Why Facebook Works, And Democracy Does Not
By Jeffrey
Tucker Feb 10th, 2012
This year, Facebook will reach 1 billion users — or
one-seventh of the human population. It has elicited more participation than
any single government in the world other than India and China, and it will
probably surpass them in a year or two. And whereas many people are fleeing
their governments as they are able, more and more people are joining Facebook
voluntarily.
What is the logic, the driving force, the agent of
change?
Yes, the software works fine, and yes, the managers
and owners have entrepreneurial minds. But the real secret to Facebook is its
internal human gears — the individual users — which turn out to mirror the way
society itself forms and develops.
The best way to see and understand this is to compare
the workings of Facebook with the workings of the democratic political process.
Watching Facebook’s development has been fun, productive, fascinating, useful
and progressive. The election season, in contrast, has been divisive,
burdensome, wasteful, acrimonious and wholly confusing.
That’s because Facebook and democracy work on entirely
different principles.
Facebook is based on the principle of free
association. You join or decline to join. You can have one friend or thousands.
It is up to you. You share the information you want to share and keep other
things from public view. You use the platform only to your advantage while
declining to use it for some other purpose.
The contribution you make on Facebook extends from the
things you know best: yourself, your interests, your activities, your ideas.
The principle of individualism — you are the best manager of your life — is the
gear that moves the machine. Just as no two people are alike, no two people
have the same experience with the platform. All things are customized according
to your interests and desires.
But of course, you are interested in others too, so
you ask for a connection. If they agree, you link up and form something
mutually satisfying. You choose to include and exclude, gradually forming your
own unique community based on any selection criteria you want. The networks
grow and grow from these principles of individualism and choice. It is a
constantly evolving, cooperative process — exactly the one that Hans-Hermann
Hoppe describes as the basis of society itself.
Democratic elections seem to be about choice in some
way, but it is a choice over who will rule the whole mob. It provides the same
user experience for everyone, regardless of individual desire. You are forced
into the system by virtue of having been born into it. Sure, you can choose to
vote, but you can’t choose whether to be ruled by the voting results.
In this democratic system, you are automatically given
220 million “friends” whether you like it or not. These fake “friends” are
given to you because of a geographic boundary drawn by government leaders long
ago. These “friends” are posting on your wall constantly. Your news feed is
relentless series of demands. You cannot delete their posts or mark them as
spam. Revenue is not extracted from advertising but collected as you use the
system.
Nothing is truly voluntary in an election. You are
bound by the results regardless. This creates absurdities. This is incredibly
apparent in the Republican nominating process. If people under 30 prevailed,
Ron Paul would win. If religious families with several kids prevailed, Rick
Santorum would win. If chamber of commerce members prevailed, Mitt Romney would
be victor. It all comes down to demographics, but there can be only one winner
under this system.
Therefore, an election must be a struggle between
people, a fight, a wrangling around, a push to assert your will and overcome
the interests and desires of others. In the end, we are assured that no matter
the outcome, we should be happy because we all participated. The individual
must give
We are told that this means that the system worked.
But in what sense does it work? It only means that the well-organized minority
prevailed over the diffused majority. This is about as peaceful as the kid’s
game “king of the mountain.”
Facebook has nothing to do with this nonsense. Your
communities are your own creation, an extension of your will and its harmony
with the will of others. The communities grow based on the principle of mutual
advantage. If you make a mistake, you can undisplay your friend’s posts or you
can unfriend him. This hurts feelings, sure, but it is not violent: It doesn’t
loot or kill.
Your friends in Facebook can be from anywhere. They
“check in” and plot their journeys. Whether your friend lives in or moves to
Beijing or Buenos Aires doesn’t matter. Facebook makes possible what we might
call geographically noncontiguous human associations. Language differences can
be barriers to communication, but even they can be overcome.
Democracy is hyperbound by geography. You vote in an
assigned spot. Your vote is assembled together with those of others in your
county to produce a single result, and therefore, your actual wishes are
instantly merged. They are merged again at another geographic level, and then
at the state level and, finally, at the national level. By that time, your own
preferences are vaporized.
Sometimes people get sick of Facebook. They suddenly
find it tedious, childish, time wasting, even invasive. Fine. You can bail out.
Go to your system preferences and turn off all notifications and take a
sabbatical. People might complain, but it is your choice to be there or not.
You can even delete your account entirely with no real downside. Then you can sign
up again later if you so desire or join some other system of social networking.
Try doing that to democracy. You can’t unsubscribe.
You are automatically in for life, and not even changing your location or
moving out of the country changes that. It is even extremely hard to delete
your account by renouncing your citizenship. The leaders of the democracy will still hound you.
We can learn from Facebook and all other social
networks that the Internet has brought us. These are more than websites; they
are models of social organization that transcend old forms. Make the rest of
life more like a social network and we will begin to see real progress in the
course of civilization. Persist in the old model of forced democratic community
and we will continue to see decline.
Regards,
Jeffrey Tucker
Jeffrey Tucker, publisher and excecutive editor of
Laissez-Faire Books, is author of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the
Statist Quo and It's a Jetsons World.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario