Monday, May 03, 2010

Why I too 'deleted' my Facebook account

Some weeks ago I pulled the plug on my Facebook account, that I'd had since the days when Facebook required a ".edu" email address. Yes, that was a very long time ago in Internet Years, and no I wasn't in school at the time but thanks to my UPenn lifetime email I was able to get in and see what this new social network was about.

Today I just cannot justify being on Facebook. All my working life I've fought against complexity and interdependence, and many of those at the receiving end of my emails know that I fancy an Alan Perlis quote that goes:
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
And today, Facebook has become such a tangled mess of relationships that:

  • it's impossible to understand how why you're shown something
  • it's impossible to control the flow of your information
  • it's impossible to handle your privacy with any confidence
  • it's impossible to know where Facebook will stop this cancerous growth
No thanks, goodbye Facebook. Back to basics, to simple and controlled interconnections. Anything else yields an abyss of unending wasted time and resources, and dangerous consequences. It's just not worth it

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