I recently decided to kill my facebook account. I had been meaning to do so but it had become such an addiction to read up on all those posts by all these tenuous friendships I had developed over the years.

A good friend Mark Pesce recently killed his account and this had reignited the idea within me along with all the recent privacy issues that were firing the media and blogosphere regarding Facebook. This baby was a leaky boat with the least of good intentions for its users. Upon reflection I felt that not only was I helping a multinational criminal gang function, my use of facebook was helping them to profit. I know that sounds hugely paranoiac but the research into its origins and ties to the intelligence community bear witness. Anything done on that site is hugely transparent and this is something I don’t need in my life. Sure it was a good tool for keeping up with people. I thought back to when I did it before… how did I do that? Email was the main answer I could come up with. I now often use twitter for some friends and most others I speak to directly on Skype. A guesstimate would put more than 90% of my facebook friends as no more than acqaintances… ie: i won’t be calling them if I am in a crisis nor would they even think of me when they are in one themselves. One of my closer friends barely noticed me missing in action after 3 weeks. So much for the social connections facebook brings

Facebook for me was a little like a Skinner box. I would post information to get rewards in the forms of responses and those responses even if it is was an inane ‘like’ being ticked were enough to make me look into the site one more time. Over time this addictive trait had me on facebook at least twice per day… once in the morning and another time in the evening. I was sort of expecting quality information in the streams from my ‘friends’. When I first started using facebook I killed all the applications and poking as it was ridiculous to poke and be poked in my opinion. I couldn’t relate to it. I got to a point where I had had enough with it to the point of posting on my profile “Poke me and be de-friended”. Of course this meant nothing when I had a run in with one of my tenuous acquaintances that was all over me for expressing my opinions all the time. She was a little depressed by what I had to write so I told her to de-friend me. A parting shot on her behalf was to poke me and then defriend. The lingering poke being her last laugh. But I digress.

Facebook was addictive. I enjoyed posting my ideas and getting reactions. In the end I was using it like my personal blog to broadcast ideas to all my friends. I enjoyed the posting and the feedback. Occasionally there were fun tustles as personal religions were crossed and double crossed and in the end one or another would concede to agree to disagree… on the whole it was fun. Although I did note the time it was taking. I was not doing anything I would consider reasonably productive in the time that I was using facebook. It was like writing notes on paper in an empty room only later to find that others had written notes to each other as well and in regard to your notes… on the whole… close to pointless considering the dilution of the information that was being passed.

I think this dilution is essentially because on some level people are not able to be fully real. This may be the side effect of the publicness of facebook and the fact that it is truly transparent to whomever facebook wants to give the data to. I look forward to other solutions better than facebook. At the moment I am literally banking on *Diaspora . Diaspora is touted as “The privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network.”, which translates in real terms to freedom of speech. I donated money to their startup and will have a node happening with they finish their first iteration at the end of northern hemisphere summer.

When I left facebook I invited all my friends to send an email to me to tell me if they were interested in joining Diaspora. Of the 230 “friends” I got 5 replies which is pretty much what I expected. I also got typical “I got nothing to hide so I don’t know what you are worried about” responses as well. I expected those too. Ignorance is bliss.

So far I am thinking of calling my node FREEDOM FIRST or FREEDOM THIRST. Not sure as yet… they come to mind from previous ideas bandied about for other projects based on freedom, voluntaryism and libertarianism. The idea being is that in this encrypted space… you are really free to say what you like. This is your node of being and you are welcome to invite your REAL friends you know PERSONALLY. This way we keep the spooks to the minimum and the freedom of speech to the maximum.

Until then I will blog my ass off and even after then I probably will too.

Thanks for reading.

Further comedic reading:  Cracked Magazine had a good look at Gaming and BF Skinner … you can read it all here