Facebook losing more friends as users reject surveillance

How many conversations have you had this past week about Facebook? In particular, about people shutting it down?

Andrew Keen, author of How To Fix The Future. Picture: John Feder.

How many conversations have you had this past week about Facebook? In particular, about people shutting it down?

“I shut my Facebook years ago,” says writer Andrew Keen, who, with his 2007 hit The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was among the first to sound a note of caution about the digital revolution into which we’ve all been sucked.

“I was so bored with reading about other people’s lives, which makes you depressed, anyway. But the movement we’re seeing now, where people are shutting down their social media accounts all over the place, talking about the internet like it’s not necessarily a good thing, it’s much bigger than anything we’ve seen before.”

Keen, who is touring Australia this week with a new book, How To Fix The Future, says the truth about the internet has been slow to dawn: when online, we are under constant surveillance by a handful of enormous, for-profit companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Google.

Everything you do — the searches you undertake, the products you buy, the people you call, the things you covet — is being recorded somewhere, by someone, for reasons that aren’t always, or maybe ever, benign.

“Facebook in particular is always talking about how they just want to make the world a better place. No, they don’t,” Keen says. “They are just big media companies, and they should be treated like media companies, which means regulation.

“We have been cleverly manipulated. It’s been easy for them to do. We are human, all lonely, we need attention. We sacrifice our individual privacy in the hope of feeling less alone and we end up feeling more lonely and paranoid than we were before.

“Then they take your content, and mine, and everyone’s, including the old media companies, who are still producing content, and they make clever use of our collective wisdom — the wisdom of the whole universe — for profit.”

Following recent scandals — data from Facebook being harvested and sold, to pick just one example — advertising agencies have begun to boycott, and governments to react.

“There is a reason food is edible. It’s because we stepped in to regulate the food industry. This will be the same,” Keen says.

Read an extract from How To Fix The Future by Andrew Keen in The Weekend Australian this Saturday.