The Facebook affair

There is another country and it is called Facebook. It has over two billion inhabitants — citizens? — and embassies in every other country. Its population is growing not by any biological path but in cyber with new births almost by the second that spring to life instantly, there is no time of growth, no path to maturity, Facebookers are born fully formed. Every one of them is connected, however tenuously. They carry universal passports and travel widely and instantaneously, the closest thing yet to teleportation. Beam me up, Scotty. Facebook has no army, has never fought a war nor invaded anywhere. Err….not invaded’…hang on there. It has. It has invaded everywhere. Everything, even if you don’t know it has. Perhaps we need a rethink on what constitutes an invasion.

This new country is difficult to describe. Not a democracy that is for sure, but possibly the first monarchy of the digital age. There is a king, a queen and thousands of courtiers that work day and night to sustain the body politic without recourse to cabinet decisions, though with a nod to the boardroom for the sake of conformity. There are no elections and the economy is entirely based on advertising revenue. At least conceptually every FB-er is a member of the government and has a say. Collectives of FB-ers can be powerful tools of change and influence. They congregate easily and fast, hold hands with other smaller cyber-states like Twitter and WhatsApp and are diplomatically nimble

Although not martial it has ambitions that in the bricks-and–mortar world look rather like that and FB, flagless and with no place at the United Nations, has the capacity to influence by proxy elections in the worlds its borders envelop. These excursions into manipulation are carried out by proxies, the modern mercenaries, that raid the data of millions of FB-ers supposedly without the King being aware of what is going on but in reality the king is all-seeing connected as he is to all around him. FB does not have borders as a state it has an exosphere, and surrounds other entities. Think amoeba. With brains.

All of this has gone on for years with billions now having dual nationality and states older than 20 — virtually all of them — carried on blithely unconcerned at the assault on their underpinnings, and it is only a little carelessness on the part of FB that it now finds itself in the court of Uncle Sam, and the king, a stripling lad of 33 who is as rich as Croesus fending off the inquisition.

The carelessness was linked to a failure to properly control the attack-dogs, in this case Cambridge Analytica but there are others, and the naughty dogs got caught in the act of a bit of jiggery-pokery with the American elections. Rather, it was the Russians doing the jigging and poking as they deployed their own cyber-thugs.

So there he sat, King Zuckerberg, fresh as a daisy but with an Adam’s apple that was doing somersaults as he dodged and weaved through questions asked about his country by some very elderly men and women who probably did not understand the questions they were asking let alone the answers. They pushed and probed and the king was gracious, composure beyond his years as befits a member of the emerging royalty and his courtiers and advisers sat behind, smiling sometimes.

The tendency at the beginning was to have some sympathy for Zuckerberg, the lone warrior of free enterprise and profit and the American dream, but that gradually faded as the hours of interrogation went by. Stonewall Zuckerman was playing a blinder, though the forty-odd senators that ringed the gladiatorial pit are likely unaware of that. It is the Taliban that are fond of saying ‘you have the watches but we have the time’ and it is Zuckerberg and his army of over 2 billion that has time very much on his side, and the ladies and gentlemen with the watches have nothing much to hand beyond some outmoded decorative timepieces.

Facebook is another country. A majority reading this will be citizens and contributing every time they log in to its vastness. Sleep tight.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 12^th, 2018.

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