Facebook is not what the internet should be. It is the internet redesigned by people who want information to be owned, and specifically owned by them. It is the internet enclosed, territorialized, packaged up and sold off. The internet for dummies.

Facebook is a walled recreation park, circled by corporate vultures and watched over by beady-eyed CIA spooks. Within the park is an attractive collection of shiny play-equipment, all of it spattered with vulture-shit. People play tag and pretend to be zombies, ride on toy scooters and clamber over climbing frames in the shapes of tractors and space rockets. On the other side of the wall are real tractors and real space rockets: open standards like Atom, SMTP and XMPP, free (as in speech) software like WordPress, MediaWiki and Moodle. Inside the park, you can peruse advertisements for hair removal clinics and online gambling. Outside the park - well, there’s plenty of that crap there, too; those vultures get everywhere. But there’s also Wikipedia, Freesound and Project Gutenberg.

Facebook is to the real internet as those Vtech “laptop” toys for children are to real laptops. It’s a cheat, a con, a distraction. It gives you nothing you don’t already have, if you have an email account, a blog (doesn’t have to be owned by Google; this one isn’t), a bit of webspace you can post text and photos to. You don’t need Facebook to join a discussion group, or to join forces with other people who are concerned about the same social and political issues as you. You don’t even need Facebook to play silly word games.

I wanted to say that I deleted my Facebook account today, but as a matter of fact Facebook won’t let me do that. I can “deactivate” it, for sure, and have done so; but as for getting the personal data I was stupid enough to put on their servers taken off it for good, well, that’s at their discretion. They own a piece of me now, forever. It’s not a big piece, but I certainly don’t want it getting any bigger. Fuck ‘em.

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And the same goes for MySpace, which is less evil only to the extent that it’s comparatively incompetently executed. I’ve cancelled the MySpace accounts for both w/trem and Spiral Jacobs; they’ll both be disappearing presently. If you want to hear my music, you can download all of it from this site, and in better quality.