Why I Hate Facebook

The title here is meant as an introduction to this post, but I really do hate Facebook, Google+ and Twitter (particularly) and have never participated in them and never will.  I just don't see the point and if there was a contest between which one I loathe more...Facebook, Twitter, or political parties of any kind I am not sure which one would finish last since all of them tend to either produce or encourage the same stream of brainless drivel and elevate the expositions of small minds and I hold them all in the same kind of contempt.  (I particularly love when I get emails that start out "I saw your profile on Facebook..." there is a real 'innovative' waste of electrons!).

Lets be real folks -- Facebook is NOT innovation by any stretch of the imagination. Facebook is a natural extension of the original Internet design as envisioned by Tim Berners-Lee as a text and document sharing mechanism. It was a case of someone waiting until the technologies were in place and sufficiently advanced enough to capitalize on...then doing so. That may be innovation in the warped and sometimes sick sense of what gets Wall Street excited...but it is not technological or scientific innovation as practiced by the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, or NASAs of the world.

However, a magazine arrived at the house the other day that really got my attention.  The MIT Technology Review has a long history (since 1899) of following things technological, and especially things technologically innovative.  The cover for the November/December 2012 magazine that they publish really caught my eye...and restated in few words what my frustrations have been with the state of science and technology in the USA (the small caption to the right says: "Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 moonwalker, would like a word with you.").

Fortunately, the issue talks about some people who are not giving up on the 'big problems', and more importantly recognize that we are currently falling way short.  The Founders Fund (sometimes referred to as the PayPal Mafia) is a dominant venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, and their motto is "We wanted flying cars -- instead we got 140 characters."  Interestingly enough, the firm places at least some of the blame on the VC community itself, which in the 1990s began a shift away from funding start-up firms with truly innovative ideas, to those that solved smaller, incremental or even fake problems as long as they would turn a short-term profit.

The issue is full of articles that talk to people who haven't given up, and covers topics as diverse as the crisis in higher education, dealing with the likely effects of a coming dementia epidemic, equalizing the distribution of energy to the 'have-not' areas of the world, government support for basic research, and more.  The ideas presented may seem unrealistic...but then so did Bill Gates' vision of "a computer in every home and on every desktop" when it was made.

Recommended for thinkers....