Dana Blankenhorn

Facebook and the Fall of Free

Facebook has no friends.

Mark Zuckerberg thought he had billions of friends. He was wrong.

That’s one of the clear lessons of the Facebook scandal.

The way competitors, celebrities and the media are piling on Facebook is something to behold. I said they were vulnerable to something like this at the start of the month.  I was right.

Facebook is uniquely vulnerable because it has no customers. It doesn’t sell anything to people. Amazon sells stuff to people, and so when Trump goes after Amazon, Jeff Bezos sees his customers defending him. The same thing is true of Apple, which is why Tim Cook didn’t hold back on attacking the heart of the Facebook business model when given the chance on MSNBC.

Microsoft and Google have (so far) kept quiet about Facebook’s troubles, and for the same reason. Both run services supported by advertising. Microsoft has been backing away from this throughout the century (the MS on MSNBC is like the Cheshire Cat’s smile as it disappears). Google has been trying to diversify into products and autonomous cars. But their dependence still exists.

There’s one more important point to make about all this.

The Facebook Scandal

Facebook could disappear. 

This is the difference between Facebook and the other “Cloud Czars,” as I call them. (Picture from the excellent blog of Lisa Vanengen.)

We don’t need Facebook. Not the way we need, in the 21^st century, the information search capability of Google. Or Microsoft’s software. Or Apple’s devices. Or Amazon.Com.

Facebook, by contrast, is entirely optional. Not only is the main service optional, but so are Instagram and Messenger. We can get along very well with Snap and WeChat. The mass move can happen by word of mouse. There is a price below free, and if we don’t want to pay it we don’t have to.

This is something people like Jim Cramer don’t yet understand. This makes what is happening, or not happening, at Facebook different from what happened at Target or even Equifax. Add to that Facebook’s enormous capital budget – it’s putting $1 of every $4 it collected last year into new cloud data centers this year – and you have an existential problem.

Fencing the Internet Content Wilderness

Political leaders have finally recognized something I’ve been saying here for some time.

If the owner of a medium won’t take responsibility for it, someone else will. And they won’t have your interests at heart.

What happened at Facebook was easy to predict. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going down, just someone willing to follow the clues. 

The Web made it possible to separate the delivery of information from its value, and we have been running with it for 20 years. This brought us to the era of the Cloud Czars, companies that invested billions in the infrastructure of information delivery and nothing in the information itself.

Call it Treason

American history notes that one of our previous 44 Presidents died a traitor to his country.

That President was John Tyler, who served from 1841 to 1845. He’d gone with his state of Virginia when the break came in 1861 and considered himself a citizen of the Confederacy when he died later that year.

Musical comedy fans also know we’ve had a vice president who tried to commit treason. That was Aaron Burr, accused of trying to set up an independent empire for himself around New Orleans, in a dicker with France and with Spain.

Later, Republicans kept power for almost two generations by “waving the bloody shirt,” accusing every Democratic candidate for President of being a quasi-Confederate. Except when the party’s corruption disgusted elites (1884, Mugwumps supporting Grover Cleveland) or the party split in two (1912, Wilson vs. Roosevelt and Taft) it worked for 72 years, an entire human lifespan.

We’ve had 20^th century Presidents called “traitor.” FDR was called a class traitor during the Great Depression, and the Supreme Court ruled his National Recovery Administration unconstitutional, considering it communist. Joe McCarthy was all about finding traitors in Harry Truman’s State Department and implied the 33^rd President was a fellow traveler.

But a true Manchurian President is a first. The closest fiction has come is The Manchurian Candidate, but Laurence Harvey shot his own mother (Angela Lansbury was just three years older than he was at the time) and we were spared the Presidency of James Gregory.

Reasons for Hope

There are two important points to remember about 2018.

First, Trump really is the Manchurian President. We know he colluded with Russia and we know why. He needed Russian investment to stay afloat and he cares more about money than he cares about his country.

Second, Putin is weaker than you think. Despite everything going right for him, Russia’s economy is still smaller than Canada’s, despite its having four times more people. It is aging out and its birth rate is pathetic. It can’t re-create the old Soviet Empire. It barely has enough money to keep Ukraine occupied and pay-off the oligarchs that keep Peronista Putin in power.

What Putin wants, then, is not to take over America, just to weaken America. Just as he wants to weaken every other country. Russia only looks mighty in the war of All Against All.

Which leads to another important point.

Speaking Your Own Truth

In his book The Tools, Phil Stutz found a way to make me cry.

One of his tools is that you should imagine yourself as a child, insignificant and broken, flawed. Not your best self, just the opposite. Then, when it’s your turn to speak, speak through that child. Once you’re unafraid of being seen for what you are, or what you’re afraid you are, you’ll be fearless.

I’ve been using this tool all my life without knowing it. I desperately want to be heard. It’s what I’m about. So, I shout, on this typewriter, as loud as I can, every day. When I’m done, I’m satisfied, whether a lot of people were listening or just a few. This gives me inner peace. It’s not what I do, or my job, it’s what I am, I tell people.

I didn’t understand the meaning of this until I faced a child who didn’t have it. I would tell this child, every day if I could that what mattered to him wasn’t what he was learning, but how he integrated it, and how he expressed what he knew to teach new truths others. The kid didn’t believe me. The fear was too great. He went around the world, learning, but afraid to speak his truth, and no one ever heard what he had to say.

There are many success stories, however, who are just like this child. They just parrot what teachers tell them. They say what they’re told to say. They memorize a script and recite it, believing that they’re saying something but, in fact, contributing nothing new to the conversation.