The Inevitable Platform
Two out of five Germans were genuinely afraid of Facebook, according to a poll they commissioned. The fear was worse among people with lower education, though about 20 percent of those had no idea what Facebook was in the first place.
A market researcher was surprised by the numbers. He’d expected educated people to be more skeptical, but it turned out the opposite—teenagers and college students used it without hesitation. Everyone was already on it, and once your entire friend group is communicating through groups and messages and walls, you can’t really opt out. You’re basically forced to be there.
The list of things to worry about was endless and also kind of ridiculous. Your boss seeing photos from a party where you’re making out with someone. Some creep downloading pictures from your vacation. Personalized ads following you around forever, trying to sell you Hello Kitty vacuum cleaners. All theoretically possible. Maybe even likely.
I used Facebook constantly. Every day, constantly. Phone and computer, home and out. I was basically never logged out, even when I wasn’t actively using it. I worked in a field where not being on Facebook meant you didn’t really exist. But I also had the luxury of not caring much if people were monitoring me. My job wouldn’t suffer because of party photos. I wasn’t a young woman worrying about harassment or someone young enough that this could wreck their future. And if someone tried to sell me a Hello Kitty vacuum, honestly, I’d be curious.
The thing nobody can really calculate is the cost of all this visibility, this documentation, this permanent residence in one system. Nobody knows. I don’t know, and I won’t for a long time, maybe ever.
I’ve always believed in fighting noise with noise—feed the system enough random information and garbage and meaningless details that it drowns out anything worth actually protecting. Let them try to profile you based on that. Keep the real secrets. It’s a defense if you can afford it, and I could.
The platform was powerful, obviously. As powerful as the people running it and using it let it be. The smart thing would be to know what could go wrong, engage with it thoughtfully and with intention. That’s probably right. But by then it was already inevitable anyway.