This Big Island - Zuckerberg & McLuhan

Mr. Piefke 3000 pointed us this very accurate if not quite complete description of the vast empire a certain Mr. Suckerberg or so has created without bombs and guns and ships and planes and tanks.

No, created it was only with the help of venture capital, the stock exchange and the easily available results of scientific research in binary mathematics and logics rules and the wondrous machines to execute them. And those results were mostly organized and funded by the the federal governement of the USA, the DOD in particular, with money provided for by all the of grown up US-American citizenship. No evil plan was behind that, only consumer capitalism principles and 60 years of television experience.

That is the island that Marshall McLuhan perceived or predicted as a global village. With all the bads and goods of that form of social organisation included. And certainly not modeled on the city of citizens. But now it's coming out a bit different than it must have appeared then. In McLuhan's time the laws of packet switching and television economy in conjunction with not yet wholly obsolete print and radio and telephone tech have produced more national and international consent and hence social and international peace then ever before in the last 3000 years. Albeit a a price.

FBs algorithms on the other hand, informed by the target group thinking model and big data set theories help segment everything rather into a vast network of a million overlapping peer control villages with invisible frontiers that only appear when condensed and projected elsewhere.

On the tool and user interface side the relation between facebook and the real internet is like the relation between elements novice mode vs. full blown photoshop. The only thing facebook can teach is how to become a world class expert in how to communicate like a really popular teenager. Which in itself is an ability never to despise. In all matters else it adamantly keeps you in child or rather scrub mode.

Whereas in the eighties billionaires and poor girls from any province still releaxed after work with the same TV shows and their respective schemes and watched the same TV-news a change to segmentation in mass media entertainment is taking shape too. Ther are expensive high class cable, pay satellite and streaming service shows for winners and second tier or older shows for single mothers and the unemployed.

What the TV inspired Global-Village of McLuhan and the loosely knit Archipelago of Suckerberg have in common is a sharp rise in peer control, as compared to a time when citizens tried to live by rules in public and enjoyed privacy when not in an office, train or using a wall connected telephone. Back then most of us let God be a good man except in an epiphany.

Brave New World! At the surface all of this is very much distinct and discriminate, only the invisible rules at the core are the same for everyone. Long live the target group and the global village. Guns and bombs included, of course.

Do not read obsolete books with updates of outdated theories from the likes of Piketty or Negri and Hardt. Start studying Shapiro and Varian and theories of matching markets. Matching markets are mostly not markets in the same way as markets are not conversations. But here is a field that is worth to start with if you seek to have political conversations worth having. These studies also help with negotiation, which is never a bad thing.

... plink