<nettime> Un-friend my Heart - Ilana Gershin on Facebook

[David Garcia <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk>]

Un-friend my Heart - Revisiting Ilana Gershin on Facebook 

Despite being nearly a decade old its a good time to take another look at 
the work of anthropologist Ilana Gershin’s work The Ethics of Disconection in 
Neo-liberal Age on Fb pioneering role of schooling a generation in 
becoming entrapraneurs of the self (Foucault).. 

Gershin’s articles and book provides a vison of Facebook as a near perfect 
mirror the neo-liberal vision of the market as an information 
processor more powerful than any human individual or collective intellect (Mirowski). 
We could call it Thatcher/Reagan's all knowing “deity" whose universal catechism 
remains “you can’t buck the market”.  

Just as we can never know as much as the market knows, so we as individuals can 
never know ourselves as well as Facebook knows us. As neccesarily flawed. In 
an information society Its our equivalent of original sin. In this atomised world any misfortune 
is our fault alone any victory owes nothing to the collective. The self is our responsibility a mere 
aglomeration of interchaneable parts, packets of truth, that render privacy a fiction. Our only task 
is to continuously assemble and disassemble in response to the universal metric of likes. 
FB is the near perfect embodiment of the market economy transfigured into the market society. 
What could possible go wrong.
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