[Freedombox-discuss] Facebook as public health crisis

[Ian Sullivan]

>From Cory Doctorow's CCC keynote "The coming war on general
computation", which may be generally interesting to people on this list,
comes an interesting phrasing of the dangers of Facebook. This begins
during ~min 37 from the QA portion of the speech :

>I think the think about Facebook is that it works incredibly well, it
just fails very badly. So >all the things it's good at, it's really good
at but when it fails it destroys your personal life or >it allows all of
your friends to be rounded up by the Syrian secret police and tourtured
and >murdered, or whatever, right? There's lots of ways in which
Facebook is unfit for purpose >but we have to understand why people use
it, they  use it because it works well, and if we >want to convince
people that proprietary or difficult technologies are likely to bite
them in >the ass in the future, we have to convey to them its failure
modes, and that's the tricky >thing.
>
>Of course, this is not a new problem to computers, although maybe the
stakes are a little >higher, this is the problem of smoking, right? If
you got cancer as soon as you put the >cigarette in your mouth, no one
would put a second cigarette in their mouth. I smoked for >half my life.
When I went to quit, my doctor said "You need a better reason than not
>getting cancer in 30 years, because next week when you crave a
cigarette,  not getting >cancer in 30 years won't keep you warm at
night." What I actually did was realize that I >was spending two laptops
a year on cigarettes and so I just said I'll buy myself a laptop a >year
every year from here on if I give up smoking, and I did and that kind of
helped. But we >need to help people understand, the problem that I find
is that we tend to attack people >on the upside, we say "Oh, Apple's
integration isn't as good as you think it is" or >"Facebook isn't as
entertaining as you think it is" and in fact they are. I think what we
need >to convey is all the ways in which it fails that are not
immediately obvious at the outset >and that's a hard problem.