I hate facebook and all that it stands for. I loathe Marc Zuckerberg. That is in itself a harsh statement but judging from coverage of what facebook has been up to the last years I am prone to classifying facebook as unmitigated evil, in numerous domains. I quit facebook in December last year and haven’t looked back despite cutting ties with several thousands people there. My resentment towards facebook has been building for quite a while now, and in my ideal future this aberration would go geocities as soon as humanly possible.
How can we expedite this process? Quite easily actually – use blockchain to boot up a decentralized PeoplePages (HumanityManual, whatever), or something catchy along those lines.
How do I visualize this?
Well, if I were to delineate a prototype of some sort I’d first prefer that information you put out to be saved on your computational device. If other people want to look at your profile they would have to be actively licensed to do that, and the software would have hurdles in place that make it hard to willy-nilly share private content about other people. This alternative to facebook would also allow users to suck all their information out of facebook itself, save and organize it locally, and then use your harvested facebook date to populate the alternative PeoplePages. In essence you import your facebook profile, and then invite all your contacts to install PeoplePages.
But the coup the grace would be advertising. Sweaty Marc (my pet name for marc zuckerberg) makes hundreds of euro equivalent income, per year, per profile. That is what you are worth in these systems, and the running proverb introduced in to the public consciousness by Charles Stross is – “if it’s for free, YOU are the product”.
In my ideal PeoplePages you would have the ability to switch on or off any advertising, and people who would send adds to you would have to pay you in your digital currency of choice. That way every human being on the planet can generate hundreds to (in some cases) thousands of euro per year in advertising revenue. Personally, I viciously hate advertising and in a perfect world I’d want to heavily regulated and advertisers would have to pay a ‘nuisance tax’, for the Greater Good. If you’d implement such a system, you would benefit and not that asshole Zuckerberg. If you chose to share private data to third parties, say because you “have nothing to hide” and you support “the law” or whatever higher value, then you would be totally in your right to actively switch data with respective partners.
But the unique qualities of blockchain allow us to contain our private data and selectively share it.
Millions of busineses and police states world wide would weep crocodile tears if this wear to come to fruition, and hopefully Marc Zuckerberg would end up impoverished as a result of a catastrophic collapse of this perverse phenomenon that is facebook. Bah.