“The fundamental goal of the Potemkin Village gambit — and facebook is a canonical example of this strategy — is the acquisition of assets and powers over persons by deception. Common tactics include the isolation of and domination of fictional ‘individuals’, conversion of isolates into manipulable factions, miseducation, propaganda and other deceptive conceptual gambits, ‘data-mining’, profiteering from damage, and economic or political domination. Extensions of this may involve the harvesting and caching (or destruction) of assets that are communally held, created or preserved in order to secure benefits for those operating the constructs.

The resultant commodities represent of the concentrated results of theft, slavery (or its near analogs), murder and violation — and are ‘produced’ by the invasive forgery or destruction of the fundamental bases of our identities, relationships, ecologies and humanity.

The economic term for this result is profit.

Nearly every film and story we have ever been exposed to involves an actual or fictional Potemkin Village. Like the bodies casting those projections as shadows, real-world expressions of this theme dominate much of our common experience and almost all of our concern. Modern America, the present state of the internet, health care, ‘justice’, ‘politics’, and our common relationships of language, information, money itself, personal and communal identity, ‘ability’, technology and culture — have been thoroughly and recursively recompromised, largely, by intrusion.”

— from the essay