On Tuesday 23 June the Facebook Liberation Army, formed by the Institute of Network Cultures, Waag Society and the Stadsschouwburg Amsterdam, organized the Facebook Farewell Party.
Het Nationale Toneel (in the guise of Anniek Pheifer, Mark Rietman and Jappe Claes) gave a theatrical interpretation of the three divisions from which the Facebook Liberation Army operates: the Underground, the Resistance and the Refugees.
After the lecture programme in the Grote Zaal there was an extensive side program in collaboration with Worm, Hackers & Designers, Greenhost and Submarine. In the Salons and lobbies of the Stadsschouwburg you could tinker hands-on in DIY workshops, working on your own online privacy issues to the liberating tunes of DJ POP CTRL. There was for instance a Social Media Rehab Clinic and a workshop where you could learn to build a network within Facebook, allowing you to operate anonymously. There was also an analogue version of Facebook where you could write on the wall and make new friends. Also on display, a installation that tells you how you can lock your messages on social media using … your heartbeat! Eventually everyone went home with a Facebook Survival Kit.
A report from the trenches, by bloggers Katía Truijen, Tijmen Schep and Christine van Spankeren, with photos by Charlotte de Gier.
Escaping the Farm
A report from Aral Balkans lecture by Katía Truijen.
Aral Balkan is a designer & social entrepreneur, creating independent technologies in order to protect our fundamental freedoms. During his talk at the Facebook Farewell Party, Balkan emphasized the need for stronger democracy and alternative social media.
In this era of the Anthropocene, Balkan argues, we are confronted with systemic inequality. The 85 richest people of the world have the same amount of money as the 3.5 billion poorest. In order to maintain this inequality, the 85 richest try to keep an eye on the others, to make sure that they aren’t up to no good. And this is exactly what companies like Facebook and Google are doing.
He states that we shouldn’t see these services as clouds to store and access data, but more as farms. As ‘users’, we are the ones that are being farmed and sold as products. These companies know everything about us, and – apart from our physical body – they sell all our thoughts, knowledge and desires. The institutions that should regulate these companies are actually supporting them. This multi-stakeholderism is a very serious problem, Balkan explains. Public-private partnerships often allow for institutional corruption, which is now even being codified in our laws. A good example is TTIP: corporations get veto rights over democratic decision making.
Balkan claims that this is a warfare on the public sphere, the commons, human rights, individual freedom and democracy. The only solution would be to have stronger democracy and to remove corporate finance from institutional decision-making. An interesting example is Iceland, where the pirate party has now become the biggest political party of the country.
Although technology can help to enforce stronger democracy, we must obtain a different understanding of our relation to our technologies, Balkan states. Normally we understand technology as a ‘butler’ that responds to your request. However, when we see technology as a real extension of ourselves and our minds, surveillance automatically becomes a much greater intrusion. Balkan argues that we must extend our personal rights to the technologies that extend us. As individuals, we must have ownership and control over our digital selves, which would be more obvious when we understand our data as part of our (extended) self.
In fact design can play a major role in this. Balkan explains that the design of Silicon Valley is aimed at empowering you in the here and now. For example when you navigate with Google Maps. But the cost of this empowerment is ubiquitous surveillance and addiction through manipulation: this is design without ethics. There are alternatives with Open Source designed platforms. But here the cost is very often the convenience and immediate experience. Balkan proposes a new ethical approach to design that both empowers you with a convenient delightful experience and that protects your data at the same time.
Balkan concludes that there has always been a mismatch between the architecture and philosophy of the web, since the architecture allowed for monopolies (like Facebook) to grow. However, designers do have the opportunity to change this and strive for an egalitarian decentralized typology of (independent) technology.
Next year, Balkan and his team will launch Heartbeat, a social peer to peer platform without spyware. You can read his Indie Manifesto at ind.ie/manifesto
Kicking the habit
Tijmen Schep reports the sermon as delivered by philosopher and self-styled Facebook rehab guru Hans Schnitzler.
“What? You don’t know who Sanne Wallis de Vries is? She was on TV!”
An evening like the Facebook Farewell Party makes you respect the
significant gap that exists between what geeks understand and what their
moms understand.
Take for instance the sermon by Hans Schnitzler (and sermon is the right turn of phrase here). Embellished with philosophical soundbites he passionately and at times rather foul-mouthed voiced a view on Facebook that the nerds and geeks have probably heard before: we are digitally abused on the internet by big companies, like cows in a dark server farm, milked for our data. However we gladly succumb to this abuse, Hans claimed, as we’ve become Facebook junkies, hard-wired to enjoy the hits provided by the feed of social updates. We’re junkies with a double life too, as we assume the role of dealer instead when we post our own updates. The whole system creates a growing attention economy in which Facebook users are subtly pressured to present their lives as attractively as possible.
The new social network Minds.com shows us this economic perspective
isn’t all that far fetched, as it seems to have taken this very idea as it’s business model. On Minds, every time you read other people’s messages you earn “credits”, a type of virtual money. You can spend this currency in order to push your own messages to an as wide as possible audience.
When we look at social networks through the economic lens of Marxism we
are presented with a picture of a sophisticated system that has cleverly
commodified human interaction and appeals to our basest desires. That’s less innocent than we think, Hans Schnitzler warns, because “as a slave of our desires, we lose some of our basic human dignity”.
So what are we to do?
A logical step seems to be: quit Facebook. But a show-of-hands in the
hall revealed what anyone could have guessed: Almost no-one really
wants to say goodbye to Facebook. For many of us Facebook has become as
inescapable as our mobile phone. It’s used to connect us to our friends, find
jobs, hear about social events and so forth. Facebook doesn’t just
appeal to our baser instincts; it also provides a very useful service.
When it comes to either staying with or quitting Facebook we all weigh the pros and cons. And for most people the pros outweigh the cons. But this needn’t remain so, for this consideration can be influenced in two different ways.
The first is to let people assign more weight to their privacy interests
than they currently do. How to convince people to do so however is a whole
new question. Hans Schnitzler’s tactic is clear: he shouts his views
from the rooftops.
The second option is to build new social networks that are less
detrimental to our privacy, so that people will have an alternative to
switch to when they decide to leave Facebook. All sorts of well-meaning nerds are trying hard to build those alternatives. But unfortunately those are not always reliable (Ello) or user friendly (Diaspora) enough to entice people away from Facebook.
The latter is a recurring phenomenon. It sometimes feels like a law of
physics: the more ethical the software, the less user friendly it
becomes. This was the primary complaint of speaker Aral Balkan.
According to him nerds often think that if they create tools that
they will be automatically distributed to the non-nerdy world. This
“Trickle-down technology” model, he suggested, is not working. We have
to make this software sexy and fun.
From this perspective, I was pleasantly surprised how sexy and fun the
evening was. It consisted of an attractive mix of stand-up comedy,
theatre, literature and of course the presentations of the speakers
themselves. After the presentations, you could go anywhere in the
building and go hands-on with tools and fun experiences. It was a
wonderful spectacle. Moreover, it was very accessible to non-geeks too.
In the end I felt hopeful. The evening fit within a wider push to create
audience-friendly campaigns and communications. All attendees were
appointed as “soldiers in the Facebook Liberation Army” by Waag
Society’s commander-in-chief Marleen Stikker. If they all cultivate
General Hans Schnitzler’s zeal, the balance could still tip against
Facebook’s current social media hegemony.
Finally: Are you ready to say farewell to Facebook?
Christine van Spankeren reports with a summary of Marleen Stikkers speech and her experience of the workshops on offer.
Over nine million Dutch citizens have an account on Facebook. This number is still rising, but meanwhile more and more people are leaving the social network behind and choose for an alternative. Leaving the Facebook-community is not that simple, that is the message of Marleen Stikker, one of the founders of Waag Society, a Dutch platform for art, science and technology.
“Facebook is manipulative, they spy on you and they take over your (virtual) identity. The moment when your own sovereignty is in danger – and you get the feeling that you are not the same person online as you are in real life – you should liberate yourself.”
Stikker states that it seems like we do not have a choice about leaving Facebook anymore. This is because all of our friends and business relations are on it: it is a source of information on all the people in your social network. But regarding all of this, she thinks that it is possible to leave Facebook with a good feeling.
Take ownership of your data
Her first option implies that you can leave Facebook. Hereby, you should explore new territories and look for complete ownership of your data. Besides that, there are alternatives for Facebook like Heartbeat, Minds.com or Ello. These options were presented at the Sociale Plein, part of the side programme after the lectures.
Hide in the network
The second possibility is that you can ‘hide’ in the network. This option is for the people who would like to stay on Facebook. One of the steps is to defeat the algorithm, which can be accomplished when you use an ‘onion browser’ for example. Furthermore, you can also use encryption tools to hide your messages from Facebook’s algorithms.
Rebel
If you do not feel like choosing one of the options above, you can always rebel. Stikker states that this option would also be accomplished when you were simply present at the Facebook Farewell Party. When you choose this path of the rebel, you can ask questions about ownership and legality. You can take action through supporting legal actions or throw a Facebook Farewell Party yourself. Besides that, you can arm yourself with knowledge about coding or hacking. The last step can be to open up technology, because “if you can’t open it, you don’t own it.”
Stikker compares Facebook with a broiler chicken: in a few years we will be ashamed when we make use of it any longer. Because every day we learn more about what Facebook is doing with our data.
A network in the Network workshop
So you want to stay on Facebook, but you do not want Facebook to know everything about you. How can you pull this of? This is what the participants of the A Network in a Network workshop learned during the Facebook Farwell Party.
The workshop was popular during the event. In the beginning I was greeted by three persons who were wearing colorful self-made masks. There was a long queue of people who were curious about how they could be David in this modern fight with Facebook as Goliath. The masked persons led us to a room where we could take a picture of ourselves. The picture that was taken, went through the paper chipper and with these shreds we had to make a new mask. This way we will be ‘unrecognizable’ for Mark Zuckerberg, but not for our own friends. Because of all the colorful shreds on the ground in the foyer it looked like a creative party.
While I was sitting on one of the tables in the room, making my mask, I heard people talking about the advantages and the disadvantages of Facebook. The main goal of this workshop was to understand how you could make an anonymous network within Facebook. The masks were a part of the workshop to let people shred their current digital identity and to show them how easy it is to make a new one, which only you and your friends understand. One of the other steps included downloading an onion browser, like Tor browser. Hereby, it is quite hard for people to know where you are.
Most participants listened attentive to the seven steps towards an anonymous network in a network, while others were concentrating on their colorful masks. The attentive participants asked questions so that their anonymity could be accomplished.
The Key to my Heart
At the salon there were two people dressed as doctors who could help to make your own ‘Key to my heart': an interactive ritual in which you can obtain a new and verifiable digital identity in the form of a cryptographic key, derived from the beat of your own heart. A cryptographic key is a number generated in such a way that it can uniquely identify a human and be used to sign and encrypt emails.
I had to stand in a small space with four screens surrounding me. Then I held a sensor against my chest, so that the machine could find my heartbeat. By registering the sound of the heartbeat, the computer created my own unique digital identity. Nobody is getting in my mailbox anymore.