An Open Letter to Mark Zuckerberg

Dear Mark Zuckerberg:

What’s up, bro?  Just kidding; trying to keep things light.  I’m not exactly writing you about games or privacy settings… well, not really, but it’s a close call.  I’m writing you about electronic/cyber warfare on your network.   

Not to be cliché, but we leave in a postmodern world.  In that world, time and space collapse.  The effects of our innovations and actions in a world of exponentially increasing interconnections (as you well know) are often spatially and chronologically disparate from their causal roots.  You, for instance, likely didn’t expect to have a Hollywood movie produced about your experimentation in college…. Word choice, I know; but that is what the creation of theFacebook was to you at the time, right?

You personally listed “openness, breaking things, revolutions…” and a couple others (“information flow, minimalism, making things, eliminating desire for all that really doesn’t matter”) as interests on your own profile. Now I’m not making an accusation of complicity or ignorance, but I do want to bring to your attention that the early part of that list just so happens to be a big part of what the CIA does.  They leak selective facts, break up old regimes, and instigate revolutions.  I am not going to use this space to decry their mission or ethics.  I have a political science background.  I am speaking purely in descriptive (as opposed to normative) discourse here.  I hope to remain ambiguous as to those former distinctions—at least in this letter.  But I want to suggest an improvement to Facebook, not by task, but by goal.

Either by fate, design, or sheer luck, your service has become the chosen social network of the world, and as such connects the masses across continents (BTW: thanks for inventing the medium where I found Die Antwoord).  As your first major investor and board member (also creator of PayPal), Pete Thiel told David Kirpatrick:

The most important investment theme for the first half of the twenty-first century will be the question of how globalization happens… If globalization doesn’t happen, then there is no future for the world.  The way it doesn’t happen is that you have escalating conflicts and wars, and given where the technology is today, it blows up the world.  There’s no way to invest in a world where globalization fails.

The same article that features this quote also references the Un Milion de Voces Contra las FARC.  The group started on January 4^th, 2008 by Oscar A. Morales (whose background is in “civil engineering”), now a “Visiting fellow in Human Freedom at George W. Bush Presidential Center.”  Major Craic C. Collucci of the U.S. Army wrote an article entitled Shaping Colombia’s Stability through Strategic Communication: Evaluating U.S. Effectiveness in May of 2009.  The report focuses on one key issue:

 In essence, strategic communication shapes the environment so that the FARC‘s isolation is a longterm [sic] consequence. U.S. efforts must empower the Colombians to achieve this end, and effective strategic communication is a requirement for success.

 The Arab Spring (the collection of revolutionary anti-fascist movements that took place this year across North Africa and the Middle East) adds more examples, that are suspicious to me simply because so many of the (now deposed or embattled) dictators were the unwanted allies, both economic and military, of the West.   I want to believe (with the idealism of Mulder from X-Files) that these movements were truly ‘by the people, for the people.’  But we know from the wealth of data the world has (for the first time) finally been given to us by WikiLeaks, that media coverage and the framing of world events is not always what it seems.

Again, this is not an accusation, just wanted to point out some disturbing ideas.  The experimental First Earth Battalion (of Men Who Stare at Goats fame) lists a particular strategy of note in their handbook, under the section “high commanding.”  “The Conspiracy of the Sparkling Eyes” involves two phases: first, get a group of operatives to call local DJ’s and manipulate social constructions of reality to a desired effect (in this case, with the reports of people’s eyes sparkling, which increases “intensity of eye contact” in the population).  In Phase II, the operatives “call back two weeks later in greater intervals and report” that they have finally found a way to tell which members of the population had them first—“they can be spotted because they’re the ones who automatically hug you upon greeting… etc… etc.”

As Al Jazeera begins pointedly asking “How much of a threat does electronic warfare pose to governments and individuals around the world”, DARPA already has the power to manipulate search algorithms to bury unwanted data (Total Information Awareness).  It’s not quite censorship, but it’s not quite liberty.  SocialBots are stealing your user’s data.  Let me repeat that, SocialBots are stealing your user’s data.  With the recent phone-hacking scandal at News of the World, it has crossed my mind that potentially Murdock owned Myspace.com never changed the “glitch” that allowed page customization for more than freedom of choice—it also allowed malignant code injection in a simplified version of the SocialBots that now attack your network.

My request is simple—provide capital to WikiLeaks in exchange for some of their encryption software and expertise.  If you really love breaking things, break ties with the American Empire, before they ever hold your site back.  I left Myspace and will not move to Google+ for security reasons.  If you really love revolutions, then revolutionize the meaning of privacy and transparency at the same time—then watch the real party get started.  I won’t flatter you, but you’re too smart to have never thought about this.  So let’s get this right.  Before it all goes wrong.

Sincerely,

Charles Schoch