The Great Big Facebook Conspiracy

I was having a ponderance the other day. It happens from time to time. I have a lot of time to think, and get an awful lot of it done while staring at the white pages in front on me that I really should be filling with text. It is both an awful burden and an absolutely wonderful curse and I love it, as a little bit of mental masturbation is always a lark.

What is more fun that thinking is completely off the wall thinking as, I will admit, that I do have a soft spot especially for conspiracy theories. Now, I'm not exactly the sort of person who sits at home refusing to use electricity because 'the man' is onto me, all the while eating cold tins of beans and wearing a tin foil hat. I'm not quite that bat shit crazy yet. In my autumn years I hope to achieve it, but alas for the moment I appear to be borderline sort of normal. Still, it's fun and pretty much just human nature to look into things – Do aliens exist? Did we really get to the moon? Was the Titanic an insurance job? Just how is Jared Allen's hair cool? That sort of stuff.

Last night, when I was once more failing to get to sleep, I did some thinking. In it, I came to the conclusion that Facebook is a massive conspiracy. Now, I know how mad that that sounds, but hear me out. I promise I'm not a nutcase who is currently sat in the bushes outside your window touching himself.

Just imagine for a minute, if you will, that you are some big powerful government man. There, don't you feel important? Looking over all the peons with a sense of unjustified superiority like that, whoa boy you sure are a big shot. But, I hear you say, what are all those zillions of people out there up to? What are they doing? Thinking? Interested in?

Also, just the other day, you happened to be having a nice informal, dress down top secret meeting with some of your bestest buddies in Industry. They were complaining that it was getting harder and harder to control the surfs, what with the advent of movable type. It was much harder to predict their patterns and advertising had become awfully broad spectrum (as anyone who has seen L'Oreal advertised on Kerrang! TV while then flicking to MTV2 only to see fish fingers being hawked will attest to).

If only there was a way to not only find out what people were up to but to also track what they were interested in. If only...

Now for the conspiracy bit – I really do have a hard time believing that something like Facebook sprung up all by itself. I mean, no doubt that the guy\guys (depending on which legal POV you take) who dreamt it up in Harvard did have nout but the best intentions for it at the time, but I find it a struggle to believe that in 4 years a business can go from helping a few Uni students keep in contact to gaining a massive, multi-billion dollar user base. Think of all the personal information that is kept on Facebook – they can word filter what you are thinking, track what you click on, see where and how you update and so on and so forth. And I mean sure, although it is not done obviously, Facebook does sell data. If I had a wager on it, I'd bet that that data was not just stuff to advertisers to see if you would prefer a red or green car...

But anyway, as I've shown already if I put money on it I'm usually wrong.

Assuming I haven't been hauled away in the dead of night, see you Sunday!