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Comment by efdee | Hacker News Reader

No, the elephant is definitely Facebook and friends.

"Its the generations of people who have, over the last 10 years, grown up to assume that their personal lives are of interest to others, and wish therefore to capitalize/profit on exposing their life to strangers." - Say what? Most people aren't looking to capitalize/profit on anything, they just want to share bits of their life with others that they count as their friends.

Most people are definitely not aware of what happens behind the curtains. The fact that there's a big gorilla in the room watching everything they post and profiting of that is the problem.

And that gorilla is Facebook.

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Facebook wouldn't be such a bully if it didn't have so many willing victims, throwing themselves at its maw. There is a market for industrialized narcissism/solipsism .. but what came first - Facebook, or the narcissist? I believe its the latter, but I'm willing to concede that Facebook - as well as others - have definitely fomented this market.

Right now, we have to deal with the Facebook dystopia. But, it won't go away if we just shut down Facebook. We need to work on the reasons for the cultural and social proclivity towards allowing the usurpation of our basic human rights. Do most of us even know what our human rights are?

There are "honest" ways to run a social network, which don't involve taking every ethically-dubious money-making opportunity. It should never have been appropriate to collaborate with a political campaign beyond the standard corporate arrangements.

This isn't a problem with Facebook as it is a problem with Zuckerberg and the executives of Facebook, who think these behaviors are acceptable in the first place.

If our culture didn't promote narcissistic/solipsism as much as it does, above all others, perhaps these execs wouldn't be so inclined.

Yes, its an ethics issue. I don't disagree that Facebook have stepped over the line. But we have to face the truth of the matter, which is that our society encouraged them to do so - and allowed it to happen - and is continuing the slide down the slippery slope towards totalitarian oblivion. Facebook isn't going to fix that for us, nor would it be fixed if we nuked the Facebook campus from orbit, to be sure.

Which is why I think there has to be an ethical, and technological means perhaps, by which we can enact the social change required to bring us out of this conundrum. Just the way that social change was brought about by culture revolution, itself the product of some small incident perhaps, we have to find that means. I don't know what it is, but I start now to think of what a 'decent' social network would be like .. don't you?

> This isn't a problem with Facebook as it is a problem with Zuckerberg and the executives of Facebook, who think these behaviors are acceptable in the first place.

The issue is not so much that this particular group of people think about what is acceptable. It is that people who don't think that behavior like this is acceptable are significantly less likely to amass as much power. Not just that, but they are also less likely to be listened to, because they are not successful enough.

Being ethical is competitive disadvantage and we live in world that values winning over competition and having financial success way more then it values being ethical.

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