Monday 14 January 2008

So...Facebook is evil. Adverts are evil. Investors to be next?

Tom Hodgkinson at the Guardian has just published a bizzare piece about Facebook. Others better qualified will, I'm confident, tear it to pieces on a line-by-line basis, but I do get a little nervous that this view of the world it portrays. I recently met a very bright and capable young technologist, who'd done great work for charities on fundraising using some really creative techniques. Whilst he expressed interest in doing his own technology start-up one day, he came to the table with such a slanted view that "advertising was fundementally evil", that it makes me worry that Mr Hodgkinson represents a significant part of the population. Facebook is dammed in this piece by loose association (via a shared investor and a specialist fund) with the CIA- and thus makes the implication that Facebook is really a CIA vehicle. Is this level of paranoia really so far from being clinically recognisable?