André Brock Jr.

“My students always grimace when I say the best way to understand Facebook is that it was a creation of a horny nineteen-year-old with more computing skills than social skills, and this was a way he could get to meet, in the abstract, the women he wanted to be with. Because that’s what Facebook was. It was a network that he built where people would submit pictures of themselves and he could select them at his leisure without them knowing that he was looking at them. Once you start from that understanding, Facebook’s extraction of personal data and sales to advertisers makes a lot more sense. It never has been about community. You can see how poorly they understand community with the way they moderate and run Facebook groups. It always has been about the extraction of something to satisfy the libidinal, whether it’s voyeurism or simply wanting to profit off of others.”
― André Brock Jr.