Occasionally I read Peter Sunde/brokep’s blog. Some of you may recognize the name; I’ve linked to and mentioned him here before. He is one of The Pirate Bay’s admins and was found guilty in trial of assisting copyright infringement, although the case is up in appeals now. Some of you may also look up to him.

In any case, I’ve found him to post pretty interesting things on his blog in general—at least when it’s not in Swedish and I can actually read it, and I just came across an interesting post he wrote a few months ago, titled “Facebook owns us.” Often we have heard of Facebook’s privacy problems and of things like people not getting the job they wanted because of Facebook. But perhaps the real danger lies in its social monopoly and its controlling effect on Facebook users’ social lives.

To better understand this, I would definitely recommend reading it, but I’ll provide the gist of it for you lazy tl;drers.

A very large number of people use Facebook. Not everyone uses Facebook, but for example, most of you reading this and almost everyone in my generation and the generations around me use Facebook to some degree. In this way, for those of us whose networks of friends stay connected through Facebook, Facebook monopolizes our social connections online and even affects us offline.

Thus, people have become connected through Facebook so much, relying on it for inviting people to offline events and so on because of its huge convenience. One of brokep’s friends wasn’t happy with Facebook for deleting his fan-made music videos on Facebook and did something that got his account completely deleted. He stopped showing up to events. People only realized later that he was never invited to some of them because he just disappeared on Facebook, and people simply rely on Facebook to invite people to events these days. At Facebook’s whim, it can deny people from being social. It can wipe out their only direct social connection with a multitude of people.

This is scary. But how do we break from the chain, a “vendor lock-in” (or “social lock-in”) of sorts, as one commenter mentioned? Open decentralized alternatives to the mega-network of Facebook seem unrealistic because the advantage of Facebook is that everyone exists on it (and that information is uniformly presented).

Here’s to hoping for the next great advance in social networking that will save us all.

Happy 2008! I’m sure everyone has a lot of expectations and goals about the coming year. I certainly do, so I’d like to wish everyone good luck in attaining their decided ambitions.

In any case, remember that time I discussed that The Pirate Bay took over IFPI.com since someone friendly to their cause donated the domain to them? Well, since then, the World Intellectual Property Organization has ordered TPB to return the domain, which they decided to do, since there didn’t seem to be a good chance of fighting for it after that point. Well, it was fun while it lasted… haha.

On another note, hopefully, I’ll get around to writing nice, unnecessarily long articles for everyone to read (or not read) sometime soon.

So this past week I received these books from Amazon:

• The Future of Ideas: the fate of the commons in a connected world by Lawrence Lessig
• Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity by Lawrence Lessig
• The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

I’m excited. I’ve already been reading Code: Version 2.0 (the updated version of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace), also written by Lawrence Lessig, and am slowly approaching its final pages.

This is the type of stuff I want to go into. I aspire to be like Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler, who are Stanford and Harvard Law professors, respectively. Since around a year ago, I’ve felt like that— “cyber” and constitutional law— was my purpose (at least the secular side of things). I just wish I had more time to read these books for fun.

And… this isn’t really necessary, but here’s what my desk looks like now with those books.