Adbusters

The #ZUCKUP Dilemma

The battle for the soul of global activism.

Today, without warning and without comment, Facebook deleted the pages of fifty predominantly left and student-run organizations in the United Kingdom. Having forged an uneasy relationship with Facebook, activists, culture jammers and revolutionaries around the world now face a tremendous dilemma.

On the one hand, it is true that Facebook's social networking platform has served revolutionary organizers well in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere. The speed by which a call to protest can snowball into bodies on the streets intent on toppling a regime is awe inspiring and for the foreseeable future, Facebook will continue to play an important role in organizing protests and insurrections. And yet, Facebook is, in its essence, a capitalist business venture whose raison d'être is the commercialization of human relations. It is terrifying, and ultimately self-defeating that a commercially driven enterprise has insinuated itself into the soul of global activism.

On a deeper level, however, beyond all self-recriminations and angry tweets against Facebook's latest #zuckup the question remains: How will we, culture jammers, escape this dilemma? What are activists and revolutionaries to do in a world where a for-profit company has a near monopoly on social networking? Would thousands of us committing Facebook suicide wake Zuckerberg up? Could we jam Facebook into submission? Or must we develop our own non-commercial platform better suited to insurrection? What is the solution to this dilemma? How do we break the Gordian knot?

88 comments on the article “The #ZUCKUP Dilemma”

Displaying 41 - 50 of 88

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Jorge M. A.

Corporations are not evil, they are amoral. Their only goal is profit. Often that goal leads them into what we would call evil acts.

Jorge M. A.

Corporations are not evil, they are amoral. Their only goal is profit. Often that goal leads them into what we would call evil acts.

Criollo

Well, a very good idea will be, create a new social network, like a fight platform... independent from the consumerism networks!

Criollo

Well, a very good idea will be, create a new social network, like a fight platform... independent from the consumerism networks!

thinkpadius

There is a replacement in the works - I'm not going to spam links, but you should check out Diaspora, it's the open-source facebook replacement. it is in the alpha stage with very few features so far, but people want it - it received over $200K when it was on kickstarter, well over the $10K it was asking for.

thinkpadius

There is a replacement in the works - I'm not going to spam links, but you should check out Diaspora, it's the open-source facebook replacement. it is in the alpha stage with very few features so far, but people want it - it received over $200K when it was on kickstarter, well over the $10K it was asking for.

Anonymous

A good idea would be to create a new social network as a platform of fighting, and independent of the networks of consumerism. The dilemma is that this new network could then become on a new Facebook

Anonymous

A good idea would be to create a new social network as a platform of fighting, and independent of the networks of consumerism. The dilemma is that this new network could then become on a new Facebook

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