Generation Why?

J sandte mir den Artikel der New York Book Review aus der Feder von Zadie Smith. Und ich verlinke ihn hier, mit Empfehlung: denn er ist ganz bestimmt lesenswert. Er faßt auf typisch amerikanische Weise - die immer von einer sehr offenen Auseinandersetzung mit subjektiven Persönlichkeiten ausgeht, insofern eine Seite der Erkenntnis betont, die uns Europäern bereits abhanden zu kommen droht (so geschichts- und damit fundamentlos die Amerikaner sich im Reflektieren auch wieder zeigen mögen, denn die Amerikaner SIND Facebook, Facebook konnte nur dort entstehen!) - zusammen, was sich zu Facebook sagen läßt. Und er tut es gut, er tut es erhellend, beleuchtet originell  die Krankheit, die Facebook darstellt wie auslöst. Hier finden Sie nur einige wenige Zitate, ich hätte auch den ganzen Artikel herausstellen können, der zur Verteidigung des Menschseins aufruft.

Fake Mark [wie er im Film dargestellt ist, Anm.] looks Roman, with all the precise facial detail filled in. Zuckerberg, with his steady relationship and his rented house and his refusal to get angry on television even when people are being very rude to him (he sweats instead), has something of the teenage Stoic about him. And of course if you’ve eliminated desire you’ve got nothing to hide, right?

It’s that kind of kid we’re dealing with, the kind who would never screw a groupie in a bar toilet—as happens in the movie—or leave his doctor girlfriend for a Victoria’s Secret model. It’s this type of kid who would think that giving people less privacy was a good idea.

Facebook remains the greatest distraction from work I’ve ever had, and I loved it for that. Some work-avoidance techniques are onerous in themselves and don’t make time move especially quickly: smoking, eating, calling people up on the phone. With Facebook hours, afternoons, entire days went by without my noticing.

Lanier [ein amerikanischer Soiftware-Entwickler und Buchautor, der vom einstigen Vorreiter der Cyber-World zum Warner vor der Uferlosigkeit der virtuellen Welten geworden ist, Anm.] is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. “Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” 

In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is a degradation, Lanier argues, which is

based on [a] philosophical mistake…the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do.

We know the consequences of this instinctively; we feel them. We know that having two thousand Facebook friends is not what it looks like. We know that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others. We know what we are doing “in” the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is it possible that what is communicated between people online “eventually becomes their truth”? What [Lanier], a software expert, reveals to me, a software idiot, is what must be obvious (to software experts): software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.

In his New Yorker profile, Zuckerberg made his personal “philosophy” clear:

Most of the information that we care about is things that are in our heads, right? And that’s not out there to be indexed, right?… It’s like hardwired into us in a deeper way: you really want to know what’s going on with the people around you.

“We lived on farms, then we lived in cities and now we’re gonna live on the internet.” To this idea Lanier, one of the Internet’s original visionaries, can have no profound objection. But his skeptical interrogation of the “Nerd reductionism” of Web 2.0 prompts us to ask a question: What kind of life? Surely not this one, where 500 million connected people all decide to watch the reality-TV show Bride Wars because their friends are? “You have to be somebody,” Lanier writes, “before you can share yourself.” But to Zuckerberg sharing your choices with everybody (and doing what they do) is being somebody.

Personally I don’t think Final Clubs were ever the point; I don’t think exclusivity was ever the point; nor even money. E Pluribus Unum—that’s the point. Here’s my guess: he wants to be like everybody else. He wants to be liked. Those 1.0 people who couldn’t understand Zuckerberg’s apparently ham-fisted PR move of giving the school system of Newark $100 million on the very day the movie came out—they just don’t get it. For our self-conscious generation (and in this, I and Zuckerberg, and everyone raised on TV in the Eighties and Nineties, share a single soul), not being liked is as bad as it gets. Intolerable to be thought of badly for a minute, even for a moment. He didn’t need to just get out “in front” of the story. He had to get right on top of it and try to stop it breathing. Two weeks later, he went to a screening. Why? Because everybody liked the movie.

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.

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