Saturday, May 5, 2018

Booking Cancellation

Despite personal reservations about Facebook’s interwoven privacy, data, and advertising practices, the vast majority of people find that they can’t (and don’t want to) quit. Facebook has rewired people’s lives, routing them through its servers, and to disentangle would require major sacrifice.
Even Amid Scandal, Facebook Is Unstoppable
One of the things that gives Facebook the "power" that it does is the idea that people are helpless to do anything about the company's practices. But Facebook is just like anything else. Right now, some two-thirds of Americans are on the service. It took the company years to amass that user base, and there is no reason to expect that it wouldn't take just as long to unwind it. But yes, disentangling people's lives from Facebook would require work, and the company counts on people being averse to that level of work to maintain them as customers. But it's not as if Facebook itself did the work to entangle those people - they did it for themselves. And while leaving Facebook would require walking away from some amount of that work, there is nothing stopping people from working over time, until they'd built a new online life for themselves.

The constant litany of stories about how Facebook has become indispensable all rely, as I read them, on the assumption that the only way to leave Facebook is a quick and painless exit. One that allows, with the stroke of a keyboard, people to take all of the benefits of a social-media connected life with them and decamp to a platform that can maintain the massive footprint needed to maintain vast human networks without the need to actually pay any bills for the capability. While we're being completely unrealistic, I'd like to file my request for a space-superiority fighter craft.

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