| Frederic Neyrat on Wed, 10 Jan 2018 18:58:34 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: <nettime> Quit Facebook: Open letter to Yann LeCun |
Open letter to Yann LeCun, former Professor at College de France, Head of Research in Artificial Intelligence at Facebook.
From Olivier Auber, researcher, Free University of Brussels (VUB)
Dear Yann
as a researcher as you are too, but in another area, that is Natural Intelligence (NI), I would like to address you publicly to let you know that I'm leaving Facebook, probably definitely.
The reason is simple. Facebook is obviously a powerful tool of communication. Many researchers I work with have become accustomed to using it without asking too much questions for their informal exchanges. The conversations that are conducted there are sometimes futile, but often also of the greatest interest.
But I realize that these conversations, in a way, no longer belong to us when they are conducted on Facebook!
The proof is that when you want to leave Facebook, the platform offers to bring with you a summary archive. But this archive does not contain:
- links included in your personal posts (just that!)
- discussions following your personal posts.
- Comments left on other posts
- the links of posts that you republish.
- your address book (you get the names, not the mails or other coordinates theoretically shared with you)
In short, it's a real hostage taking!
In other words, Facebook looks like a sort of Far West saloon in which alcohol would be free. If you go in, not to drink, but to simply chat with your friends, you realize when you go out that your conversations and your address book no longer belong to you. They belong to the boss of the saloon! To top it off, the boss forbids you to say goodbye one by one to your friends and retrieve their details. Personal messages are indeed blocked after a few hundred!
In short, by this open letter, I wish to alert my colleagues and more generally all professional or independent intellectual workers. Do not post your ideas on Facebook! Do not lead any interesting conversation on Facebook! Instead, choose to chat on free distributed social networks such as Diaspora or Mastodon. Choose shared intelligence platforms like Seenthis. In particular, my friends, independent researchers or independent artists, do not wait until Mark Zuckerberg, enriched to the extreme by your free work, wants to pay you a basic income. He has no legitimacy to do that! Instead, experiment with distributed free money creation networks such as Duniter.
Dear Yann, to conclude, I do not doubt that thanks to your talent and that of the researchers you have gathered, Facebook can one day realize the most beautiful Artificial Intelligence. On this day, however, by behaving like this, Facebook is likely to be emptied of its users. Gone!
Cheers
Olivier Auber
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