Facebook or its Instagram, are already archived, socialized, and disseminated in near real-time. For such services, the archive is the primary channel of communication; the index is the medium of the message.
As a model for Cloud Polis, Facebook ’ s social graph relies on at least four techniques: identity and display, network closure, visual communication, and fabricated currencies. Through the profile and the feed, Facebook gives standard form to acts of social display, filtering them through perpetual refinements and updates. Participation in this narrowed Cloud “ public ” means a consistent, performative fashioning, and the “ care of the self ” as a public artifact of its own shadows and connections. Peers like what you say, they share your offerings, and, in time, they subscribe to you, the individual character in your own reality mini-show. The fabrication of the self becomes the primary project of this platform, at least for the User, but in time, this general model could take many different forms, as subjectivity and agency are dispersed into nonlocal networks and assignments. For Facebook today, that means Tarde meets Sartre meets Pavlov: this “ hell of other people ” is drawn as a social prison of timelines, passionate positiontaking, political sentimentality, “ weird tricks ” for this and that, pseudoscience, teen and mid-life narcissism, and stalking, all paid for in microseconds of attention.
The Facebook model is a closed and largely opaque network. How exactly its Users network with one another is based on proprietary graph algorithms and subject only to periodic, largely useless protests and petitions. Spawned in the image of the Ivycovered walls of elite mating grounds, Facebook maintains the reality and illusion of a well-pruned curated lifestream (restricted from other random people, that is, not from Facebook), such that one ’ s social network is not spammed by usurping gatecrashers. In some ways, this closure mimics the enclaved and privatized Cloud itself, monetized mostly by a few early investors. Whenever pressed, it seems that Facebook explicitly and emphatically does not endorse the cosmopolitan vision of information infrastructures professed by Google. However, as default rentier of our social affiliations and wannabe concierge of their capitalization, this conservatism may stunt the platform ’ s long-term evolution. <sup>51</sup> For one, it pushes Users toward regulatory remedies for perceived mismanagement of what they take to be “ their ” content in a “ public ” forum. It also invites the legal preemption of many techniques for social graph capitalization that Facebook (or any other graph-based Cloud) might wish to pursue and leverage in the future toward further independence. The company ’ s leadership is unloved and popularly perceived as selfish, petulant, and uncommitted (as reflected in the company ’ s IPO problems, the David Fincher movie, a hundred Sean Parker jokes, a smirking Eduardo Saverin defecting to Singapore to avoid paying his taxes, and the contrarian public persona of early funder Peter Thiel). There are, however, many other examples of network closure that deliver very different effects (Apple ’ s own take on the walled garden is discussed below) not the least of which is the model provided by China ’ s portfolio of social media properties like Renren, Sina Weibo, Tencent/QQ, and others.
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Cloud Layer