So, there’s this »really weird problem with asking public questions on FB.

Don’t let’s start with my longstanding position on this platform. Which has, for more than a decade, been one of studious opposition.

If we ask each other questions here, and answer them with any degree of personal uniqueness… we’re giving away something … we should not be quick to dismiss with a shrug of modernity. Something primordial.

An electronic representation of what »would otherwise be actual intimacy. Data that is far more personal than any other form of data. So we’re giving to machines and corporations what should be reserved for those we are close to. And, perhaps, those who could help us make wise use of these assets…

And we give them our social network, because our attention and psychology wasn’t enough.

This is a catastrophically misguided indulgence. And facebook, as a corporation and a process, feeds upon this with an insatiable hunger.

[ The Science Fiction story where FB starts generating non-existent ‘influencer’ non-persons, hires actors to play roles, and actively becomes more influential than anything in human history, since they can directly manipulate the ‘audience’ ]

What we refer to generally as ‘analytics’ — the unique behavioral and historical record of ‘user activity’ — comprises »specific forms of data that belong to a nonordinary class. We would do well to pause and think about this with great care together.

For it seems we find ourselves in a position where the first ‘instar’ (growth phase) of the dominant social network was and is intrinsically malignant. This is not an entity you want your analytics residing with.

There are many options. I have lectured at length about related topics. But we could boil things down to a few.

Analytics are more valuable than money, and more powerful than governments. This isn’t merely a software product; it’s something we failed to imagine. A corporation that eclipses governments, because it has assets that no mere ‘organization’ should have. Assets produced by study and experiment, purposefully, on its users.

The options are: defect (doesn’t resolve the problem), try to participate meaningfully in the existing nightmare-experiment (likely to be cognitively and relationally toxic, since the context is pre-compromised), or …

… actively compose a new way of retrieving our analytics — and the potentials for opportunity they actually represent — from those who would both deprive us of their benefits and punish us for opting in.

I came here to study this phenomenon. So that I could understand… what we could do »instead… together, if we could form and enact this intention.

If we gathered our own analytics, anonymized (most of) them together, and repurposed their value for learning and social development… we could learn in ways our species has failed to yet imagine.

Every time we used a device.

There’s another universe near at hand, where privacy allows us to magnify the accessible benefits of the analytics we produce, and that universe is wild with astonishing potential…

I think we need to invert the paradigm here. Not by resisting it. By establishing its opposite. We’re using the internet wrong, and this is damaging its integrity and potential.

And ours. Because, unless we simply unplug, the internet is the public face of common humanity, media, news, and… identification.

In a »slightly more intelligent system, one easily envisioned, we could change social networks from chains … to wings.

For now, however, we dwell in enemy terrain.