That’s the focus we need to change the world. Yes, we must adapt to the times, but we cannot forget that what matters most of all is human connection.

For further reading:

Cliff Stoll, “Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana”

Billy Bragg, Three Dimensions to Freedom

Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

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1 comments captured from original post on Blogger

**Unknown said on 2020-06-02** It’s ironic that you wrote this in December, and now we are in June, living in a much more online world.