Facebook is in the dock, so to speak. nnIts practices are the subject of Congressional hearings. The algorithms it relies on to draw in new users, to link users to content, and users to advertisers are hidden from plain view and a main focus of the company’s many critics.
This criticism is well deserved. The company is insanely profitable, produces nothing, and has shown little concern over how it is perceived as a player in the world.
Still, I can’t help wonder if the focus on Facebook — and to a lesser extent the other main social media platforms — is a case of misplaced rage. The problems with Facebook are not isolated to Facebook, nor are they solely the province of social media. Facebook is part of a much larger and longer standing trend in which we have ceded public spaces and public goods — both physical and metaphorical — to the corporate realm, to our detriment.
I’m thinking of the growth of shopping malls and privately owned public squares — like Zuccotti or Bryant parks in New York — places that are accessible to the public and might appear public, but lack the protections truly public spaces have. I’m also thinking about hospitals, which increasingly emphasize profit over care, or universities, which are adopting more and more corporate governing models and shifting their missions away from the pursuit and sharing of knowledge to proprietary models of research.
Social media is a part of this shift, and Facebook stands as the Big Kahuna, making it the perfect vessel for our fears and anxieties. The Facebook platform, after all, plays an outsized role in most of our lives, mine included. It has become our chief way of remaining connected, of disseminating personal and public news, of organizing politically. It is our digital town square.
But it also is an opaque, for-profit behemoth that exists to generate wealth for its owners — its founder Mark Zuckerberg and other members of its upper-management team and shareholders — and its whipping-boy status, while earned, also distracts us from the much larger issues in play.
Whistleblower Frances Haugen hinted at these larger issues in her testimony on Oct. 5. She told a subcommittee of the Senate Commerce Committee that Zuckerberg and the leadership knows “how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes, because they have put their astronomical profits before people.” The media chose to focus on the first half of the statement, but it is the second half that is key.
Facebook is no different in its corporate behavior than most other American corporations, which long ago tossed off any sense of responsibility to the public. Our poisoned air and water, the code-red threat of climate change, homelessness, inequality — all of this can be laid at the feet of an economic system built around massive corporations that have a legal obligation only to their shareholders.
While Haugen testified, crude oil was spilling into the Pacific off the Southern California coast, the likely result of an aging pipeline being pierced by a ship’s anchor. The immediate cause is under investigation, but the larger causes — reliance on fossil fuels and the lack of care taken by big and small oil to ensure that its pipelines and transport systems are safe — is unlikely to pierce the public consciousness.
As with the Exxon-Valdez spill in Alaska more than three decades ago, and the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, our focus will be on individual bad actors, on ship’s captains and maybe the leadership of individual companies. We seem unable or unwilling to consider broader systemic causes that would undermine our faith in an economic system that has as its main ethos the privatization of profit and the socialization of costs, a system in which the big companies keep what they earn and the rest of us get to pay to clean up the mess they’ve made.
I’m not arguing for nationalization of industries, though I think that small-scale public ownership — local ownership — of public goods needs to be explored, or re-explored, as does the break up of these overly large entities. Vertical integration may create efficiencies for business, but it also limits choice and funnels economic and even political power upward into fewer and fewer hands.
We can and should impose new regulations on industry, including on social media firms, though doing so will require a difficult balance that does not compromise freedom of speech. But we cannot and should not leave it there. Systemic change is needed. Anything short of that is like the Dutch boy and the dike, and we know how that ended.
Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter, @newspoet41 and @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Facebook, facebook.com/ Hank.Kalet; Substack, hankkalet.Substack.com.
From The Progressive Populist, November 1, 2021
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