Web Fetus

Of course I'm not surprised reading this article that 2 male Harvard alumni students (Remember Zuckerman?) have created a fetus fetish online extravaganza called Totspot.com. Facebook for the fetus. It was bad enough that I saw pictures of a bloody bath birth from an old high school acquaintance back in the day when I was on Facebook for three weeks. But now the emby can even be profiled and spoken for before the dip in the tub. Expect an inundation of fetus fetishizers and prolife advertisement banners.

More than Addiction

As I've posted before, I didn't last long on Facebook. I'm a tiny minority among friends, family and colleagues who is not using the network site; I realized it was a time waster after wasting too many valuable lunch hours and evenings searching for people I knew in days gone by and gasping that some would post photos of their child being born. Tom Hodgkinson of The Guardian reveals some very interesting and perhaps shocking facts about the men behind Facebook. Hodgkinson introduces us to the only three faces on the board of directors of Facebook.

1st Board Member Mark Zuckerberg, the poster boy who initially conceived Facebook

2nd Board Member Peter Thiel
Some highlights:

But 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's philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel's virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook. Girard is a regular at Thiel's intellectual soirees. What you don't hear about in Thiel's philosophy, by the way, are old-fashioned real-world concepts such as art, beauty, love, pleasure and truth.

3rd Board Member Jim Breyer
Some highlights:

He is a partner in the venture capital firm Accel Partners, who put $12.7m into Facebook in April 2005. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and Marvel Entertainment, he is also a former chairman of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Now these are the people who are really making things happen in America, because they invest in the new young talent, the Zuckerbergs and the like. Facebook's most recent round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital, who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock's senior partners is called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on the board of In-Q-Tel. What's In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA. After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions".

The US defence department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier. "We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries," defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. "We need to make the leap into the information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation efforts." In-Q-Tel's first chairman was Gilman Louie, who served on the board of the NVCA with Breyer. Another key figure in the In-Q-Tel team is Anita K Jones, former director of defence research and engineering for the US department of defence, and - with Breyer - board member of BBN Technologies. When she left the US department of defence, Senator Chuck Robb paid her the following tribute: "She brought the technology and operational military communities together to design detailed plans to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next century."

If these men's philosophies, agendas and ties aren't enough to kick the habit, consider this:

"Share" is Facebookspeak for "advertise". Sign up to Facebook and you become a free walking, talking advert for Blockbuster or Coke, extolling the virtues of these brands to your friends. We are seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of capitalistic value from friendships.

Too right. Consider life before Facebook. Consider its value. Consider quitting; saying no to these rich neocon elites and picking up the phone to connect with an old friend. Look up a postal code and delight someone you care about with snail mail. There is more pleasure in a hand-addressed envelope than a Facebook gimmick gift can ever hope to offer.

I Quit Facebook to Start a Blog

I quite Facebook around the same time as I started up Lilith Attack. I'm one of the few citizens I know who doesn't have a television plugged in for the purpose of television. I watch films, yes, and lots of em... I even watch some choice television on the internets; but for the same reasons why I don't have t.v. connections I quit facebook after a few weeks. Time waster. Everyone admits it's like crack (although most quantify that's what they imagine crack to be like), wish they'd spend less time creepin', and yet continue to get sucked into the wall messages, the application gimmicks (which facebook didn't yet have when I was on), the free drink "gifts," and oh, those GROUPS. Facebook Groups were my guilty pleasure. Serving no purpose, I'd join the few groups there were I could identify with and some of the cult classics like Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (may I be blessed by his noodly goodness). But as discussed on Salon's Broadsheet today, a troubling group is the "30 Reasons Girls Should Call It a Night." group I'm pleased to never have noticed in the ol' days. So this facebook group features photographic candid shots of self-proclaimed drunk 'it's time to go home moments'. Here's the thing about these public postings showing up in National Newspapers: a) why is facebook group of drunk women making national newspaper news (it's not news); and b) these women are in control of their actions (the action being the posting of the photo, not necessarily the action being comitted in the photo). I think a more interesting group would be "Getting' Drunk in Front of Facebook and Posting a Photo of Being Drunk in Front of Facebook!" Oh wait a minute, that would be about as interesting. As far as understanding why anyone would post humiliating photos of themselves passed out with their faces against public bathroom toilets for other people who are posting humiliation shots similar is beyond me. Let's all get drunk and look at humiliating pictures of eachother and then do it again!

Maybe there's a real sense of community I'm missing out on. Now don't get me wrong, I love getting' drunk as much as the next gal; I love sluggin' em back and having a grand old time. I love taking and looking at those party pictures of friends with our arms around eachother laughing and featuring some crazy knee and belt buckle dancing. The Facebook article discussed in Broadsheet today has me wondering, though, about who the intended audience is of these photos and what is the real purpos. Are they for a laugh? Or do they pick at women's dignity like scabs on scraped knees? Yeah, I think they do. I think they do a lot and that what I find so disturbing about this group. Instead, let's be women who are proud of ourselves and uplifting to eachother. And when we like to have a lot of fun that can sometimes lead to "exhaustion"; lets use our brains we've got and the compassion we carry to look out for eachother with honesty and integrity… and put the cameras away for the night.