"Has another company ever come out with a high-concept, big-production 'brand ad' and then, just a few months later, turned around and utterly trashed it? I don’t think so. What we learn from this is not just that Zuckerberg is a bullshit artist who’s most insincere when he’s sounding most sincere — we already knew that — but that for Zuckerberg, and for Facebook, 'sincere' and 'insincere' are equally meaningless terms. Everything is bullshit. A chair levitating in a forest and a ballerina dancing on a dinner table are equally fake. They’re fabrications, as are the emotions that they conjure up in us. It’s all advertising."

[....]

"Every object, at least in our perception of it, carries its antithesis. Behind the plenitude symbolized by the vase we sense an emptiness: the wilted bouquet rotting in a landfill. And so it is with the tools of communication. When we look at them we sense not only the possibility of connection but also, as a shadow, the inevitability of loneliness. An empty mailbox. A sheet of postage stamps. A telephone in its cradle. The dial of a radio. The dark screen of a television in the corner of a room. A cell phone plugged into an outlet and recharging, like a patient in a hospital receiving a transfusion. The melancholy of communication devices is rarely mentioned, but it has always haunted our homes."

I had a Facebook account for a year or two, then, tired of cropping digital cotton for Marky-Mark, deactivated it.  Zuckerberg's contempt for users informs every decision Facebook makes -- nonstop revisions to the interface; dwindling privacy options; ever-increasing coercive exhortations to "share" -- and I'm never going back.
- posted by cjb @ 5:11 PM