我鄙视Facebook（上）

Facebook has 59 millionusers - and 2 million new ones join each week. But you won't catch TomHodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not now that heknows the politics of the people behind the social networking site

• Tom Hodgkinson
• The Guardian,
• Monday January 14 2008

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday January 16 2008

The US intelligence community's enthusiasm for hi-tech innovation after9/11 and the creation of In-Q-Tel, its venture capital fund, in 1999were anachronistically linked in the article below. Since 9/11 happenedin 2001 it could not have led to the setting up of In-Q-Tel two yearsearlier.

I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American businessdescribes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the peoplearound you". But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer toconnect with the people around me? Why should my relationships bemediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks inCalifornia? What was wrong with the pub?

And does Facebookreally connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since insteadof doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing anddrinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammaticalnotes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? Afriend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night athome alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Farfrom connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

Facebookappeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put upa flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, Ican construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to getsex or approval. ("I like Facebook," said another friend. "I got a shagout of it.") It also encourages a disturbing competitivness aroundfriendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts fornothing and quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better youare. You are "popular", in the sense much loved in American highschools. Witness the cover line on Dennis Publishing's new Facebookmagazine: "How To Double Your Friends List."

It seems, though,that I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time of writingFacebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in the UK,Facebook's third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That's 59million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card informationand consumer preferences to an American business they know nothingabout. Right now, 2 million new people join each week. At the presentrate of growth, Facebook will have more than 200 million active usersby this time next year. And I would predict that, if anything, its rateof growth will accelerate over the coming months. As its spokesmanChris Hughes says: "It's embedded itself to an extent where it's hardto get rid of."

All of the above would have been enough to make me reject Facebook for ever. But there are more reasons to hate it. Many more.

Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind thefunding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearlythought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world.Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it,it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind ofneoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be whoyou want to be, as long as you don't mind being bombarded by advertsfor the world's biggest brands. As with PayPal, national boundaries area thing of the past.

Although the project was initiallyconceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behindFacebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist andfuturist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three board members onFacebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third investor calledJim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners (more onhim later). Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook when Harvard studentsZuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to meet him in SanFrancisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the site. Thielnow reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook's currentvaluation of $15bn, would be worth more than $1bn. There is much debateon who exactly were the original co-founders of Facebook, but whoeverthey were, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, althoughHughes and Moskowitz still work for the company.

Thiel is widelyregarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as alibertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual bankingsystem PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m forhimself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium CapitalManagement and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. BloombergMarkets magazine recently called him "one of the most successful hedgefund managers in the country". He has made money by betting on risingoil prices and by correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken. Heand his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently beenlabelled "The PayPal Mafia" by Fortune magazine, whose reporter alsoobserved that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLarensupercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely competitive. Hehas been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury whenlosing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitveness,saying: "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser."

But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist.He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduatefrom Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth,which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalistideology 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 TheStanford Review - motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is amember of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressuregroup that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure groupthat works on the web. Thiel calls himself "way libertarian".

TheVanguardis run by one Rod D Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel greatlyadmires. On the site, Thiel says: "Rod is one of our nation's leadingminds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. Hepossesses a more complete understanding of America than most executiveshave of their own businesses."

This little taster from theirwebsite will give you an idea of their vision for the world:"TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe inconservative values, the free market and limited government as the bestmeans to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone,especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies thatwill "reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes itspolitics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite". The chairman's message says:"Today we'll teach MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and theleftwing media some lessons they never imagined."

So, Thiel'spolitics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened to apodcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. Hisphilosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certainenlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from theold-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes'famous characterisation of life as "nasty, brutish and short", andtowards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value nowexists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated bythis belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects,but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of movingmoney around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts itlike this: "For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enablepeople to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe."

Clearly,Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money outof friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries -and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. Itmakes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that werehappening anyway.

Photo: Tim Boyle/Getty

Thiel's philosophical mentor is one René Girard of StanfordUniversity, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimeticdesire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and willcopy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem tobe proved correct in the case of Thiel's virtual worlds: the desiredobject is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings willtend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormouspopularity of Facebook. Girard is a regular at Thiel's intellectualsoirees. 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.

The internet is immensely appealing toneocons such as Thiel because it promises a certain sort of freedom inhuman relations and in business, freedom from pesky national laws,national boundaries and suchlike. The internet opens up a world of freetrade and laissez-faire expansion. Thiel also seems to approve ofoffshore tax havens, and claims that 40% of the world's wealth residesin places such as Vanuatu, the Cayman Islands, Monaco and Barbados. Ithink it's fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is against tax.He also likes the globalisation of digital culture because it makes thebanking overlords hard to attack: "You can't have a workers' revolutionto take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu," he says.

Iflife in the past was nasty, brutish and short, then in the future Thielwants to make it much longer, and to this end he has also invested in afirm that is exploring life-extension technologies. He has pledged£3.5m to a Cambridge-based gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey, who issearching for the key to immortality. Thiel is also on the board ofadvisers of something called the Singularity Institute for ArtificialIntelligence. From its fantastical website, the following: "TheSingularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-humanintelligence. There are several technologies ... heading in thisdirection ... Artificial Intelligence ... direct brain-computerinterfaces ... genetic engineering ... different technologies which, ifthey reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable thecreation of smarter-than-human intelligence."

So by his ownadmission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he alsocalls "nature", and install a virtual world in its place, and it is inthis context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is adeliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a brightyoung thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant forfar-out techno-utopian fantasies. Not someone I want to help get anyricher.