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The politics of Facebook

Tom Hodgkinson at The Guardian explores the politics of Facebook's directors, Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer. First, he makes it clear that he doesn't buy the premise of Facebook, regardless. Then he explores the philosophy driving its evolution, especially Thiel's neoconservative positions. [Link]

Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the "multiculture" led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford, Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The Stanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is a member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group that works on the web. Thiel calls himself "way libertarian". . . . This little taster from their website will give you an idea of their vision for the world: "TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone, especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies that will "reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes its politics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite". The chairman's message says: "Today we'll teach MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the leftwing media some lessons they never imagined."

So, Thiel's politics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened to a podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes' famous characterisation of life as "nasty, brutish and short", and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: "For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe."

Read the rest of the article, there's quite a bit more. Is Facebook the Internet's version of television, i.e. a system that transforms a potentially worldchanging technology into a dumbed-down marketing machine? That's the thrust of Hodgkinson's argument... and it's applicable to other popular systems (I'm thinking Second Life).

I'm not feeling quite as negative and Hodgkinson about Facebook, and certainly not about virtual community – he despises the whole idea of online relationship vs alternatives, e.g. hanging out with friends at the pub or reading books. These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.

Like any online community, Facebook will become what its users make it, regardless of the plans of Thiel et al. We're only susceptible to commercialization a la television if that's what we accept. I'm glad Hodgkinson's given us this background info to ponder, but it doesn't worry me. We get the communities we accept, just as we get the governments we deserve. If we don't make the effort to be better citizens, better community members, better people, that's our fault, and not the fault of manipulative neoconservatives.

jon posted this at 8:30 AM
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