So Facebook has been valued at $104 billion dollars. Do you, my Facebook friends, feel richer? Do you understand that all the value of this company comes from your interactions with one another, from your posts, from your friendships, from your sharing of the most intimate details of your lives with each other, and (of course) with Facebook, at the same time? All of this detail adds up to data to be data-mined, to be parsed and parceled, to be sold to advertisers so that they can serve as the pander between your pocketbook and their profit. If you ask me, it is a latter day enclosure of the commons. One might think, since all the value of this company comes from you, my Facebook friends, that Zuckerberg, might want to share the wealth of this IPO with you unsung creators of the value which he has aggregated, analyzed and marketed. I keep waiting for the invitation to become part of the Facebook Co-op but it has been slow to arrive. I am sure it is just a matter of time. After all, he surely knows he could not have done this without me, without us. Moreover, and finally, it is not like he sold us a car or beer or even a search engine. What he did figure out was how to get enough of us to drop by, stick around and hang out with each other (mind you, not to hang out with Facebook, but to hang out with each other!) while he and his team monitored everything we said or did on the site, so that he could sell this data to his advertisers, who endeavor in turn to sell us the very thing which the analysis of our online behavior suggests should fulfill our heart's desire.
A few questions to close: first, what are your thoughts on this day of days? And, more particularly, do you think it is a good thing that an unregulated private company controls the social space where 900 million people -- and perhaps several billion yet to come -- spend so much of their online lives? Is this really the best way to realize the Internet's social and communicative potential? What say you?
