The right to play with yourself

Opinion
Written By

In "The Social Network", the fictionalised account of the making of Facebook, the audience is introduced to one of the most influential people in technology, perhaps the world, today - Peter Thiel.Thiel is reduced to a caricature of a caricature in the film. In an early version of the script, a character remarks, on entering Thiel's building, "We’re in the offices of a guy whose hero is Gordon Gekko". [1]Gordon Gekko, from the '80s film classic "Wall Street" is himself based on a real individual, Ivan Boesky. Known for Wall Street's biggest insider trading scandal - that sent him to jail for two years - his words from an influential lecture he gave at UoC Berkeley in 1986, "I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself", which became the takeaway line from Michael Douglas' character Gekko in the film, "greed is good!".Is Peter Thiel then, stripped of layers of reference, a modern Ivan Boesky? If a drive for accumulating wealth and the finer things that can be bought with it are any indication then they share some resemblance. But Boesky was an arbitrage specialist - more interested in maximising profit through legal loop-holes and clever bookwork than what companies he bought and sold actually did.Thiel on the other hand has built his fortune from investing in online businesses that have grown remarkably, such as Paypal - using an enviable eye for where the world is going.In "Wall Street" Gekko proclaims at one point, "The most valuable commodity I know of is information." This showcases a more interesting similarity between the '80s investor and Thiel. His investment record since striking it truly rich with Paypal has been a savvy mix of startups - many of which have gone on to prominence, if not all yet riches.More interesting are his purportedly philanthropic investments, such as anti-aging research through the Methuselah Mouse Prize, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Seasteading Institute, whose mission is "to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems".Thiel seems to have moved from having an eye on "where the world is going" to having the money and clout to have major influence in actually deciding where it is going.A concern? Perhaps not - the wealthy have always had undue influence and Thiel is by all accounts a smart and liberal man. Your mileage will depend on your political and ethical leanings as with anything. But as example of a wider trend he does highlight an often unconsidered aspect of technology - that it is not benign or devoid of influence over how we use it. The developer of a piece of software or site sets up rules about what behaviours can exist under its roof and defines which will flourish.In a public essay [2] Thiel writes of three technological areas he is investing in to have influence over the world, having come to the belief that, "freedom and democracy are [not] compatible"- Seasteading, Outer space and Cyberspace. The latter includes his Facebook investment of course. Of his investment philosophy for online businesses he writes, "By starting a new Internet business, an entrepreneur may create a new world. The hope of the Internet is that these new worlds will impact and force change on the existing social and political order."The Internet then, to those like Thiel is a virtual Seastead, where unfettered by many existing social norms, and in fact some laws, the developers can "enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems". Only it is the virtual home of 500 million actual people that they are experimenting with not a few folk on a decommissioned oceanic oil well.In a review of The Social Network [3] author Zadie Smith quotes futurist Jaron Lanier, "software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible."Smith is intent on showcasing a divide between People 1.0 and People 2.0, the latter embrace Facebook and its ilk and,according to popular (mis)conception, have little or no interest in privacy. But ethnographers like Danah Boyd who actually study youth behaviours online have shown time and time again that youth care more about privacy than many adults - they are just not necessarily as savvy with using the tools as they could be, or they care about privacy between them and peers but less so that with parents or other adults.In a recent post [4] Boyd observes one young Facebook user's behaviour,"

Mikalah uses Facebook but when she goes to log out, she deactivates her Facebook account. She knows that this doesn’t delete the account – that’s the point. She knows that when she logs back in, she’ll be able to reactivate the account and have all of her friend connections back. But when she’s not logged in, no one can post messages on her wall or send her messages privately or browse her content."

Clearly Mikalah is not the media's ill-conceived cliche of generation Y, uninterested in privacy. As dramatic as her technique is she is not unrepresentative of the level of concern many youth, and adults, have over the ability to control their identity online.Facebook's view of what level of control over their privacy a person could want, and indeed should have, is influenced both by technology and usability. But in the light of attitudes of the likes of Thiel we have to wonder which decisions about how features are implemented on sites like Facebook are as a result of usability of technological constraints and which may be deliberately engineered to "force change on the existing social and political order" by influencing users to act in a certain way.Such as living out their interior lives publicly. Even if we have the ability to completely control our identity's representation on sites like Facebook, it has baked into it the ideological notion that a person has one identity and a persistent-self that is stable across time and relationships. If ever this is more untrue it is during our youth when we are discovering ourselves. It is not simply that sites like Facebook expose children's selves too early before they are formed, marking them for life - the much talked of "reputation damage" caused by scandalous posts.The real issue for youth is that Facebook requires users to maintain a single account under their own name and carry this from High School through to University to adulthood. A great part of discovering exactly who you are comes from "identity play" - becoming members of different subcultures, trying on new personas or activities. Without the requirement to integrate these into any holistic representation of yourself that Facebook enforces.No wonder then, that sites like 4Chan are huge with the young, where the cult of Anonymous rule and they can experiment freely with their identity and interests. Despite the focus on the pornographic aspect of sites like 4Chan, the lack of censorship is of less importance than the implementation of the message boards on the site in such a way that means there is no persistence of content (it expires quickly as new content is added) or enforced self-identification.Listening to those involved in Facebook such as Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg you hear strong successful individuals who have a belief in a certain type of privacy, and give little thought to those who, for whatever reason, want to have fluid identities. For them Facebook is something that would have made their youth better - but for many youth today it may be an entirely different site, more similar to 4Chan in features, that would help them grow. Of course with 4Chan comes other dangers, and Facebook has peer momentum. It will continue to succeed and influence how we live our lives for sometime.This enforced persistence of identity is just one example of an ideology influencing technology development but it is far from an isolated case. Where the media are mostly concerned with visible privacy leaks and extreme incidents on Facebook it is the more subtle baked-in ideologies that are effecting us all, having become, "ubiquitous, become invisible" on the site that are more interesting and concerning.Thiel is brazen in his belief that technology can change the social order and that he is investing with that intent. If that is the case, and others are doing likewise, and if technology can indeed influence the social order - should those without his financial might do the one thing we can do, more carefully select what technology we embrace (and how we use it) in order to have what little say we can on how society is shaped?

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