Comments on: Shut your facebook http://thelatest.co.uk/homes/shut-your-facebook Just another The Latest weblog Sun, 15 Apr 2012 09:50:17 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Leif Harmsen http://thelatest.co.uk/homes/shut-your-facebook/comment-page-1#comment-1723 Leif Harmsen Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:34:38 +0000 http://thelatest.co.uk/homes/2008/01/31/shut-your-facebook/#comment-1723 Online social networking seemed so promising and liberating at first to my naive imagination. My 75 year old mom thought it was the devil. I was wrong. She was right. She is more politically experienced and astute than myself. The not-so-subtle issue is ownership, and with it, the totalitarian control it affords. Whatever good social networking websites do for you on the short run is more than undermined by private ownership. Theirs, NOT YOURS. The Soviet Union seemed a wonderfully promising response to fascism at first. The pigs on animal farm had such a seductive plan. Cocaine can work wonders. It's so cheap and easy to build your house out of straw that anyone can do it! Invading a less powerful nation seems like a good idea until we realize that we never had an exit strategy. My mother wasn't born yesterday; she can smell a stinky deal from a mile off. So far the only way to build a brick house is to build your own website at your own domain name and keep your own mailing list. I'll revisit the concept of social networking online when there's a fully distributed open standard for it that nobody owns - like email. Fortunately there are some very clever people working on one.... now that would be truly cool. Online social networking seemed so promising and liberating at first to my naive imagination. My 75 year old mom thought it was the devil. I was wrong. She was right. She is more politically experienced and astute than myself. The not-so-subtle issue is ownership, and with it, the totalitarian control it affords. Whatever good social networking websites do for you on the short run is more than undermined by private ownership. Theirs, NOT YOURS.

The Soviet Union seemed a wonderfully promising response to fascism at first. The pigs on animal farm had such a seductive plan. Cocaine can work wonders. It’s so cheap and easy to build your house out of straw that anyone can do it! Invading a less powerful nation seems like a good idea until we realize that we never had an exit strategy. My mother wasn’t born yesterday; she can smell a stinky deal from a mile off.

So far the only way to build a brick house is to build your own website at your own domain name and keep your own mailing list. I’ll revisit the concept of social networking online when there’s a fully distributed open standard for it that nobody owns – like email. Fortunately there are some very clever people working on one…. now that would be truly cool.

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