Tag Archives: delete facebook

March 29, 2026

Meta Mendacity & Malice

By DP

Here at DP, it will come as no surprise to longtime readers that we exuberantly celebrated the recent major court victory against the poisonous social company that began as Facebook and now hides behind the idiotic pseudonym Meta.

Below, a press release from the esteemed nonprofit, The Tech Oversight Project:

This was the first product liability case to go to trial that any Big Tech company has faced and was brought forward by plaintiff K.G.M., who experienced dangerous mental health harms after becoming addicted to social media platforms run by defendants Meta and YouTube. Her case against TikTok and Snap was settled before the trial began.

“The era of Big Tech invincibility is over – this ruling is an earthquake that shakes Big Tech’s predatory business model to its core. After years of gaslighting from companies like Google and Meta, new evidence and testimony have pulled back the curtain and validated the harms young people and parents have been telling the world about for years. These products were purposefully designed to harm, addict millions of young people, and lead to lifelong mental health consequences,” said Sacha Haworth, Executive Director of The Tech Oversight Project. “This trial was proof that if you put CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg on the stand before a judge and jury of their peers, the tech industry’s wanton disregard for people will be on full display. We have the documents, we have the evidence, and now is the time for Congress to step up and finally pass the Senate’s Kids Online Safety Act, so that we can finally protect kids and save lives.”

More than 2,000 plaintiffs are alleging social media companies like Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, and Alphabet knowingly designed addictive products that expose children to predators, exploitation, and self-harm. The trials are considered the most significant Big Tech accountability litigation to date, drawing parallels to precedent-setting products liability cases against Big Tobacco.

The evidence now in the public record shows how companies knowingly engineered products with design features such as infinite scroll, push notifications, and algorithmic amplification. For Big Tech companies, youth engagement is a financial imperative. Social media platforms generate billions in annual ad revenue from U.S. youth. According to new Pew Research Center survey data, 36% of U.S. teens say they use TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and/or Facebook “almost constantly.”

The trials have already produced an unprecedented public record of damning internal company documents.

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Social media are as addictive as nicotine & crack, and equally as damaging to individual mental health; they also have massively contributed to the social fragmentation, divisiveness and rancor infecting our polity and our democracy.

Let this past week’s victory mark the beginning of the end for these dangerously toxic, predatory and manipulative media!

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May 13, 2025

Sad By Design

By DP

Over the years, we have received countless enquiries as to why we are not “on” Facebook; and why do we not “weigh in” on X.

Now comes the voice of esteemed media theorist Geert Lovink with a few excerpts from an interview (worth perusing in its entirety) centering on his 2019 book, Sad By Design.

Read on:

In my book, Sad by Design, I contrast technologically induced sadness not just with the historical ‘illness’ melancholy but also with boredom, depression, loneliness and similar sombre mental states that are dominant today. We read a lot about ‘male’ anger, from trolling and shitstorms to cyber-warfare but less so about the regressive side. Emotional rides are no longer experienced in solitude; the virtual others are always there as well.

It is a truism that we are lonely together (a subtle but crucial variation of Sherry Turkle’s alone together). We cannot put the phone away — there is no relief. In my essay, I have tried to minimize the comparison between the current wave of technologically-induced sadness and the rich historical descriptions of melancholy. […] 

The predictable continuity thesis is not just elitist, it is escapist. It walks away from the dirty present, much in the same way romantics did in the industrial 19th century.

Techno temperaments generated by computer code and interface design (also known as nudging) causes overload and exhaustion and produces a gloomy state that flickers, without ever becoming dominant on the surface. Sadness today is an indifferent micro-feeling, a flat and mild state of affairs. This should be contrasted with the much heavier illnesses such as depression, stress and burn-out.

One or two centuries ago these would be labelled melancholia. Some artists make this an explicit topic of their work such as Lil Peep and Billie Eilish.

Sadness is no longer hidden and is becoming part of pop culture. Youngsters feel the anxiety, the stress, and become sad about empty promises and diminishing opportunities. They are experts at reading daily life through the sadness lens. This does not mean we should medicalize them. We are not sick.

How do we comfort the disturbed? Not by taking their phone away. What can we do that’s liberating and prevents moralism? […]

Right now, social media are either the domain of marketing or an object for (moralistic) concern of teachers, parents, politicians). Critical internet research is still a joke in terms of funding, schools, research programs. […]

Social reality (SR) is so much larger than hyped-up technologies such as virtual and artificial reality. SR is also am ironical hint to sociology, the discipline that so far has failed to contribute to a better understanding of the ‘social in social media’ as I called it in 2012 in e-flux, an essay I updated in Social Media Abyss.

I no longer believe there is some raw and truthful reality outside of the social worlds that tech companies have created.

Dichotomies such as online-offline and real-virtual are no longer meaningful. I like the idea of a social reality that people carry with them. Once they grab their phone and start swiping and scrolling through the updates on their ‘social’ apps they are in it again. You go on ‘social’, as the Italians say. Have you seen it on ‘social’, as the Italians say.

We need to re-invent the social, which is now technical and digital. I would not say it ‘affects’ us as such an understanding somehow suggests that we are outside, victims, subjects. The user perspective teaches us that we’re fully involved—by design—and constantly interact, contribute, upload, klick, respond, like, swipe, whatever. The extractive data machine lives of that.

[…]

Self-design can be a somewhat naïve term. The daily reality, in particular for young people, is a brutal one, in which the construction and maintenance of the self-image is a matter of life and death. We should not underestimate the internalized values of the neo-liberal precarious reality in which people are forced to compete with each other and life never quite succeeds.

There are always mishaps, fall-outs, missed opportunities, break-ups, strange downtimes in our mood, an endless period of boredom in which nothing seems to work. The self-image constantly breaks down, we get angry or depressed, can’t finish a deadline. This is all recorded and captured, processed and turned into data points that are added to our profile. Self-image is no longer a cute selfie, it has become much more complex and contradictory. […]

Silicon Valley has all but killed the speculative imaginary—and they are acutely aware of that. This was their aim. Not merely own it but shut it down by pulling it into the background. A growing movement is reclaiming the net but it’s an uphill battle.

It sounds weird but ‘another internet is possible’ has almost become a subversive slogan. If we want to overcome homo extractionist, we need to organize and fight, in visible manners, build and use those alternatives we desire so much! […]

Right now, there is hardly anyone working on the speculative re-design of the social. This space has been poisoned by the systems of likes, followers, updates, newsfeeds, ‘friends’ you name it. Let’s get rid of this jargon. However, we want to reinvent the social we need to acknowledge that we can no longer distinguish between the social and tech.

Forget offline romanticism. Secondly, we need to get rid of the Silicon Valley online presence inside our conversations, our lives. Let’s minimize the presence of third parties and focus in a pragmatic way on what needs to be done and what tools support this strategy.

No more invisible moderators, filters, censors. The algo ain’t no friend of mine. Alt.social will have to confront itself with various challenges: monetization and democratic decision making. Both aspects have been quietly removed from Silicon Valley’s agenda and their related start-up venture circles. For art and activism redistribution of the ‘wealth of the networks’ and collective decision making are essential. We need to dismantle the ‘free’ and invent new ways to work together and deal with difference and disputes.

We can no longer delegate the management of the world to these IT firms. Silicon Valley is part of the problem and we no longer expect them to resolve the growing tensions in the world.

 

True, all that, in 2019 — more deeply so in 2025!

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November 6, 2020

Rage For Sale

By DP

Longtime readers of DP know of our deep aversion to social media: we are not linked to Facebook in any way, nor have we ever dipped a single toe into the toxic backwaters of the Twittersphere. We have no Instagram feed, nor do we Snapchat. To be clear, we are not “late adapters”; we were early refusers!

The shallow promises of Social Media, to connect everyone to everybody while feeding egos and pumping addictive endorphins, are nothing but camouflage for the vast data mine that is both social heart and economic engine for Surveillance Capitalism.

The varied platforms of Social Media also incubate and accelerate a detachment of American political life from the world of verifiable facts and evidence, with potentially catastrophic results, as evidenced by the increasingly aberrant outbursts from King Tweet (Exhibit A, below).

The algorithm does not care about truth; the algorithm only cares about behavior.

Below a few lucid remarks from political historian and distinguished essayist Jill Lepore, in an interview following the publication of her recent book about the Simulmatics Corporation, an early probe into the commodification of human subjectivity via the data mine.

 

 

EXHIBIT A

 

Daffy as it may be: amen to that.

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March 23, 2018

Miners of the Self

By DP

One of our core themes here at DP:

Our social life-world has become increasingly transformed into a vast data mine, an extractive and highly lucrative corporate bonanza in which the “mine” is our own subjectivity, together with whatever is left of our communities and collective identities. 

The behavioral psychology lab offers the dominant social organizational model, with strip miners such as Facebook, Alphabet and Twitter at one end of the spectrum, and more focused drill-hole miners at the other end, such as black sites and Guantanamo Bay.

Full disclosure: DP has no personal experience of Facebook, having declined to “connect” in a way that so obviously destroyed personal privacy and web autonomy. We submit for your consideration a montage of quotes and captioned images, beginning with a charming IM thread from the Prime Digger of the FB Data Mine, twitching his thumbs in a rare moment of brutal honesty, dating from 2004:

TWO TEENS WITH A DAY’S WORTH OF “LIKES” AND CLICK-THRUS

More recently, we have that exemplary “networker” Steve Bannon sifting tailings from the Cambridge Analytica strip mine:

FACEBOOK USER ENHANCING THEIR SHADOW PROFILE

Not to worry, because “Zuck” is sorry for stealing your subjectivity after tricking you into commodifying every quirk and foible from your most private self:

TWO UNPAID MINERS PUSH AND PULL THEIR PRIVATE IDENTITY TO MARKET

 

Gentle DP reader: We suggest that you treat Mr. Zuckerberg’s disingenuous apology with a degree of skepticism, and STRIKE the FB Data Mine until you are amply compensated for the sale of your self, over and over again.

 

miningboss

IT WOULD BE SO COOL TO PAY MY MINERS NOTHING WHILE CONVINCING THEM THEY ARE THE ONES GETTING SOMETHING FOR NOTHING

 

DELETE FACEBOOK      STRIKE THE MINE       DELETE FACEBOOK

 

1 Comment   |  tags: , , , | posted in bearings, DP