This article was taken from the June 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
As a Silicon Valley-based networker, my job is grabbing other people's attention on Twitter and Facebook so that I can become ubiquitous.
I am an influencer, a wannabe Jeremy Bentham -- what futurists call a "Super Node", the vanguard of the workforce that, they predict, will increasingly come to dominate the 21st-century digital economy.
But, like the solitary utilitarian, who has been on public display at University College London since the industrial age, I've become little more than a corpse on perpetual display in a transparent box. I am in a place called social media, that permanent self-exhibition zone of our new digital age.
This place is built on a network of increasingly intelligent and mobile electronic products that connect everyone on the planet through services such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.
Rather than a virtual or second life, social media is becoming life itself -- the central and increasingly transparent stage of human existence, what Silicon Valley VCs now call an "internet of people".
All the Valley grandees -- Reid Hoffman (Wired 04.12), internet moguls such as Twitter cofounder Biz Stone and heavyweight investor Chris Sacca, Second Life founder Philip Rosedale and the technology journalist Mike Malone, the so-called "Boswell of Silicon Valley" -- have embraced the pre-modern faith that the social is hardwired into all of us. But, whereas these architects of our social future seemed to possess all the answers about this connected future, my mind is filled only with questions: where are we going and how will we get there?
I have come to understand that the social -- the sharing of our personal information, our location, our taste and our identities on social networks -- is the internet's newest new thing. Every new social platform, social service, social app, social page is becoming a piece of this new social-media world -- from social journalism to social entrepreneurship to social commerce to social production to social learning to social charity to social email to social gaming to social capital to social television to social consumption to social consumers to the "social graph", an algorithm that supposedly maps out each of our unique social networks. And given that the internet is becoming the connective tissue of 21st-century life, the future -- our future, yours and mine and everyone else's on the ubiquitous network -- would, therefore, be, you guessed it, social. But the truth, the reality of social media, is an architecture of human isolation rather than one of community. The future will be anything but social. That's the real killer app of the networked age.
Unfortunately, sharing has become the new Silicon Valley religion. As I argue in my book Digital Vertigo, privacy -- that condition essential to our happiness as human beings -- is being dumped into the dustbin of history. "Fail fast," Reid Hoffman advises entrepreneurs. "You jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down," is his advice for a startup. But the problem is that, by so radically socialising today's digital revolution, we are, as a species, collectively jumping off a cliff.
And if we fail to build a networked society that protects the rights to individual privacy and autonomy in the face of today's cult of the social, we can't -- like the eternally optimistic Hoffman -- launch a new company. Society isn't just another startup -- which is why we can't entirely trust Silicon Valley entrepreneurs such as Hoffman or Stone with our future. Failing to properly assemble the social-media airplane after jumping off that cliff and crashing to the ground means jeopardising those precious rights to individual privacy, secrecy and, yes, the liberty that individuals have won over the last millennium.
Andrew Keen is author of Digital Vertigo, published by Constable on May 24
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
