Inside Facebook
BBC2 Money Season Documentary | 05 December 2011
This was intended as a post for my company’s new website. The designers said I should ‘post’ regularly on it with my thoughts on adjacent matters to the media & digital payments markets we were in.
Apparently, my comments transgressed a number of unwritten protocols and so I was persuaded by my colleagues not to use it. Having zero interest in putting up the kind of anodyne, tedious ‘content’ that the designer had in mind, I never bothered again.
I’m quite pleased with this in hindsight: it foresaw how ineffectual former British politicians could seek gainful employment in the pay of the online giants and the absolute nonsense that virtual currencies are, without the backing of central banks and the implicit tax-payer guarantee this represents.
“A lot of griping about this documentary, generally on the lack of Mark Zuckerberg who popped up only to offer the occasional anodyne, gnomic observation. Much more in evidence were the tanned and toned shoulders of Emily Maitlis, mostly denied to her legions of followers that make up the 10 O'Clock News audience who normally must make do with just the doe-eyes and the Head Girl demeanour.
It all proved too much for the witless spinner who corpsed completely when asked the fair question of whether it was reasonable that when a Facebook user "Likes" a product, this is parlayed by the brand into a full-blown product endorsement, let alone whether or not this person’s so-called 'friends' would take a blind bit of notice of a recommendation procured in such an underhand manner.
The cognoscenti seem to concur that Facebook was not given a hard-enough time by Ms Maitlis but on this occasion, the camera whirred for an uncomfortably long time while he sat, ironically like a deer in the headlights, while the doe-eyes bored into him before eventually dredging up some narcoleptic banality from his first day at PR school. With their money, you'd think Facebook could find someone better, particularly with so many ex-New Labour media apparatchiks wandering the streets looking for pointless $1M a year posts in which to practice their Dickensian arts.
Better still was the socially-isolated programmer who had bought himself a digital dog on Facebook using Facebook Credits, a one-way exchange where users buy a Monopoly currency that can only be used to buy 'content' on Facebook. To complete the ownership experience, he had used yet more Credits to buy a digital dog turd whereupon his life was presumably complete. So there you have it: real cash turned into virtual shit and the deftest comment yet on all this nonsense.
Here's looking forward to when Emily Maitlis presents a documentary on the next currency crisis brought about by all the money that has flooded into virtual currencies, held by unregulated, unaccountable institutions that people can't get out again. Now that would be worth setting the video for, regardless of whether the shoulders are on display.“