Eben Moglen in 2012: “Facebook Will Not Have Success for 10 More Years.”
The other day: Eben Moglen Correctly Predicted the Demise of Social Control Media and How It Would Happen
Video: Eben Moglen on Facebook, Google and Government Surveillance
THE FOLLOWING is a transcript of the above video from 2012, which we shared 1.5 days ago:
[00:00]
Title: Are you saying that Facebook is the new KGB?
Eben Moglen: Yes. That's correct. I gave a talk to college students about Facebook in America. I called it from Lubyanka to Harvard Yard. Why do you build a prison and torture people? Why do you have informants and build a social networking system badly designed and people bring you everything? They don't think they're bringing it to you. They think they're bringing it to their friends but they're actually bringing it to Lubyanka and Lubyanka is giving it to their friends. This is not a good way to work.
[00:30]
EM: It's not bad to have social networking. Social networking is wonderful and important. It changes human life. It's bad to have it in a badly designed way.
Title: Will Facebook still be around in 10 years from now?
Eben Moglen: Facebook will not have success for 10 more years. Facebook will have success until its membership starts dropping. Once its membership starts dropping, it will be in deep trouble. The theory of Facebook is nobody can leave
[01:00]
EM: because they have to leave their friends behind. Once we create federated social networking with soft migration, Facebook will not be able to say that any more, and its death cycle will begin. This was the importance of the software called Diaspora. Diaspora is correctly engineered with respect to the one essential question, "How do I leave Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, without leaving
[01:30]
EM: my friends and followers behind?" This is the thing that as an engineering matter we need to understand. As people use more and more social networking, they don't just use one service. They don't just use Facebook, or Google Plus. They use that and Twitter or Identica or this or that. So that pretty soon start using feed aggregators because they need to aggregate the various social network feeds they get. The
[02:00]
EM: aggregator then is the crucial middleware, in the same way the browser is the crucial middleware in the Web. So you build an aggregator, which is basically what Diaspora's front side is. And you say, ok, you have all these feeds from your friends. If your friends are also using Diaspora, then you're gonna share in an encrypted way, privately. And for your friends who aren't using it yet, you'll bounce off of the public services, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, whatever. Over
[02:30]
EM: time as more and more of your friends switch to Diaspora, you disappear from the public services slowly and gracefully. So you never lose your friends, but you shift away. Why do they start using Diaspora? It's not even because they are worried about Facebook privacy. It's just a good aggregator, and they need one because they do more social networking they need better aggregation. So in the same way that Firefox frees people from a net created by Microsoft the
[03:00]
EM: web we own. FrontPage does this, therefore the browser is broken if it doesn't do the same thing and various software has moved away. Because Firefox meant that if you got tired of IE's security or your IT guys got tired of IT security problems created by IE then you could move. The same thing will happen with social networking. Whether we succeed in freedom [...], whether Diaspora, whether GNU Social, whether many other possible
[03:30]
EM: varieties because we have many talented teams working on better social networking around the planet. Many, many. One of them will begin to be an aggregation system other people like to use. Maybe tied to a browser. Maybe not tied to a browser. And as people begin to adopt that aggregation system, they will softly move to secure sharing. At some point there will come a day when Facebook has a maximum number of users. A billion, a billion five, a billion seven? I don't know. But once it starts to fall, it will come apart quickly. Because then people will realize you don't have to leave your friends. Why do we stay with this Facebook? What is it that the service gives us that's worth the spying? And the numbers are not particularly impressive. We know now from the IPO documents for sure, Facebook takes in $4.40 per year per user.
[04:00]
EM: Huh? $4.40? 3.25€, right? That's not very much money. And they're not providing anything that's worth all that much, once we have a good substitute and people don't lose touch with their friends by shifting, they'll naturally shift. Ten years is a good outside bet about the maximum length of Facebook's life.
His predictions turned out to be accurate around 2019. █