The Facebook Interview (revisited)

Recently, a Facebook friend named Adam Lee (pictured right) asked me a couple of questions about Facebook. Said he was writing an article on... well, Facebook! Thought I'd share my response with you...

Where do you think Facebook is heading?

Consider the unimaginable ways young people can find themselves becoming billionaires in the digital age: back in the mid-1990s Larry Page and Sergey Brin were 23-year-old computer studies undergrads at Stanford U when they stumbled on a new algorithm for a faster, more free-associating search engine called Google. Today each is worth USD16.7 billion.

Then there's Mark Zuckerberg who started Facebook in February 2004 as an interactive social networking website for the campus crowd while he was in college. I hear Yahoo! offered Zuckerberg USD1.7 billion for Facebook last year - and he turned down their offer. Last I heard, MSN estimates that Facebook is worth USD15 billion.

My point is: these youngsters have been able to turn a simple idea into a complex income-generating engine by identifying two basic human needs, viz., the desire for information and the desire to feel connected. These desires are very much in alignment with the incoming frequencies of the Aquarian Age (the Water Bearer symbolizes the dissemination of wisdom acquired during the Capricornian phase of introspection and consolidation, and the Piscean phase of dissolution and disintegration of ancient taboos).

Today more and more people regard a laptop or tablet (and now smartphones) as an essential personal accessory. Instant messaging, virtually free text-messaging, Skype and a whole array of connectivity tools has been facilitated by advances in satellite communications that would leave our grandparents scratching their bald pates. This is what I call the age of server-assisted telepathy when a planetary mind is emerging from the preceding centuries of technological development. Buckminster Fuller, thirty years ago, called it "accelerating acceleration." By this he meant that quantum advances in technology would soon hurl us beyond the gravitational pull of the tragic past into a comic/romantic future.

Take Facebook's burgeoning popularity: within two years just about everybody I know who owns a computer, tablet or smartphone is on Facebook. My daughters and their far-flung network of cousins are now on my Facebook friends list. For the first time ever, the separate realities of family and friends are merging in cyberspace. And I just saw an interview with Zuckerberg taped in May 2007 where he quoted the figure 45 million as the total number of Facebook users - that was almost 6 months ago. I figure at least 250,000 new users sign up every day. In June 2017 Facebook hit 2 billion monthly users, making it the world's largest virtual community.



Where is Facebook heading? Who da fuck knows? Right now everybody complains that they're wasting too much time on Facebook (and a few months ago I was bitching about the same thing too) - but the reason Facebook is distracting people from work is that they're having more fun just playing with each other in harmless ways (try throwing a sheep at me in real life!) Friends I hardly get to see in real life are poking, tickling, cuddling, and loving me - albeit virtually but it sure feels nice! Hotties I've long wanted to meet give me cheap thrills by appearing in my inbox and adding me as their Facebook friend. Faces I haven't seen in 25 years are suddenly among my Top Friends! Wow... why ask where a party is heading when it's in full swing?

What's in it for you in Facebook? What's your story?

I live a long way from the city. In my younger days I was a real party animal. For me Facebook is a 24/7 party without the hassle of driving 3 hours, finding a parking space, and worrying about not getting laid. On Facebook you KNOW you're not gonna get laid because it's all make-believe, all a buncha pixels - but you can let go and sink your virtual teeth into that plump backside on some hottie's profile photo without getting slapped (except virtually of course)... and you can bite five pairs of buttocks at one go if you like. This is something I've long dreamed of doing. I've stopped cursing Facebook. In fact I've just written Mark Zuckerberg a thank-you note. Hope he responds with a $50-million deposit in my PayPal account.

On re-reading the above in February 2018, the whole world has shifted into a different set of probable timelines. Recent revelations have unearthed the distinct possibility that digital megacorporations like Google and Facebook may well have been created by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an offshoot of the US Department of Defense). In effect, they could be products of the "Deep State" designed to effortlessly keep humans under electronic surveillance while our behavioral patterns are closely monitored by ultra-secretive agencies like the NSA, CIA, MI6, Mossad, ASIO and so on (ultimately these covert agencies transcend political ideologies and national boundaries and they all serve the same Central Nervous System (variously called Yahweh, Allah, God, Ialdabaoth, Artificial Intelligence, or the Archons of Fate). 

To me, Google and Facebook serve as useful tools - and tools are either benign or malevolent, depending on who uses them and towards what agenda. If you're paranoid, as many of my friends are who refuse to use social media and insist on sticking with email (even though they must realize that even text messages and phonecalls can be routinely intercepted and stored in gigantic databases like Prism (and now Palantir) - indeed, it is now known that software giants like Microsoft and Apple are ultimately extensions of DARPA and they all come with sneaky backdoors into their operating systems, allowing personal computers, tablets and smartphones to be turned against their owners as spyware.

[First posted 28 October 2007. Reposted 7 February 2018 & 30 December 2021]

Behold the faceless corporate fascism of Facebook!

The Facebook Inquisition (source unknown)

Just as the calendar rolled into December 1st, 2017, I found myself locked out of Facebook (again!) for posting a link to a book review which happened to contain a slightly ribald but perfectly harmless image - actually very amusing and hardly as objectionable as the many hideously gory images I have seen on my newsfeed.

The censorship happened INSTANTLY (within two seconds of my clicking 'POST') and the psychological effect was akin to a heavily-armed balaclava-clad inquisitorial SWAT team breaking down your front door in the middle of the night (remember that classic Terry Gilliams movie Brazil?). It was a vivid reminder on so many levels of the crazy sci-fi timelines we are all navigating and have been, especially since the end of 2012, some transcendentally numinous and others starkly ominous.

In any case, for a few moments I contemplated the option of simply turning my back on Facebook and using this as an excuse to finally detach from this artificial sense of community we have grown so attached to over the years (it's true there are so many positive features of digital interconnectivity and being part of special-focus Facebook groups, not to mention the comforting sense of being virtually in touch with everyone even if close encounters have become more difficult to manifest).

Then I realized that in actual fact nothing at all had happened. I could simply take a badly needed 4-week vacation from the Facebook Universe or I could get back in with my wife Anoora's account (which I manage, so what if she doesn't have the massive network I enjoy as Antares). As my initial sense of outrage and intense annoyance subsided I became aware that I was in a very strange place - between nowhere and everywhere, between being fully immersed in the hurly-burly world and feeling completely indifferent to any or all outcomes. Sort of like watching a football game on the screen and not bothering which team wins because I have no loyalty to any football club.

21st Century Cyber-Emperor Marcus Zuckerbergus

This can be placed in the general context of my current perspective on everything: I'm tracking developments on many different levels - from energetically supporting the anchoring of the Totally New and Unknown (as is occurring in countless spiritually conscious communities and networks everywhere) to keeping a close eye on the factional warfare that has broken out among the old-school control freaks (whether you call them the Khazarian banksters or Yahwehists or the virus-infected Zombie Apocalypse and the covert agents that have hitherto served as foot-soldiers of the so-called Military-Industrial-Financial-Academic-Religious Complex).

Although essentially an eternal optimist - and all the positive signs are to be found in the growing number of rapidly awakening, self-governing humans I have become increasingly aware of since the advent of the internet - I realize at the same time that the rot may be already too deep for the gentle transition all of us have worked towards; that the sheer inertia of our entrenched habits could be setting up too much resistance for radical transmutation to happen smoothly and painlessly.

And we have witnessed in just the last 6 months how unpredictably aggressive the elements can be when unleashed upon puny human aspirations. Fire, Water, Air or Earth can so easily erase all our fondest dreams built upon countless lifetimes - within hours, even minutes. So as we enter the final months of 2019, all I can say is: "Phew! ... we made it through all the bumpy patches so far ... and each time we successfully navigate the wild weather and scary waves and emerge intact, we gain so much more experience, expertise and maturity as individuals and as a species. It's a good time to relax and not feel so driven, perhaps? Maybe it's true that getting there is what it's actually about, not arriving?

[First posted 3 December 2017]

Mark Zuckerberg, I take back what I said about you... (but do I still feel the same about facebook 7 years later?)

It all began in mid-2005 when the 24-year-old son of an old friend returned from a week's holiday at my place and invited me as his Facebook friend. I like Dave Herzenberg so I signed up. Soon after that I received almost daily friend requests and after a while it became a serious annoyance. I was tempted to delete my account more than once.

Then I read somewhere that Yahoo! had offered you $1.7 billion for Facebook - and that you had turned them down! That got me really mad, Mark. First of all how could a nerd come up with just another variation of the networking site and attract so much interest in such a short time that he'd be technically a billionaire? Guys like me have been plodding on for decades, dreaming of that elusive Big Break... and here comes a kid on rollerblades whizzing out of nowhere with a nothing idea and... anyway, how dare you turn your nose up at 1.7 billion bucks?

I got even madder when friends kept asking me to add all sorts of apps - just so they could poke me and turn me into a zombie (yeah, that's what I've always wanted). But why didn't I just delete my Facebook account and breathe a huge sigh of relief?

Well, the sad truth is: I couldn't! I was secretly having too much fun flirting with the women and bonding with the men. Then amazing things began to happen: long-lost friends spontaneously appeared in my Facebook inbox; people I had long wanted to meet suddenly added me as a friend!

Damn... I knew then that whatever Mark Zuckerberg's original intentions were, he had created a monster beyond anyone's control. Nobody can predict what will happen when family and friends begin to merge on Facebook (up till now they've always been separate worlds). But I've got my buddies and my two daughters and their mother, as well as my sister and one brother, on my Facebook friends' list - and that alone is a phenomenon. Distant nieces and nephews have added me as their friend... people who bumped into me eight, nine years ago at a party have added me as a friend. It's a weird unpredictable journey into a dimension of universal connectivity one could only dream about even 10 years ago.

There are detractors who warn about having so much personal data on Facebook's servers - and then there are all these auxiliary app developers and their servers. What if the secret government is behind Facebook?

Well, fuck the secret government! We have nothing to hide. It's them that have been in hiding all these aeons. I haven't a clue where this will eventually lead, Mark, but I just wanted to tell you one thing: Facebook is pretty much a sign of the Aquarian times and you deserve to be fabulously rich because your simple idea is enabling a level of planetary connectivity that merges work and play across the board. That, ultimately, has got to be a very positive and wholesome evolutionary factor.

So, hey... thanks, buddy!

[From a facebook message to Mark Zuckerberg sent 20 Oct 2007 at 6:54pm. First posted 16 February 2012]

The Face of Facebook

MARK ZUCKERBERG OPENS UP
by Jose Antonio Vargas
The New Yorker

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in his college dorm room six years ago. Five hundred million people have joined since, and eight hundred and seventy-nine of them are his friends. The site is a directory of the world’s people, and a place for private citizens to create public identities. You sign up and start posting information about yourself: photographs, employment history, why you are peeved right now with the gummy-bear selection at Rite Aid or bullish about prospects for peace in the Middle East. Some of the information can be seen only by your friends; some is available to friends of friends; some is available to anyone. Facebook’s privacy policies are confusing to many people, and the company has changed them frequently, almost always allowing more information to be exposed in more ways.

According to his Facebook profile, Zuckerberg has three sisters (Randi, Donna, and Arielle), all of whom he’s friends with. He’s friends with his parents, Karen and Edward Zuckerberg. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and attended Harvard University. He’s a fan of the comedian Andy Samberg and counts among his favorite musicians Green Day, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Shakira. He is twenty-six years old.

Zuckerberg cites “Minimalism,” “Revolutions,” and “Eliminating Desire” as interests. He likes “Ender’s Game,” a coming-of-age science-fiction saga by Orson Scott Card, which tells the story of Andrew (Ender) Wiggin, a gifted child who masters computer war games and later realizes that he’s involved in a real war. He lists no other books on his profile.

[Read the entire feature here...]

Priscilla Chan has been Zuck's girlfriend since 2003

Read my 28 October 2007 post:
The Facebook Interview