Robert Rauschenberg,
Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953

I have without a moment’s hesitation deleted, unliked, cleaned my presence on that Grand Ole Platform known as Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Using a free utility somewhat creepily known as Facebook Seppuku (that’s the Japanese word for ritual suicide) and much clicking of Delete/Done, I got rid of all the entries, mentions, likes I accumulated since 2006 when I joined. It was kind of fun to see the wave of activities as people, nay a whole wave of FB immigrants took hold in 2008 when Zuck opened the floodgates to the world.Prior to this it required an .edu email address to join, and further back still your College campus had to be one of the elites to allow Facebook registrations, and then from bona fide student email accounts. But I digress.

What really shed a great deal of light on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook operations was this movie shared on YouTube: Facebookistan

One sees an utter lack of acccountability and standards too which even the smallest businesses are held. Facebook is allowed a free ride by EVERYONE. Nobody is enforcing any rules or practices, Facebook is the law of its own land. It decides and worse yet, you don’t even know WHAT it has decided. The rules are not published, the process is not documented and every employee is under a gag order upon being hired. Nothing is allowed to let the cold light of day creep in on the operations at Facebook. You have to understand Facebook is not an ISP, is not a Service Provider. It is an advertising business. It collects data, watches you click thru ads, looks at what you share and  begins filing you into generalized hoppers to then sell you to a manufacturer, supplier, service provider (in other words a “REAL” business). They don’t judge, they don’t really enforce a whole lot of rules. People can make spoof accounts and masquarade as anyone nearly anonymously and Facebook doesn’t care. Why? Because they have as of today 1.7Billion users. Even Twitter cannot overcome that lead (read NYTimes story below)

Facebook Casts a Giant Shadow Over Twitter

Add to this my own personal aggravation, I just got suspended on Twitter as of Tuesday morning this week! As much as I like Twitter, their appeal process is EVERY bit as obscure, unsure and murky as the day-to-day operations at Facebook. There’s no explanation as to WHY you got suspended other than the EULA and rules for being a member, and possible infractions that may cause a suspension. Getting ANYTHING like detail or actionable steps to unsuspend your account is impossible. You can do searches on this to find out more. The extent of what you can do is send an appeal in email asking “why”? And see if they respond, when they respond. It’s been 48 hours for me now. So I’ve been without Facebook, without Twitter for that full length of time. I have great hopes for stealing back all the time these two “free” services have stolen from me. And they won’t have this datapoint to kick around anymore. This is my declaration of intellectual independence.

Let Freedom REIGN!