Facebook is scary

Yesterday I played a facebook game called "D&D: Heroes of Neverwinter". I had never played a facebook game before, but I've played D&D and other role-playing games off and on since I was a lad. The game was disturbing. In order to do well, a player must recruit other people from facebook to play it. Players are also rewarded in the game for spending more time playing it, and for playing on consecutive days. The game is optimally designed to spread through social networks and to take up more and more of a person's life.

 Part of the appeal of games like D&D is that they allow people to create their own stories. Role-playing games offer a DIY alternative to the stories and entertainment created by the commercial media. But "D&D: Heroes of Neverwinter" is a preeminently commercial game. Its sole purpose seems to be to spread through facebook to as many users as possible and to get people to spend as much time on facebook as possible (presumably for the sake of generating ad revenue). In other words, welcome to the machine.

 After thinking about this game and why it bothered me, I started thinking about facebook in general. It's a great tool which has enabled people to connect, to reconnect, and to stay connected with people they care about. But the fact that it is a commercial enterprise should give us pause. The owners of facebook want us to spend more and more of our lives using their product. They want their product to become indispensable to our work, play, and intimate relationships. The life experience and connections between people have become commodities. There is a risk that we will live our lives for the benefit of and at the pleasure of a commercial enterprise.

 I say all this as a fan of the free market who believes that competition is the best way of checking the market power of firms. The point is not that free market capitalism is bad because it has given birth to monsters such as facebook. The point is that we as consumers should be as intelligent and careful as possible about how we consume commercial entertainment and social media. Social media like facebook and Google+ are network goods, which means that the greater the number of people who use them, the more valuable they are. (If only a few people used facebook, it would be harder to find people you know and the product would be less valuable. The more people who use facebook, the easier it is to find people you know and to meet new people.)

This can make it hard for alternative social media to compete. But it is not impossible to unseat an established network good. For example, consider Microsoft's Windows operating system, a network good which now has several viable competitors. It's hard to say how things will play out, but the worst case scenario is that people become extremely dependent on facebook or other commercial social media in order to have satisfying work, play, and relationships. A better alternative would be a crowd-sourced, non-commercial social media platform.

Ruth J. Simmons on Leadership

An interview in The New York Times with Ruth J. Simmons, president of Brown University, is full of insights about leadership and working with others:

I worked for someone who did not support me. And it was a very painful experience, and in many ways a defining experience for me. So having a bad supervisor really probably started me thinking about what I would want to be as a supervisor. That led me to think about the psychology of the people I worked with. And, in some ways, because I had exhibited behavior that was not the most positive in the workplace myself, it gave me a mirror to what I might do that might be similarly undermining of others. So I think at that juncture that’s really when I started being much more successful.

Recommended.

Critique of Thomas Friedman

Belen Fernandez has written a caustic but effective take-down of Thomas Friedman over at Guernica. An excerpt:

Friedman’s writing is characterized by a reduction of complex international phenomena to simplistic rhetoric and theorems that rarely withstand the test of reality. His vacuous but much-publicized “First Law of Petropolitics”—which Friedman devises by plotting a handful of historical incidents on a napkin and which states that the price of oil is inversely related to the pace of freedom—does not even withstand the test of the very Freedom House reports that Friedman invokes as evidence in support of the alleged law. The tendency toward rampant reductionism has become such a Friedman trademark that one finds oneself wondering whether he is not intentionally parodying himself when he introduces “A Theory of Everything” to explain anti-American sentiment in the world and states his hope “that people will write in with comments or catcalls so I can continue to refine [the theory], turn it into a quick book and pay my daughter’s college tuition.”

Fernandez also attacks Friedman's fecund use of puerile, semi-coherent metaphors.

David Graeber on the Anarchist Roots of Occupy Wall Street

The reader in social anthropology at the University of London has much to say in an essay at AlJazeera about the flaws of American democracy, the differences between anarchism and Marxism, and the nature of consensus-based decision making:

I should be clear here what I mean by "anarchist principles". The easiest way to explain anarchism is to say that it is a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society - that is, one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence. History has shown that vast inequalities of wealth, institutions like slavery, debt peonage or wage labour, can only exist if backed up by armies, prisons, and police. Anarchists wish to see human relations that would not have to be backed up by armies, prisons and police. Anarchism envisions a society based on equality and solidarity, which could exist solely on the free consent of participants.

I applaud the Occupy Movement's critique of American state capitalism, in particular the protection afforded politically connected business interests at the taxpayers' expense, and I agree with Graeber about the general superiority of consensus to democratic majoritarianism, but I doubt that society could ever produce order without armies, prisons, and police--or, for that matter, without a judicial system and legal code. However, I also think all of these things can exist without states, or at least without states as we know them (which unduly restrict the entry and exit of citizens). I therefore fully agree with Graeber that we don't need states to create social order, and in fact that states are frequently disruptive of such order (such as through foreign wars and the war on drugs).