I just came back from a week long event out in the desert where I had no access to the Internet. On the way home, as soon as my phone had signal I checked Facebook. I am not proud of this.
On August 6th, nearly a month ago now, I posted the following message to my Facebook friends to announce my plans:
I will be leaving Facebook. It won’t be right away and I will leave a trail so others can find and/or follow me. I’m certainly hoping to take some of you with me. Unlike last time, this time I intend to leave permanently. There will be a series of posts over many weeks as I migrate away, and this is the first one. The next will contain action items should you wish to stay in touch.
On August 23rd, I announced the first step in that process: an open source address book designed to allow my friends to share a variety of contact information with me in a way where I the data is not shared with a third party such as Facebook. I also set an intention to start producing content for my own blog again.
This post is an attempt to capture and share why I started down this long path to leave Facebook. It’s a complex topic and I might reflect on it differently in the future. Lately, my short answer is that “I’m a decentralist” and Facebook is, of course, highly centralized. However, that doesn’t explain why I would choose to leave Facebook over any other centralized service I use on a regular basis. There are two things that make Facebook the service I feel I need to leave. First, I believe Facebook is one of the more dangerous centralized services. Second, Facebook has been one of my worst addictions. Addictions to drugs or alcohol will slowly kill you. Many people who struggle with alcohol or drug addiction also have a co-occurring mental health condition such as anxiety or depression, so look for rehab facilities at recoverydelivered.com. Facebook is a little different in that, instead of just being bad for you, it is looking to exploit you and manipulate you. It was designed that way.We now know that the political consulting firm named Cambridge Analytica used the Facebook machine to drastically impact the 2016 American Presidential election. The details of this propaganda campaign are the central topic of the documentar The Great Hack; I highly recommend watching it. The fact that Facebook asked Cambridge Analytica to destroy the data they ended up using for their campaign doesn’t go very far in making me feel like Facebook is responsible enough to hold so much of our personal information.We didn’t need the Cambridge Analytica incident to know Facebook is a problem. When the service is free, you’re not the customer – you’re the product. We’ve accepted that advertisers are trying to manipulate us into buying a product of some kind. This seems innocent enough. However, that kind of advertising model creates an incentive for Facebook to design their experience to keep you viewing more and more adverts, thus the platform has evolved to hook us rather than satisfy us. And I have been hooked.
After moving from Boulder to Seattle, I found myself spending a lot of time “socializing” on Facebook and not engaging the new city. I was using Facebook as a social crutch and I needed to stop. So somewhere around 2014/15 I decided to take a year off. It was wonderful and also painful. Without Facebook, I had more time – time that I invested into other important parts of building a life here in Seattle. However, without Facebook I wasn’t getting the same updates on the lives of friends and family I cared about. I was missing pictures, events, and critical opinions on popular memes. When the 2016 election was approaching, I decided to come back from my Facebook vacation and re-engage. The time off gave me a lot to reflect on.
A lot of good stuff happens on Facebook. We wouldn’t use it if it didn’t have some kind of value to us. However, I find that I am often going to Facebook to connect but only engaging with people I barely know about topics that frustrate and upset me. I find it harder and harder to keep track of authentic posts made by my friends. When I visit their personal pages, I see lots of relevant posts about their lives that I never saw in my feed. The fundamental value of keeping up with friends and family isn’t as prevalent as it once was. Yet I still keep checking Facebook, hoping for something that’s going to make me feel some kind of way – and I don’t think that’s a good thing.
So I have resolved to leave, but not in a rush. I know that I have to. Facebook lacks the ethical foundation to warrant surrendering so much of my personal power. However, I’m going to take my time and try to maintain – perhaps even strengthen – my connection with Facebook connections that I care about. And I’m going to document and share the story along the way right here on this blog.
I’m also hoping to start making more decision to support the kind of Internet I believe in – the Internet and open Web we all were dreaming of before taking some wrong turn along the way. If I can leave Facebook, who knows what I’m capable of.
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