Zucked – as summarized from the Sam Harris interview

I listened to the Sam Harris interview with Roger McNamee – author of Zucked – Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe. It can be summarized as follows

Facebook takes something we should (in McNamee’s opinion) value, but don’t (in this case, privacy) and converts it into something we actually do value, but shouldn’t (in McNamee’s opinion) (in this case a sense of hyperbolic community), all the while making tons of money in the process.

Not that much deep thought involved – lots of willful ignorance centered around the central dilemma: if person A and person B have a conversation, then that conversation is practically (perhaps not morally, but practically) owned by persons A and B. It is NOT just person’s A data. If they decide to have it via Facebook, then it (for all intents and purposes) belongs to Facebook too.

I’m in the anti-Facebook camp, and I listened to this feeling very unimpressed with my own side.