So Long, Facebook?

Mark Zuckerberg lives in my neighborhood (although, believe me, my house is nothing like his). Meg and I passed him and Priscilla Chan out walking one night, and we all nodded and said hi just like any neighbors. Larry Page is rumored to be building a house not far away, near where Steve Jobs lived, I think. My son’s chess teacher (really more like a chess philosopher) was a mathematician at Stanford and an early mentor to Page and Sergey Brin. He called them “those boys.” It’s not surprising, I suppose, that having been exposed to these people this way, they seem to me like regular folks. Of course I don’t really know them, but nodding sidewalk neighbors and “those boys” don’t seem like they could be bad guys.

I was early on Facebook, long before they went public. I have always been a huge fan of Google. And Apple. Tech holds a place in my heart and soul like volcano gods for early man. Beautiful, exciting, occasionally a little frightening. For years it’s been obvious how Google could be dangerous, but so far they seem to be toeing an acceptable line, giving us all tremendous benefits of accessibility to knowledge without obviously high costs. Or perhaps I’m not fully up to speed on the costs of having Google in our lives in such an intimate way.

But this post isn’t about Google, it’s about Facebook. 

Early on, Facebook seemed to be just what it was originally designed to be: a social hang out. It’s been nice for me. I’ve been able to keep up with friends, old and new, with whom I would otherwise have lost contact. We chat, I see what they’re up to, how their kids are growing up, etc. No downside to all that, right? No cost, right?

Now we learn, courtesy of Cambridge Analytica’s exploitation of Facebook’s members’ information, that there most certainly is a cost. I do not approve—I repeat, I do not approve—of being part of any shenanigans to hijack an election for a man like Donald Trump, or anyone else, for that matter. That’s not why I signed up for Facebook.

So I did what I have done in the past, but with more earnest effort this time: I adjusted my privacy and sharing settings on Facebook. The Facebook settings are a thicket of such density and thorniness that one has to wonder if they have not intentionally been made difficult to hack through in order to discourage users from limiting what Facebook can do, and permit to be done, with their data. 

Facebook is not a charity, I understand that. It needs to make money. I’ve been naive, I guess, about how their machine works; if we can believe their public protestations of innocence, so have they. 

When I’m naive, it’s dangerous to me. What a company like Facebook is naive, it’s dangerous to our democracy. That is not an acceptable cost for being in a social club.

I loved it when Facebook was the platform to spread the word of the Arab Spring. I love that they want to bring the internet to underserved places in developing countries. In their best moments that can seem like a modern Marshall Plan, fostering democracy, prosperity and goodwill around the world.

But here in their home country, they have let us down. They have, guilelessly or not, permitted themselves to serve as a massive platform for misinformation and trickery.

I would hate not to keep up with my friends. (Maybe we can all use Instagram.) I’m just not sure I can continue to be a part of a platform that can be so easily turned against our most fundamental interests. We’ll see. In the meantime, maybe “those boys” at Google can help Mark figure out how to clean up his business model.

Learning the Hard Way

We’re on the train from Paris to Barcelona, along the path of world wars. Out the window I see the men with bayonets fixed to their rifles charging the barbed wire and the men in the trenches rising up to return fire, and then, looking over time, only a few decades, I see the panzer tanks of the blitzkrieg and the men and women outside the small stone villages like the ones we are passing with their hands held high over their heads as the Nazi soldiers inspect them and decide whether they will live or die, and whether there and then or in a death camp.

For me the fields of France are the eternal fields of war. They don’t look very different now than then, bare and speckeled with snow along the tree lines on this last day of February. I think of how cold the soldiers, the boys, must have been in those trenches, how merciless the tanks of the second German invasion.

I see those boys in the fields and I wonder if others do. It’s a different world now than at the end of World War II. The Germans and the Japanese, so thoroughly defeated in that war, roared back into economic dominance. It remains to be seen what that means. The Germans are setting almost as much economic policy for Europe today as they did when they overran it militarily. Japan isn’t the economic tiger it was in the 1980s, and the country it used to dominate, China, has taken over the title as regional monarch.

When I was growing up in the South, I regularly walked the killing fields of the battle of Nashville and the battle of Franklin of our Civil War. But they weren’t fields of war to me. They were just boring patches of farmland. I had no sense of the Civil War. I could not imagine the boys dying in those fields and in the parlors of their homes where they were sometimes brought home to die. The Civil War meant nothing to me. Less than nothing. I rejected talk of it the way I rejected talk of all things that would never matter in my life.

I wonder if young men and women today see the fields of war of the generations before them with that same lack of interest and curiosity, whether they see the mistakes of those who came before them as unique to the frailties and vanities of those times.

The frailties and vanities of today are manifested by the nuclear saber rattling of the United States and North Korea. By the islands China is building in the open sea to control shipping and military routes. By Russian tanks in Ukraine and its new missiles announced just today.

Perhaps because I dismissed our Civil War as an anachronism, I was unprepared for the resurgence of white male nationalism that was awakened by the racist and misogynist rantings of our current president. I would like to blame him, but he is just one man. It is we who are to blame. Millions of us elected him, apparently without memory of Southern lynch mobs or the time not so long ago when women didn’t have the right to vote.

In Europe, the hard right is building fences to keep out migrants, and the fears they cater to are winning them elections again. I thought fascism had been not just defeated but eradicated. But like polio, it is making a comeback. I thought racism was dead, but it was merely lying dormant in the cold ground of our darkest urges.

The cliche is that those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. I’m sure I am not the first to suggest a modification to this wisdom: it may not be enough merely to know history to avoid repeating its mistakes, we may have to personally feel the pain of the lives shattered, the children lost, the future lost. To those who come later, the past may seem quaintly antiquated.

“We are not like that,” they will say, the ones who walk the fields and cannot hear the guns and smell the cordite.

But they are, I fear. We all seem to be. Only when the pain of tragedy is seared in personal memory does it seem hold us back from our human need to conquer and dominate. If there were a way to pass that pain along to each new generation, not just the fact of it but the actual night sweats, we might escape the tyranny of our evolutionary imperative. Otherwise, it won’t be long before another generation learns these terrible lessons the hard way.