Face it

[Re-posted from a book review on Goodreads]

If this review had a subtitle, it would be "The problem with subtitles." The problem is that subtitles try to squeeze all the meaning of an entire book into a few words. Functionally, it's stupid. Nobody goes around saying, "Have you read the latest subtitle?" But maybe they should. After all, it's essentially a headline, and how often do we know anything about anything beyond the headlines that parade before us on our "wall" or in our "feed"?

Feed. Good word, that, for us human informational bovines. Here is a book with a perfectly good title -- Anti-Social Media -- whose subtitle goes on to tell us what the title means -- How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy -- so that we can have something to add to the coffeehouse chatter: "Hey, did you know that Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy? Terrible, innit? Hey, look what just popped up on my feed: Ronaldo and Neymar, and they're not playing soccer, they're boxing! Hahaha!"

I think I prefer the quaint, old-timey way that publishers used to provide a seemingly alternative title: "Anti-Social Media -- Or How Facebook Primarily But Also Google, Not to Mention a Host of Others, Profits by Providing a 'Free' Service that Tickles Our Inner Compulsion to Use the Cotton Gin to Generate Profits and Other Glib Excuses for Enslaving Others."

In fact, this book doesn't mention the cotton gin. But if you will allow yourself to go beyond the subtitle and actually read the entire book, you'll learn that author Vaidhynathan is onto something much deeper than the manner in which the architecture of Facebook willy-nilly acts on the human spirit like a steady diet of Coca-Cola acts on a set of teeth.

(I said "spirit." I meant "brain." But I couldn't use that word, because it connotes "rational," which as Seth Godin says, no one is. And everybody knows that Seth Godin must be right because Seth Godin is a Marketer and we are all Brands and Brands don't use rationality because it isn't sticky and lacks the potential for virality, which autocorrect wants to change to "virility," but that was another time.)

So, anyway: spirit. Why do people drink so much Coke? There's 9.75 teaspoons of sugar in one 12 oz. can. Imagine putting that much sugar on a bowl of cereal. I mean, it's total junk, and it funds an EMPIRE. Full disclosure: part of the empire is a university I got a degree from, so totally worth it, right? Just like slavery, except rotten teeth and obesity! That's the spirit!

And then there's Facebook, and not only is it FREE, but it doesn't rot your teeth or make you fat, and it comes complete with an afterlife by keeping you friends with people after they (or you) die! Who wouldn't want it? So, it's completely neutral, right?

If you think that, you've never concerned yourself with advertising. Back in the graybeard days of advertising -- all of 15 years ago -- they used to say that 20% of your advertising budget worked, but you didn't know which 20%, so you had to go ahead and spend the other 80% on stuff that didn't work. Now, with Facebook sucking up all kinds of personal and browsing data that its users give up for FREE and fire-hosing it to advertisers, anybody with any kind of advertising budget can customize many messages to many audiences and gauge the responses. With that kind of feedback, no wonder the traditional "Waste 80% of Your Advertising Budget With Us" newspapers are struggling.

And guess who have massive advertising budgets to saturate an atomized market with targeted messages? Political marketers, with dictators like Vladimir Putin showing the way. Here's Vaidhyanathan: "By segmenting an electorate into distinct sets, candidates move resources toward efforts to pander to small issues with high emotional appeal instead of those that can affect broad swaths of the electorate and perhaps cross over presumed rifts among voters. It's not necessary -- and may be counterproductive -- for a campaign to issue a general vision of government or society or to articulate a unifying vision. It's still done, but it's not the essence of the game anymore. Voter targeting … encourages narrow-gauge interventions that can operate below the sight of journalists or regulators. A campaign like Trump's can issue small, cheap advertisements via platforms like Facebook and Instagram that disappear after a day or get locked forever in Facebook's servers." (p. 162)

"High emotional appeal": your brain on Coca-Cola. We love it, we can't get enough of it, and we are powerless to resist, and the first three letters of Seth Godin's last name are G-O-D. Sweet.

Even if Mark Zuckerberg has good intentions, and even if his company makes occasional interventions, they manifest the naiveté of the libertarian Silicon Valley mindset. His creation is a Frankenstein monster, out of his control: "Facebook is simply too large and the variety of human depravity too vast for the company to deploy enough people or computer code to anticipate and regulate the misbehavior of millions." (p. 204)

The broader value of the book -- beyond the narrowness of its title and subtitle -- is that Vaidhynathan transcends his own characterization that "Facebook is itself the problem" with the larger problem of people and how they respond to technological innovation: "[N]ot for the first time, market and political forces have turned products of the Enlightenment against enlightenment. … When we make a cult of technology and welcome its immediate rewards and conveniences into our lives without consideration of the long-term costs, we make fools of ourselves." (pp. 202-3)

As to what should be done, the author argues both for the application of more accountability and transparency to the lesser problem of Facebook, e.g. by extending Federal Election Commission oversight of political advertising to web-based platforms (presently not the case). As to the larger problem of the human response to technological innovation, at one level he says resistance is futile -- he himself is not leaving Facebook, and it would be a mere "blip" for readers of his book to do so -- but on the other he counsels that we "reinvest and strengthen institutions that generate deep, meaningful knowledge," (p. 215) e.g. universities, museums, libraries, science, responsible journalism. He also says that we must get political. The libertarian mindset of Silicon Valley has produced at the corporate level "the hubris of self-righteousness" that threatens the very notion of democratic self-government. "Only the threat and force of stern state regulation can push companies to straighten up," concludes Vaidhynathan. "That's both how it is and how it should be." (p. 219)

So uh who won the boxing match? Neymar or Ronaldo? Wait, wait, don't tell me, it no longer matters, cuz it looks like Scaramucci and Omarosa are gonna tangle, but mostly I can't wait til five years from now when they will be gone. Trump will be gone, the US will have a Green New Deal, Medicare for all, a well-regulated militia armed with flintlocks, Facebook and Google will be public utilities, and the EU will move its capital from Brussels to London. Also, people will have actually read this book, gone beyond its publisher's marketing crapshoot of a subtitle, and brought policy back into fashion. Because yes we can … think.

And I will have written a book called 9.75 Teaspoons and the Truth: Drink the Kool-Aid. No, no, no. Listen to my inner Seth Godin; pack it with virality; then go all virile and kick him to the curb: Think the Kool-Aid.