TWO-FACED BOOK

Facebook was a fascinating invention in its time. Its potential for good communication and social activism between geographically separated individuals has been realized in many cases. But our Universe is one of balance between The Dark and The Light. Facebook is not immune.

Perhaps people in less free societies can still benefit from Facebook's reach. Perhaps not. There seems to be an unanswered question about the corruption of personal privacy by Facebook when it is approached by authoritarian regimes. After all, Facebook under Zuckerberg is all about profits, wrapped in a "we're doing this all for you" package. Those of us who watched electric, gas and water utilities morph into privatized companies who value employee compensation over public good are all too familiar with this marketing hypocrisy.

Facebook's corporate insincerity, most recently exemplified in its flirtation with censorship, is matched by its users'. If you have ever been to a bourgeois cocktail party, you have been schooled in the mannerisms of Facebook postings. The heterosexual brand is prevalent. Baby pictures, grandchildren competitions, family travelogues. It's all there in your face. The homosexual brand is similar. The gay wedding, the new boy toy among older users, luxury travel to the exotic, beach shots in winter. 

The hypocrisy in all this is stunning. I spent two intense decades working with people at their most vulnerable, and thereby most honest. The bedside is as far from a Facebook page as a person can get. That is where I learned my lessons about human beings, their flaws and their rare magnificence. The fact is that most human beings are cowards. Plain and simple. This simple fact is the reason why madmen rule and armies kill. 

Human independence of thought and action goes against our DNA. We are generally chimps with mobile phones and cars. In the more direct chimp world, the independent chimp is either king or exile, sometimes eventually both. Facebook is a form of social engineering with a veneer of individual expression. But recent times have illustrated how the chimp tribe rallies with tree branches in hand to beat and isolate the outsider. Human beings flatter themselves with their adaptive clothing and infrastructure. Meanwhile, the species is destroying its own home planet with blatant disregard in favor of its own creature comforts and gang rule. 

This is all part of the materialism of our time. Personal value is measured by things, possessions, academic letters after names, the amount of everything from children to grandchildren to pets to cars to rental units. Personal value was once measured by mastered skill, maturity and intelligence. These measures will soon be applied primarily to robots. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of artificial intelligence to most human beings is its unlikely resemblance to chimp-think.