Pervasive Labour Union

Olivier Auber (olivier.auber@vub.ac.be) To: Mark Zuckerberg (markzuckerberg@facebook.com)

Hi Mark!

Best wishes and congratulations on your good resolutions 2018!

1) you tell us that you have realized that "with the rise of a small number of big tech companies — and governments using technology to watch their citizens — many people now believe technology only centralizes power rather than decentralizes it."

Only a belief? Isn't it a little real? And you're here for something, aren't you?

On top of that, you tell us that you are "interested to go deeper and study the positive and negative aspects of these technologies (of decentralization)"

That's cool ! You should know that others have been working on decentralized networks for a long time - already long before Facebook was created - to create the conditions for a more equitable and healthy society. If your awareness is real, you can probably help us. We lack developers!

2) You also seem to have understood that your algorithms made people crazy by flooding them with sponsored posts and fake news. You say: "strengthening our relationships improves our well-being and happiness." So you're going to modify some lines of code to reinforce what you call our "strong ties" that have a lot of "value" according to you. In the end you want "the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent".

That's cool ! However, my dear Mark, you must understand that this time is even more precious than what you imagine.

For my part, let's say I spend(t) about an hour a day on Facebook developing these strong ties and my own professional documentation. Apart from that, I also spend(t) some "recreational time". This point is mentioned below *.

As my strong ties and my documentation are irrecoverable by the Facebook backup system as I explained to your colleague Yann LeCun¹, I must note that Facebook stole them from me.

Let's see how much it costs ...

365 hours a year, that is round to 50 days. If I count my day price at USD 1,000 (it's very reasonable, FB's lawyers are paid USD 1,000 per hour), that's USD 50,000 a year. Since I have been on Facebook for 7 years, I will send you a USD 350,000 bill

All the statistics indicate that I am an average user of Facebook in terms of duration of use. Hence we can multiply this cost by the number of users (not the current 2 billion but say 1 billion as an average number during the past seven years). Thus we obtain the figure of:

USD 350,000,000,000,000 Three hundred Fifty Thousand Billion Dollar

In conclusion, my dear Mark, you provide a true interoperability of personal data that would allow people not to be hostages of Facebook and its centralization, or you repay all of them!

Yours

Olivier Auber

Attached document: MyFacebookInvoice²

(*) The recreational time is not counted. Indeed, the entertainment provided by Facebook is funded by advertising. That is to say that everyone pays for this entertainment through its daily consumption of products overcharged because of the advertising budgets of the brands captured to a large extent by Facebook ..

1) Mark Zuckerberg's resolution #1: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104380170714571 2) Mark Zuckerberg's resolution #2: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10104413015393571

Facebook Invoice Generator: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfKtqRF8tTEJ3mzz7YhjvTmZQ72JyG9tbQ0mQIhTna73o0ciQ/viewform

Original publication: http://perspective-numerique.net/wakka.php?wiki=MarkZuckerbergEnglish