I wrote about Facebook in a blog in January, pointing to ominous clouds on the horizon. (And, one looking at the future of Facebook and the world in 2011.)

For an update. Those clouds now are overhead. With the ever-growing realization that Facebook has been a channel for manipulating our life-as-we-know-it (literally so), there is the drumbeat of #deletefacebook (which I joined last week). And with this are articles showing how difficult it actually can be, which bring to the fore just how deeply Facebook has plunged itself into our being.

There are how-to guides to find alternative to Facebook. There is the recounting of the times Zuckerberg has skirted over the line on privacy, each followed by the ritualistic apology. And there is Colbert's acerbic humor on "Suckerberg", which includes screen shots showing the mind-blowing amount of information Facebook holds on various staff members of his show -- including call's made from one staffer's cellphone, the family tree of another,  and the data for the face-recognition of a third.

Many people will leave Facebook and use alternatives. Some will discover they can leave without using social network alternatives at all. People who stay with Facebook will opt out of everything they can think of, especially related to sharing their personal information with advertisers and apps. (As part of the mea culpa this time around, Facebook is centralizing the privacy settings so you don't have to navigate through twenty different places to do the job.) People will log into apps using their email addresses rather than Facebook, thwarting the insidious tunneling by Facebook beyond its own borders.

Whether people leave or decide to stay with tighter privacy controls, the targeted advertising and third-party sharing that is the life blood of Facebook will be eroded.

Beyond these short-term, but possibly devastating reactions that are focused on Facebook, it is becoming all the more likely that we are at the beginning of a broad sea change in how we view social networking and in our willingness to give up privacy for a song. Jaron Lanier pointed out the faustian bargain we have made with Facebook, Google (which at least gives us something of value in the search engine) and the like, and proposed a path for us to be enfranchised for the personal data we toss into the world.

There is an alternative to the business model of mining personal data, which is having Facebook and others move to a subscription model. But this will not sustain the valuations Facebook currently enjoys. People are not likely to pay out of pocket anywhere near the value that is implied by giving the world all of their personal data. Which suggests just how much we all are giving away.

The following is a brief, contemporary account of our world, which we call, for obvious reasons, the Amazon Dystopia. I leave it undated -- Nadir.


The dystopia is most evident in the control of the working class. During work and commuting time all workers are mandated to wear a “health watch”, a wristband that monitors their movement. The wristbands also tell the time and weather. Workers also wear “world view” collars and glasses equipped with biometrics and a 360 degree video display to determine the level of their exertion, and where they are fixing their gaze. The collars can generate electric impulses to encourage workers. If they fail to perform, there is summary dismissal. The government has recently added a worker-terminating explosive charge if workers are found engaging in treasonous behavior – which includes “robust criticism or a marked lack of enthusiasm.”

Cocking and the Rise of the Plutocrats

The elections are determined by majority vote, but the people’s choice becomes the tool of the wealthy once ascending to office. This transformation is known as “cocking”. This is an unfortunate play on the Koch name, but one that is not classified as robust criticism.

Cocking was first revealed in the Washington Post, which reported that the Koch brothers, a center of corporate political power, presented various incumbents with a check made out to their opponent for $25 million, with the threat that the check would be handed over to the opposition if the incumbent did not act in what the Koch brothers considered to be the best interests of the country. The threat only had to be made good one time, and the story planted for the Washington Post team to uncover, (with a Pulitzer for their efforts), before compliance to the threat became absolute.

The Consolidation of Power: From the One Percent to the One
The cocking grew, and political power became increasingly consolidated with those with the deepest pockets, until it finally has become a plutocracy of one. And having power over the press has helped to correctly frame the new order for the masses. At least the small subset of the masses that is not placated by free, unlimited streaming of videos and music.

From Each According to His Need

A value-added tax is now a primary source of revenue. Essentials such as food, clothing, and school supplies pass through a taxation station, the “fulfillment center”. Its operation is based on extensive records of every citizen, both their biometrics, gazing patterns, queries, social interactions, and of course consumption history, to infer their preferences, to the end of taxing them more highly on their purchases based on the algorithmic determination of how much they need them. This principle is promoted with the slogan, “from each according to his need.” All purchases are made with the certification of the buyer that they will not resell or redistribute, with the delivery chain iron clad from the fulfillment center to the consumer's doorstep to reduce the risk of missteps.

Luxury goods by definition are not needed, and therefore generally are exempt from taxation.

To Each According to His Abilities

The tax is paid to the agency that is responsible for the building and maintaining of this distribution system. This payment is tax exempt, because it already is a tax. The agency is in private hands because the government has determined to leave to business those things that it can do best, as measured by the profit they can extract. Thus the slogan, “to each according to his abilities.” As has been noted in various recent Washington Post articles, this is the most sure way of adding to the economy, and thus to the wealth of all individuals.

The Revolt of the Masses

Note by the conveyor of this account: As with any dystopia there is a plucky, fearless group that is fighting back. Led by Kadir and his former-rival-but-now-lover Sabella, a beautiful woman who is good with knives, this group is bringing in others to fight against the tyranny of the plutocracy.

Note by the second conveyor of this account: They are discovered and killed. The end.

Twitter was not available to the pod people in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They had to confront the humans directly, pointing and screeching to muster the mob to attack. But now that we have Twitter, a pod person in our day and age can efficiently and remotely signal a human to the pod-people mob with hashtag HumanToo.(This hashtag is already used in other contexts, but always by humans, so no problem.)

We don't have body snatchers right now, and, for what it is worth, we have put in legal protections should the event ever occur. Barring a dystopian state, (probably inevitable should the instance arise), no one can take someone's body without due process. No one can point and screech and have the mob take over from there.

At least that is true if body snatching is considered an assault on civil liberties that are protected by law. I suspect that is the case. Just as there are other actions that require due process. No one can be incarcerated without due process. No one's property can be seized without due process. However, there are harmful actions that can occur outside the constraints of due process, like accusations that do not rise to a threat of harm or to libel. While immune from the requirement of due process, they can destroy one's character and reputation. (Thus the term character assassination.) It can leave the victim unemployable, and set them apart from society.

The pod people had bad intentions from the start, at least from the human's perspective. But sometimes there are things going on that justify some pointing and screeching. Unfortunately, what starts off with noble motives can move into body snatcher mode. And when pointing and screeching is given free rein, that is where things inevitably arrive. With the excesses, the social winds finally turn, and any value, any noble cause, is lost in the process, even met with a backlash.

In a recent post I discussed McCarthyism. This is a good example of how a legitimate concern -- there really were spies tied to the Soviet Union infiltrating the government, intent on subverting our government -- can turn into body snatching. Accusations could be made without support. People could be targeted mistakenly or even for ulterior motives. (And, getting back to the pod people, what if a timid pod person is not body snatching, but is only body touching. Do we pile him in with the full-throttle snatchers?) All with the result that, in so charge an environment, and based on the accusation alone, they were destroyed.

I enjoy studying American history of the post-World War II period, and just remembered that earlier this week we passed the anniversary of a milestone for that period: On December 2, 1954, the United States Senate voted 65 to 22 to condemn McCarthy for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute", signaling the erosion of the crushing anti-communist excesses of the previous years. McCarthyism has been applied indiscriminately and almost invariably incorrectly to any number of perceived political and social excesses, but it is worth recalling it for what it was.

First, to criticize McCarthyism is not to diminish the real threats. We must understand that at the time there was a real, broadly recognized threat to the U.S. Through documents from Soviet archives and Soviet messages, we know that the Soviet Union engaged in substantial espionage activities in the United States during the 1940's, that the Communist Party in the U.S. was being funded by the Soviet Union, and that it was used as a base for recruiting spies. We should not have McCarthyism diminish the reality of the subversive elements of the time.

The threat was real, but the reaction to that threat was a frenzy, often described as a witch hunt, that was particularly focused on those in the entertainment industry and government. A simple accusation was sufficient for people to be attacked, lose their job and even their career, with no further prospects for employment at more than a menial level. President Truman remarked that, "A man is ruined everywhere and forever. No responsible employer would be likely to take a chance in giving him a job." Those who were accused had no recourse because the process took place through extra-judicial channels; no response could hold sway. Pleading the Fifth Amendment during the proceedings was taken as an indication of guilt.

What is more, although there were instances of serious attempts at subversion, there also were many who were attacked for activities from decades earlier that, though perhaps outside the social and political norm, had been benign. These were pulled up and judged with the now more stringent standard. It was as if a law had been enacted, and those who did not follow that law in the past were found guilty.

Yet at the time, these excessive and unlawful efforts which cast aside any notion of due process were supported by many thoughtful people. For example, William F. Buckley Jr., a prominent conservative intellectual, wrote that McCarthyism “is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks." Certainly there were those who were opposed, but popular opinion – and no doubt the concern that those who opposed the juggernaut would be painted with the same brush – keptthem silenced.

The political climate of McCarthyism declined through the 1950’s as public opinion shifted, and a number of court rulings pushed back against the processes that supported it. Most notable is one in 1956 that pushed back on using the invocation of the Fifth Amendment to infer guilt. The Court wrote that “we must condemn the practice of imputing a sinister meaning to the exercise of a person's constitutional right under the Fifth Amendment”, and in 1957, when the Court condemned cases where “Guilt or innocence may turn on what Marx or Engels or someone else wrote or advocated as much as a hundred years or more ago.”

The baby boomers have changed our society as their demographic wave has washed over one institution and norm after another. Split sessions for public schools, a new level of competition for elite colleges, the free love generation and the rise of student protest, the housing bubble, the creation of the Millennials, (a.k.a. the echo boomers). They have the numbers and the political will to do things, and they have time and again pushed against the norm. To use the phrase of one baby boomer, they think different.

The final change will occur with the crashing of that wave: The availability of assisted dying for all. Assisted dying is already becoming the norm for those with terminal illnesses. Australia is the most recent to join the ranks of Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, Columbia, and Luxembourg, as well as California, Colorado, Washington, D.C., and Oregon in the U.S. (I use the term assisted dying broadly, to also involve giving the subject a lethal drug, and not literally being on hand as they take it and pass away. That is what is allowed in California.)

Currently there are restrictions, like having a terminal illness, especially one that is either painful or imminent. But once the mechanics are in place and the threshold has been passed, it is only a matter of degree to have assisted dying for those who decide that their debilitating state makes them no better off than one who is terminally ill. Once we have clear diagnosis tools for Alzheimers, for example, I can imagine voluntary assisted dying protocols along the lines of a more successful and less surreptitious Alice Howland in the film Still Alice.

The way is being paved to make this more acceptable. For example, consider the context provided by a recent full section in the New York Times devoted to the bleak world of old age and dying in Japan. We will see more articles depicting the emptiness of old age, the drain on society and our children, arguments that we should take charge of our death just as we do our lives -- this is the sort of thing that resonates with the baby boomers, also called the "me generation" -- and even arguing, as I have, that keeping someone alive can be akin to torture. I also have argued in a past post that we could help matters along by giving payments (obviously to a designated beneficiary) if someone elects to forgo expensive treatments that would only delay death by a short period.