Facebook Auschwitz or Holocaust

April 30, 2011
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Face­book a 21st Cen­tury Nightmare

Vou­liag­meni, Feb­ru­ary 18, 2009 — by Yorgo Nestoridis

Auschwitz was a place where peo­ple were forced to work for the account and ben­e­fits of the at that time Big Brother under the slo­gan “work brings free­dom”. Work­ers were stripped of their belong­ings, the fruit of their work and cre­ations, their lib­erty and finally their dignity.

Sounds famil­iar?

Remember

Remem­ber

The dif­fer­ence between a Camp like Auschwitz and Face­book is: on Face­book YOU have opted in! For the rest, I am not any­more sure I can see a big dif­fer­ence: you work, cre­ate and pub­lish con­tent on Face­book, you are not paid for doing so, nor do they feed you.

With the most recent mod­i­fi­ca­tions of the Terms and con­di­tions, Face­book strips you of the fruit of your work, pro­pri­etary rights to it and takes even the rights to exploit and resell your work for their own benefit.

Face­book grabs your per­sonal data, builds a huge data base about you, your con­tacts, your online behav­ior for the pur­pose of exploit­ing all of that by offer­ing adver­tis­ers tar­geted ads placement.

Some peo­ple have suc­ceeded in sur­viv­ing Auschwitz, thanks God; you can­not sur­vive Facebook’s mem­ory and legacy-building engine, at least not for as long as there is elec­tric­ity or the polit­i­cal desire to put a stop to Facebook’s abu­sive busi­ness practices. Your pub­li­ca­tions and data will remain in their hands beyond your death and they have about the right to do with it what they want.

For more details on the mod­i­fied Terms, check out my arti­cle on Face­book mod­ern Gang­ster­ism. 

Face­book is stand­ing for a whole crowd of Busi­nesses using the same Model

What would the intenet be with­out Google, Face­book, MySpace, Sec­ondLive, Twit­ter, Ebay and so many oth­ers? They all have one thing in com­mon: YOU build their con­tent, wealth and author­ity, in exchange for what? 

When is free too expen­sive? Def­i­nitely when “free” steals your rights as the author of your cre­ations, be it text, media or design. Free becomes unaf­ford­able, when you are the play-ball of Big Brother, play­ing with and putting at stake your inti­macy, pri­vacy and dig­nity for the shrewd and greedy pur­pose of trans­form­ing your data into cash, irre­spec­tive of any eth­i­cal consideration.

Remember 2

Remem­ber 2

Free is too expen­sive, when you are degraded to a num­ber, a nick-name, a star-tagged some­thing which is just a hook for key­words, a vir­tual iden­tity which sooner or later back­fires at you in the con­text of your real life.

And yet, FREE is the ham you catch mice with.

Free and Vis­i­bil­ity is the magic for­mula which moves masses, masses which are obsessed by gain­ing high vis­i­bil­ity for the pur­pose of those famous 15 min­utes of glory in life. Masses which mea­sure suc­cess on the num­ber of acquain­tances you have on Social net­works; masses which are fol­low­ing blindly the promise of high vis­i­bil­ity, pri­vacy and glory; masses which are so eager to exhibit their soul in pub­lic to com­pen­sate for a per­ma­nent lack of affec­tion in their native envi­ron­ment; masses which look for a valve to escape from the bleak monot­ony of real life and who let them selves manip­u­late online in a way, no one right in his mind would accept in real life.

Auschwitz has been closed long ago. Slav­ery has been pro­hib­ited 80 years ear­lier in the USA, later in many other coun­tries. It is ille­gal to treat peo­ple the way they have been treated in Auschwitz and other camps. It’s ille­gal when it con­cerns peo­ple physically.

How about labor camps online, in the vir­tual world? How about if you are so manip­u­lated and so des­per­ate in life that you become vul­ner­a­ble to all the glit­ter of mind con­trol­ling mar­ket­ing strate­gies, that with­out notic­ing it you are sell­ing your soul to spir­its, you call by opt­ing in and you can­not get rid off later?

In fact it’s worse: even if you have no account on Face­book, some of your friends and fam­ily mem­bers may have one and pub­lish con­tent con­cern­ing you. From that moment on you start exist­ing on Face­book and you become a toy, punch­ing ball or other exploitable ele­ment in the hands of a bunch of just above 20 year old kids of whom I doubt that they have the matu­rity to under­stand or the capa­bil­ity to mea­sure the respon­si­bil­ity that comes along with run­ning Facebook.

In my opin­ion, the present Face­book affair is of pub­lic con­cern. No coun­try should tol­er­ate Face­book to get away with their prac­tices. There is no excuse such as Face­book is sub­ject to US juris­dic­tion. They oper­ate in our coun­tries and we can there­fore force them to cre­ate a domi­cile in our coun­tries and to stand trial in our coun­tries. In the past this has been done with com­pa­nies trad­ing com­modi­ties or in finan­cial markets.

Auschwitz

Auschwitz

Face­book has breached the line of what is tol­er­a­ble and it will trig­ger increased state inter­ven­tions. Face­book is break­ing the toy which gives so much to so many peo­ple for as long as it’s self-regulated. As soon as Gov­ern­ments find a good rea­son to inter­vene, we give up a junk of our lib­erty and it becomes just a mat­ter of whether Big Brother will be called Gov­ern­ment  or Something.com.

We don’t want camps and we don’t want Big Broth­ers; his­tor­i­cally both lead to abuse and Holo­caust. For me the vir­tual Holo­caust is as bad as any other Holo­caust — a per­spec­tive we need to fight at the root. Today and right now!

 

Yorgo Nestoridis

 

 

There is one more dif­fer­ence:
Auschwitz does not exist any­more,
how­ever the mem­ory of the night­mare
lives on; Facebook is a real­ity play­ing with
people’s memory!

Incom­ing search terms:

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This entry was posted on April 30, 2011 at 7:10 am and is filed under Yorgo Nestoridis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

14 Responses to Facebook Auschwitz or Holocaust

  1. South Africa | The Beginning of the End of Facebook Twitter on June 11, 2009 at 12:36 pm

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  2. Danger of Facebook (Danger of Facebook) by Yorgo Nestoridis | Editorial on June 9, 2009 at 12:43 pm

    […] the exploita­tion of people’s exhi­bi­tion­ism by the busi­ness model applied by social net­works. Face­book a 21st Cen­tury Night­mare dis­cusses some of the bleak aspects of social […]

  3. Facebook Terms Trigger Uproar | Publishing on May 19, 2009 at 5:58 am

    […] two articles:”Facebook mod­ern Gang­ster­ism” and “Face­book Auschwitz or Holo­caust” have trig­gered some inter­est­ing com­ments and attracted new read­ers to my […]

  4. Hastspeache on May 1, 2009 at 9:31 pm
    Reply
  5. Facebook Terms Trigger Uproar | Childrens Books on April 25, 2009 at 3:06 am

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  6. Facebook Terms Trigger Uproar | Publishing Online on March 30, 2009 at 12:00 am

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  8. Facebook Terms Trigger Uproar | blogging on March 29, 2009 at 9:53 pm

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  9. Facebook Terms Trigger Uproar | Alejandra Neri on February 18, 2009 at 9:13 pm

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  10. Tristan Benz on February 18, 2009 at 4:23 pm

    Wow. I had just heard of this myself and was par­tic­u­larly disturbed.

    Iron­i­cally, I joined Face­book as you say — a MEANS to obtain some power in order to get the world out on the Big Brother harm of CPSIA (I actu­ally found your post via another blog that kindly pointed folks to mine — Big Brother) and try to reach as many “every­day cit­i­zens” with the mes­sage that it is NOT about stores and man­u­fac­tur­ers — but about their dimin­ished rights and author­ity as cit­i­zens in Amer­ica (marks a crit­i­cal power shift).

    So, now it’s a Catch 22 — in for the sake of a cause I believe is big­ger than me or my busi­ness (or all busi­ness, for that mat­ter) but def­i­nitely con­cerned about “hav­ing” to be in, in order to reach peo­ple. Our media has only just BEGUN to cover the “big­ger issue” of CPSIA — the real issue — the inter­net is a means of reach­ing peo­ple with this kind of infor­ma­tion and lev­el­ing the play­ing field. But, as you say…at what price?

    I have to won­der — are we all sim­ply bar­relling down a path of dimin­ished return. As I have ref­er­enced in con­junc­tion with CPSIA, it’s like we’re a nation of peo­ple stunned — like cat­tle, headed for slaughter.

    Now is the time for ques­tions — by WHAT author­ity are WE going to allow for laws and changes like this to progress toward our grow­ing dimin­ish­ment and per­haps ulti­mate destruc­tion? Appar­ently (by opt­ing in) our own.

    Ugh.
    Thanks for this post — will be giv­ing it consideration.

    Reply
    • Yorgo Nestoridis on February 18, 2009 at 8:15 pm

      Thank you for your com­ment. CPSIA can give a frame­work, how­ever imple­men­ta­tion has to pass through Con­sumer Edu­ca­tion. Back in the 70s aver­age US High Schools were offer­ing Con­sumer Ed courses with the goal to build “bet­ter” con­sumers. They (we) became bet­ter con­sumers, in any case, we have done a great job heat­ing up con­sump­tion till the spi­ral broke last year.

      Con­sumer Pro­tec­tion leg­is­la­tion unfor­tu­nately is like any leg­is­la­tion: sub­ject to heavy lob­by­ing. Usu­ally what passes, passes for as long as it does not cut con­sumer spend­ing and keeps peo­ple on the psy­che­delic trip of head­less con­sumerism. Leg­is­la­tion should be accom­pa­nied by the polit­i­cal ambi­tion to imple­ment its real sense, which starts with the ques­tion: Do I need to con­sume, do I need this prod­uct. Since Reaganomics, this kind of ques­tion was polit­i­cally incorrect.

      In fact Con­sumer Edu­ca­tion must build aware­ness and build more crit­i­cal Inter­net users. This means that peo­ple must be able to learn about how the Inter­net works, how mar­ket­ing online works, how the arms used to catch us are hid­den behind the bells and whis­tles of yet another Great Free Product.

      Today’s kids grow up with the vir­tual envi­ron­ment, which for them often becomes inter­change­able with ‘real­ity’… and a few years down the road, these kids will gov­ern us: bet­ter start now with imple­ment­ing CPSIA and edu­cat­ing them to make a respon­si­ble use of the media available.

      Do we really need Face­book and such like ser­vices? You may feel ‘forced’ to use it just because every­one hangs out there.

      Here is my answer: there are two ways to look at it: you either can work for the Social Net­work or as did Barack Obama, have the Inter­net work for YOU. The sec­ond option means: instead of drag­ging peo­ple INTO Face­book to meet you , go there and drag them out of Face­book to meet you on YOUR site. This is what Obama did and what smart mar­keters do: or, have you ever seen an Adver­tiser in Face­book keep­ing you on Facebook?

      At present I am hor­ri­fied to see how many own­ers of ‘seri­ous’ net­works drag their con­tacts into the depen­dency of Social net­works; the lat­est I saw was ecad­emy urg­ing their com­mu­nity to fol­low into Twit­ter … Neu­ron, where have you left the Brain!

  11. Big Brother » Facebook Auschwitz or Holocaust on February 18, 2009 at 3:31 pm

    […] Free Traf­fic wrote an inter­est­ing post today on Face­book Auschwitz or HolocaustHere’s a quick excerpt­Face­book a 21st Cen­tury Night­mare Vou­liag­meni, Feb­ru­ary 18, 2009 — by Yorgo Nestoridis Auschwitz was a place where peo­ple were forced to work for the account and ben­e­fits of the at that time Big Brother under the slo­gan “work brings free­dom”. Work­ers were stripped of their belong­ings, the fruit of their work and cre­ations, their lib­erty and finally their dig­nity. Sounds famil­iar? Remem­ber The dif­fer­ence between a Camp like Auschwitz and Face­book is: on Face­book YOU have opted i […]

  12. Zo Nicholas on February 18, 2009 at 2:29 pm

    You are tracked from the minute you are born to the minute you die. And now comes the track­ing of your thoughts, com­ments, ideas and cre­ativ­ity. Com­plete Slav­ery! Just pawns in some­one elses game.

    Reply
  13. Yorgo Nestoridis on May 4, 2009 at 11:23 am

    It is not from eat­ing Pork Meat that you will get the flue, the more that if cooked with over 65 degrees Cel­sius the virus would be killed. As heared on TV…:-).

    Reply

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