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

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

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 Facebook’s pioneering role of educating 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-liberalism vision of the market as an information 
processor more powerful than any human individual or collective intellect (Mirowski). 
We could call it the Thatcher/Reagan “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 intellects in 
an information society Its our equivalent of original sin. In this atomised world any misfortune 
is our fault alone any victor owes nothing to the collective. The self a mere aglomeration of 
interchaneable parts, packets of truth, we must 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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