Stop Reading Mark Zuckerberg’s Tirades As Heartleft Cries. There Is a Business Performativity To Them
▻http://www.casilli.fr/2017/02/19/mark-zuckerberg-manifesto-heartfelt-business-performativity
Capitalism feeds on crises. And #Facebook (being the ultimate capitalist scheme) feeds on “trainwrecks”— it uses them as devices to establish its dominance. So the 2008/9 “privacy trainwreck” jumpstarted its extensive market for personal data. The 2013 “connectivity crisis” spawned Free Basics. And what will the 2016 “fake news disaster” be exploited for? Smart money says: “turning Facebook’s colossal user-base in a training ground for AI”.
Admittedly, this doesn’t come as a surprise. The ambition to “solve AI” by extracting free/micropaid digital labor from users is evident. Facebook AI Research (FAIR) division is devoted to “advancing the field of machine intelligence and to give people better ways to communicate” by relying on quality datasets produced by… people communicating on Facebook.
What is new is how the “#fake_news trainwreck” has ended up supporting this ambition by turning Facebook human users into a “social infrastructure” for AI (cf. #Zuckerberg). More importantly, it provides a rationale for the company’s strategy. And throws in “terror” for good measure, to render it unavoidable…: