Facebook and Giants Baseball: Yeah, I've Got Thoughts

Tomorrow, (Thursday May 10) the Giants play the Phillies and the only place you can watch it is in Philadelphia or on Facebook. I've got some thoughts about baseball on Facebook. 

Let's begin with Facebook. What did Facebook take of mine? 

My friendships, some of more than 40 years. My relationships with my parents and siblings. My love for my wife and 3 children. The movies that made me cry. The books that changed my life. All of this and more. The most intimate and sacred pieces of me and my network of relationships. The entirety of my 'social capital.' As much of what it means to be human that they could wrap their sharp-clawed algorithms around.

I will say, legally speaking, Facebook didn't steal this information from me. They gathered this information while I willfully used their platform to share ideas, keep up relationships, and in some cases, build new friendships. I knew I signed away control of my data on their platform. I knew they compiled and sold it to corporations. I figure, "I'm a savvy consumer. I'll know when I see a car ad on my feed not to go buy a new car."

But what FB has been doing is something altogether different than advertising. The truth is that they have been compiling all of my intimate data, the essence of my private relational life, and compiling the deep intimacies of my life (along with the deep intimacies of your life) and selling the collective human psyche in all its sacred nuance to the most evil actors on the planet for any and every form of manipulation, violence and deceit possible. Facebook has used and/or enabled this data to help foment racist hatred here in the US, to overthrow democracies, for ethnic cleansing and genocide among the Rohingya. The list goes on and on. All without as much as a whiff of remorse. If there’s no justice for Facebook and Zuckerberg this world is fucked. Which, of course, it is, because there doesn’t exist any type of accountability for Facebook or Zuckerberg. The power and technological capacity of the elite in today’s world is unmatched by any previous generation. At the same time our collective capacity for restraint is negligible. Our capacity for moral and/or spiritual thought and behavior is diminishing at an alarming rate. Brave New World here we come!!

I know, I know, I sound unhinged. But I was/am a friend and conversation partner for a few of the pioneers of Silicon Valley and I’ve had this conversation a hundred times or more: what happens when our technological capacity outstrips our capacity for moral and spiritual restraint? I can tell you that many of the folks who built the computer age are filled with overwhelming dread as they watch the devolution unfold in real time. As one such pioneer confided in me some years ago, the whole computing age is nothing like Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel and much more like Hieronymus Bosch' vision of hell on earth. If only he could have seen where Zuck and Facebook have taken us. 

So, yeah. Rob Manfred is dragging baseball onto Facebook where watching the Giants game tomorrow won't be an option among many options, but will be the only option for watching the game. It's a minor thing but it's also just another indication that in the competition between greed and humane, ethical action greed will win every time.