Facebook is like an infant with parents strung out on drugs, the child sadly left to its own devices. Courtesy of freedom detached from paradoxical rules, the epitome of unfreedom.
I blame the child’s parents, mostly, as in all cases where the parents are not keeping a watchful eye over the children they proclaim to love so much. Oh, how I have seen this scenario unfold before.
Unfree
I will back my blunt yet deserving gating statement up shortly.
After I first attempted to sign up for the distribution of my blog posts over Facebook’s network, the thought came to mind as I have done for about 8 years with The Venture Company articles and to complement our buzzing Twitter feed.
Yesterday, I investigated boosting a post manually to see how the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution is currently supported on the platform. A hot topic these days.
Just so my global audience understands what we are talking about:
The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prevents the government from making laws that regulate an establishment of religion, prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
Par Example
Below is a screenshot of how my last post, according to Facebook, must be corrected to be published for a fee. I declined, for it tells me what soup of mediocrity my analyses will drown in.
Notice how Facebook evaluates what it deems appropriate and how it governs, with silly, inaccurate, and belittling suggestions, as the arbiter of free-speech 2.6 billion people on this planet are now forced to abide by. Without, I must add, any legislative approval of said arbitrage and without respect for the plurality of sovereignties of the people it serves.
Or perhaps Facebook recognized, by scanning the words in the specific article I attempted to post, Larry Summers, an early investor in Facebook, was not favorably mentioned. Whatever.
Monisms Leads To Totalitarianism
I repeat the question I posed in a live questionnaire to Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, again:
This, my friends, is how the free world’s self-proclaimed leader, the United States of America, allows technology companies to rule the world with the unfreedom sold to innocent greater-fools as freedom.
Thankfully for humanity, smarter and independently thinking countries see through this cunning Trojan horse kind of deceit. The unbridled technology escapades tarnishing trust in American integrity.
The Devil Incarnated
The world had conquered many kinds of attempted monisms before technology came around. Luckily, The United States was the savior of the last resort to the many impending atrocities in foreign countries.
We never got a proper thanks, for it is perhaps the reason why we now, under cover of wide-scale global technology intoxication, attempt to deploy our own monism with a government asleep at the wheel of creative destruction promulgating the worst form of infectious totalitarianism imaginable.
The mind-numbing coddling of people on the platform, aided by the manufactured consent of arbitrage, attracts and colludes innocent participants who are made to think, postulate and behave alike, forming a stultifying antithesis to nature’s evolutionary principles. Principles that should promote our meaningful differences, not our commonalities, define how best to adapt to nature’s entropy.
Parenting Facebook
I feel obliged to reiterate the role of parenting, not just because Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as a budding father, may soon recognize, but also because the commitment to our offspring requires a succinct understanding of the constitution, implementation, and adherence to freedom, including its obligatory paradoxical rules. A subject I have covered and practiced at least the last sixteen years extensively.
Every child’s freedom to challenge the boundaries set before them is paramount in expanding the multigenerational fractal of human ingenuity and capacity. Dissent is crucial in revalidating foregone conclusions of manmade systems and discovering new and better ways of approaching things. A dissent terribly abused by parents who dare not be challenged, and worse, who let their children do whatever they want.
Laissez-faire is the kiss of death to freedom. The best parental approach I have found to raise my child is a reverse funnel—a gradual unleashing of freedom commensurate with the merit of trusting but verifiable proximal development and self-governance.
The role of parents, with hopefully two committed complementary individuals strengthening a consistent vision, is to be the procreator of the theory, in the words of Albert Einstein, that determines the jump-off point of what your child can discover. Meaning parents establish the starting game rules knowing what societal buttons to push, challenged by the dissenting viewpoints above. And then, let the child play its game, by virtue of its evolving merit, improving the game’s outcome to the best of its ability.
In this case, the fractal expansion of ingenuity by all children in the world, some of it implicitly granted to Facebook, contributes to the regenerative strengthening of humanity to combat nature’s entropy.
Mammone
However, when the behavior of Facebook itself either looks like a child stuffing their face in the birthday cake we were all supposed to enjoy or, under cover of opaque tactics, robs money from any propaganda wallet it can find, it is time to deploy more stringent paradoxical rules to freedom to reign this Mammone (Italian for mamma’s boy) in.
Our government, in control of the legislation to determine the rule of some 350 million people in The United States alone, has neither been seriously challenged by people identifying the gaping holes in the U.S. Constitution nor has this government responded to reign in the Mammones of unbridled capitalism using technology as the accepted excuse to take humanity on a fantasy ride.
The parents strung out on drugs are the absent folks in Congress who failed to apply the constitutional guardrails to everything analog also to digital purveyors. Technology purveyors are currently behaving like drug escapees opening the unprotected backdoor to nation-state sovereignty.
In all fairness, Facebook is merely the player who takes the lack of paradoxical rules to its generous and self-fulfilling advantage. Hate the game, do not hate the players.
The company could take the high road and help Congress reinvent the constitutional precepts that should govern the innate plurality of our world, as I have offered to do for them, but that would expect the child, using the above analogy, to have grown up.
Learn To Lead
I, like Einstein, worry about the future of The United States, not because it does not have the capacity to reinvent itself, but because it lacks the will-power to fundamentally challenge and change its deeply rooted foregone conclusions while failing to rein in those who take those feeble and expired conclusions for a selfish ride.
In the words of Gore Vidal, I suggest we take our stance on the recovery of our liberties, including refreshing the paradoxical rules without which human evolution becomes as hollow in regenerative excellence and as short-lived as the devil’s Prada.
