INTERNET — Computers turned people from apes into apes that can view and interact with apes and their messages from anywhere in the world. People are now a multiplying, interconnected, knowledge-sharing cancer. We’re a computer virus in the planetary system. [pullquote]All social media is inherently evil, so how is myspace better than Facebook?[/pullquote]
But remember myspace? Sure, after everyone went to Facebook, myspace was a sad, broken scene. In fact, there was a period between 2008 and 2015 where I had been unable to create a profile, just to see the place again.
Billions of people and bots now use Facebook every day. People use it for their reasons, and the bots use it for their own reasons, plus people.
Cambridge Analytica behaves as both.
Modest Beginnings
At one time, Facebook was simply a website for college students to get mad puss, so naturally we all went over to Marko Zuckerberg’s place and made a profile. Today there’s no telling what your 2004 facebook profile is worth, but it’s probably in the hands of every marketer, scammer, and blackhat attacker that ever wanted it.
We left our space when we left myspace, and went to Facebook, where everything and everyone looked more or less the same. Homogeneity therefore made our messages more important, and gave us incentive to set ourselves apart in the images and text displayed on our feeds.
It would be interesting to see myspace still in business. Because users had control of their own pages’ appearance, people used music and background pictures to set yourself apart. Bots rarely did this!
Russian bots on myspace now would have background images of farmland and hardworking good old boys, while God Bless the U.S.A. plays in the background. The bots’ memes to steer hatred away from Russia, only to splash it back out at each other would be all the more hilarious. Unfortunately, that would never happen because myspace never reached so deep into people’s lives as Facebook has done.
All social media is inherently evil, so how is myspace better than Facebook?
For starters, myspace did not sell your shit to Russia. Or if they did, I haven’t heard about it. I don’t care if they did! My opinion is special and you’re still reading it.
They also didn’t track you all over the web, using artificial intelligence to build personality profiles around you, which is objectively pretty cool but really, if we hadn’t been so slowly acclimated to that tracking shit, we might have asked ourselves, why are we tolerating this?
I would be motherfucking pissed if I found out a friend in my group was recording my conversations, building character profiles around me and my friends, connecting the dots between innocuous information we shared, and searching – like a stalker would do – for deeper meanings behind those connections and what it means for them being able to profit from that intimate access. That’s something a very sick person would do. You know this, but you guys keep coming over and hanging out at his house, anyway.
That’s weird, man. That’s fucked up.
Myspace was so much better than Facebook.
As far as sites go, Facebook is not even in my top 8. My favorite webpage is a 404 error.
