There’s an interesting article on The Guardian website about Facebook, in particular the people who run it, and their ideology that drives it. It makes for interesting reading. Talking about Peter Thiel, one of the three board members of Facebook, who is a 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and futurist philosopher, it says:

His philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes’ famous characterisation of life as “nasty, brutish and short”, and towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now exists in imaginary things. 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. Bloomberg Markets puts it like this: “For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe.”Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries – and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.
[…] by his own admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he also calls “nature”, and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in this context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is a deliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright young thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for far-out techno-utopian fantasies.

It all sounds very reminiscent of the ideas of Jean Baudrillard about Simulacra and Simulation. I have to admit that I’ve not actually read much in the way of his writings first hand, but I’ve come across his ideas while at university and so have a rough idea of his thinking. This is only a quick blog post, so I don’t feel too guilty about quoting what Wikipedia has to say about him:

Baudrillard claims that modern society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that the human experience is of a simulation of reality rather than reality itself. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are signs of culture and media that create the perceived reality.

Baudrillard argued that simulation and simulacra is all that we have – we don’t have access to the real, only to the simulated hyperreality of symbols and signs. I disagree that we cannot have access to reality, and I don’t think that “hyperreality” is the universal situation that he makes it out to be. But I do think that Baudrillard’s views are a very perceptive analysis of a phenomenon that is very common in our culture, where we seek to replace reality with a more manageable simulacrum, and these simulacra are often commercially driven. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the media-saturated nature of modern Western society.

From a Christian point of view, there is a powerful similarity between simulacra and idols. We constantly struggle against the temptation to replace the reality of an awesome holy God with the idol or simulacrum of a God made to our liking and comfort. Sin drives us to attempt to distort reality to suit the needs of the self, and the drive to replace reality with self-serving simulations is ubiquitous.

I don’t think the problem is with symbols and signs in themselves. Without them, we would be less than human, and they have the ability to connect us to reality in a very powerful way. Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with email and social networking sites and so on as tools in themselves. Facebook is a really handy way of keeping in touch with people.

But it’s important to be aware of the deal that you’re striking in exchange for this convenience. There is a price to be paid out of your privacy, and you’re basically signing up to be advertised to. It’s also important to understand something of the rationale behind Facebook

The real problem arises when the symbol replaces reality rather than connecting us to reality. If you’ve ever spent an evening sat in your room browsing Facebook at the expense of actually doing something with your friends, then the simulation has begun to eat up reality. In this postmodern world, real activities and relationships are in danger of being swallowed up the endless morass of entertainment and distraction, unlimited virtual worlds where virtual selves spend virtual lives.

With technology like Second Life opening up new horizons in simulation, the process is only likely to accelerate. One of the big challenges facing us in this brave new world of technology and hyperreality is to actively maintain real, authentic activities and relationships and lives.