This facebook article from the Guardian Unlimited was brought to my attention on a few lists, With friends like these… written by Tom Hodgkinson. (The Idler magazine) This article does an in-depth analysis on the people behind facebook and their philosophical-economic motivations. It made me realise that joining social media platforms like facebook is like signing up to a company or corporation that you detest. Something you would never do if you understood in advance what they where about, which is where in following what I would call a “social media fashion”, i.e. blindly follow your neighbour, some very bizarre companies are making huge economic gains. These developments also have quite a significant affect on the development of the Internet. For example, connections could be made with MySpace and YouTube.

Some quotes from the article:

Thiel’s philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to be proved correct in the case of Thiel’s virtual worlds: the desired object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous popularity of Facebook.

Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects, but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving money around the world with no restriction.

Jean Burgess Why I am deleting my facebook account