In 2008, most people thought Facebook was fun and Silicon Valley was run by well-meaning nerds. Tom Hodgkinson recalls an article he wrote that year which has proved somewhat more prophetic

Private Eye magazine has a regular item called “Eye Told You So” in which they remind readers that they were on to certain stories far earlier than Fleet Street’s finest, and quote from a back issue. One example might be the Peter Mandelson and Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

In the same spirit I today offer you “Idler Told You So” where I quote from a long piece I wrote for the Guardian on 2008 on the subject of Facebook and Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal (others include Elon Musk and David Sacks), who put $500,000 into Facebook in 2004 and became a board member.

Yes, I know that quoting from your own work is supposed to be bad manners, but please indulge me this once.

At the time comments were dismissive. I remember the online wits of the day posting remarks along the lines of “get back in your cave, dude” and “I think he’s taking it all a bit seriously”.

Back then people believed that Silicon Valley was largely liberal and progressive in its politics.

Facebook then had a mere 59 million users compared to the three billion it claims today. Investors were pouring money in because they correctly believed that Facebook would grow into a massive ad sales company with enormous profit margins (today Meta turns over $200 billion annually in ad sales and makes pre-tax profits of $80 billion).

Thiel, I wrote, was anything but progressive.

“He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the ‘multiculture’ led to a lessening of individual freedoms.”

Truly, Thiel later found an ideological ally in Trump.

The Internet massively suited his ambitions.

“The Internet is immensely appealing to neocons such as Thiel because it promises a certain sort of freedom in human relations and in business, freedom from pesky national laws, national boundaries and suchlike. The Internet opens up a world of free trade and laissez-faire expansion.”

The business model was pure genius. The people who run the company “simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts voluntarily upload their ID details, photographs and lists of their favourite consumer objects. Once in receipt of this vast database of human beings, Facebook then simply has to sell the information back to advertisers.”

Newspapers, I wrote, had better watch out.

“[B]y comparison with Facebook, newspapers, for example, begin to look hopelessly outdated as a business model. A newspaper sells advertising space to businesses looking to sell stuff to their readers. But the system is far less sophisticated than Facebook for two reasons. One is that newspapers have to put up with the irksome expense of paying journalists to provide the content. Facebook gets its content for free. The other is that Facebook can target advertising with far greater precision than a newspaper.” (Facebook doesn’t have to pay sub-editors either. It doesn’t care about typographical errors.)

I then watched with horror as the Guardian, perhaps in an effort to look au courant, covered their websites with links to Facebook. In doing so the Guardian handed its readers to Mark Zuckerberg for free. Soon it became true that if you wanted to advertise to Guardian readers, you might do better to pay Facebook than the Guardian. Newspapers and magazines all over the world struggled, closed down, cut fees, changed their business models or shrank.

I mention all this because it fits in nicely with our Book of the Week, Enshittification, by long-time Silicon Valley critic and author Cory Doctorow, which reveals the various tricks used by the big tech firms to get us trapped in their systems. My other hero in this area would be Jaron Lanier who wrote the brilliantly titled Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

Live well
Tom

A Drink with the Idler

Next week’s guest on “A Drink with the Idler” is the author and economist Guy Standing, who will be talking about how to revive the education industry, which today serves commercial interests rather than its teachers and students. That’s Thursday 5 March at 6pm. Book tickets here.
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