It is generally recognized that Facebook is a computer implementation of the High School Popularity Game, or the related College Fraternity Game. The game itself isn’t new, if anything, it is a rather bloodless form of the meatspace game. Every so often, the meatspace fraternity “brothers” wind up in court after a pledge gets killed during pledging. Perhaps they made the pledge drink a gallon of vodka, or perhaps they drowned him in the swimming pool. Such is life. The same kind of thing traditionally happened at a certain type of boys’ boarding school. Read John Knowles, _A Separate Peace_, or Robert Musil, _Young Torless_ (_The Confusions of Young Torless_). More mundanely, there is the kind of over-riding preoccupation with “collecting scalps.” In certain circles, it used to be immensely important how many people you could get to autograph your high-school yearbook. That is the ancestral form of “Friending.” One might obtain a set of back issues of Mad Magazine, to get a fairly good idea of what “kid culture” looked like, circa 1970.

What impressed me about MySpace, on the other hand, was that there were a series of “MySpace” murders, the kinds of senseless murders which normally happen in the alleys behind rough taverns, eg. two tough guys fighting to the death over a waitress who doesn’t want to have anything to do with either one of them. Again, there’s nothing new about that kind of thing in general. However, in these instances, the events were mediated by MySpace, rather than by a bricks-and-mortar tavern. When I began hearing about these kinds of murders, I knew that the internet had expanded downward about as far as it could expand. Facebook doesn’t seem to have as much of that kind of “rough traffic.”

What happened was that certain systems were computer-implemented before others, because of the ways skills overlapped. Other things equal, the first systems to be implemented were those which people could make for their own use, “scratching one’s own itch,” which meant systems useful to a computer geek. Things like computer conferencing systems– blogs in all but name– date back to the 1970’s (see Murray Turoff, _The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer_, 1978). There were other variations. When a middle-aged non-techie academic set up a blog, dealing with, say, medieval history , years before anyone else in his field did, it was often a case of having a son or nephew who was a computer geek, so that the effective cost of setting up a blog was much lower than it would have been for the general public. The thing about MySpace and Facebook is that they were systems geared to the interests of the groups of people least likely to learn to program. They are not pinnacles of high-tech, so much as they are expressions of the Disneyland Principle, the Traveling Carnival Midway Principle, of things being built by businesses “for the rubes.”

I suspect that the “for the rubes” factor is part of what Sherry Turkle is reacting to. One thing you get a sense of in Turkle’s first book, _The Second Self_ is how much she likes the boys, the engineering students, who come into her MIT classroom, all of them more or less resembling Luke Skywalker. Further, this is an extension of what she likes in small children. A twenty-year-old computer wizard is like a little kid playing with LEGO blocks, only more so. Facebook users are rather less attractive customers. There was a time when the bare fact of using a computer self-selected you as a more-than-usually-intelligent person, because you had to do all sorts of things by hand. This, of course, is no longer the case.

There are certain types of very structured computer communication systems, notably software development version control, which are, at one level, similar to Facebook, but at another level, quite different. It is necessary that two people should not attempt to alter a given program segment at the same time, and there are mechanisms to prevent this. These are not regarded as especially dehumanizing, any more than a traffic light is. The fact that a computer is completely literal-minded in running its program is a fact of life, just as it is a fact of life that two automobiles cannot occupy the same space simultaneously. A blog does not need that order of foolproofness, because the human reader is intelligent, and can cope with different blog-posters disagreeing with each other, or using words in different ways. In the case of traffic lights, one could, in theory, fit every automobile with a loudspeaker or whatever, so that the motorists could do an Alphonse-and-Gaston routine at every intersection. Of course, nothing like that happens. Most people simply go when the light says it is their turn, and leave it at that. When people install such loudspeakers in their cars, they usually do so in order to make insulting remarks to strangers in safety, to shout “fighting words” without the associated risk, and then to speed away, to behave like Anonymous Cowards, in short. Someone who installs such a loudspeaker proves in practice to be a very little person.

Facebook puts a lot of stress on hiding information, and then sharing it out– unequally. The limiting factor in secrecy, of course, is how many people know something. It is written that Christ had twelve apostles– and one of them was Judas Iscariot. By the time a hundred people know something, one or the other of them will be thinking about where he could sell the information, so the information might as well have been published in the first place. Facebook’s access controls aren’t really about secrecy. The whole point of Facebook’s access controls, is to manipulate people by whispering about them behind their backs, and making sure that they find out, indirectly and eventually, by way of leakage. Or, in other words, let’s trick thirteen-year-old Megan Meier into hanging herself.

Of course, if one looks at the recorded interaction of Mark Zuckerberg and the Winkelvoss brothers, it is apparent that they were both playing the same game, only he was much better at it than they were. A basic starting point is that if one cannot program well enough to do a demo, one is not going to be able to run a technology company. As nearly as can be determined from outside, the Winkelvosses seem to have had a desperate desire to make the person who actually wrote the code work for chump change, so that he would feel cheated afterwards when they became very rich. They could not accept that the going rate to outbid Microsoft for Zuckerberg’s services would be a partnership, say twenty-five percent. They had to be seen to be big shots, who lived on other peoples’ labor. Zuckerberg could have backed away, simply told them that he was outside of their price range, and let them find their own disaster, trying to find someone who would write their code for minimum wage while working a hundred-hour week, racing against time and Zuckerberg. But Zuckerberg had the same desire as the Winkelvosses, to make them eventually realize that they had been set up. In the end, it cost him sixty-five million dollars. Quite possibly, he regards the fun as being worth the money. It is possible that only a group of young men engaged in “recreational cattiness” would have seen the business logic of something like Facebook.