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March 26, 2018: Explaining cryptocurrency w/Alex George, Popular Mechanics - and Mark on #deletefacebook

Listen to this show:  Pop-up player!

(Above, explosm by Rob DenBleyker. See also this one.)

...or as the joke puts it:
Dad: Timmy, what would you like for your birthday?
Timmy: All I want for my birthday is one bitcoin.
Dad: What? $11,228? Don't you know that $15,475 is a lot of money! What do you need $8,498 for anyway?

This evening, Alex George, who covers technology for Popular Mechanics. (See his articles.) Alex wrote The Beginner's Guide To Bitcoin And Cryptocurrency for the current (April 2018) issue of Popular Mechanics, and he's here to help explain this timely topic.

See also, on bitcoin:

• The John Oliver video on bitcoin.

• And in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Bitcoin Is Ridiculous. Blockchain Is Dangerous by Paul Ford, who argues that like the Internet itself, the cryptocurrency fad is a bubble that will burst, but will eventually yield something useful.

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But first,...

Tech in the past week:

• I deleted my Facebook account last week. I mainly used it to post anti-Facebook articles, but I no longer want to be there at all.

• Billionaire Brian Acton, who sold WhatsApp to Facebook, feels similarly. He posted: It is time. #deletefacebook

• Elon Musk replied to Acton: "What's Facebook?" and then announced that he was deleting Tesla's Facebook presence.

• Here's how to delete Facebook, thanks to the helpful site deletefacebook.com. (See also this piece by LibrarianShipwreck, arguing that deleting Facebook is a good start, but we have to do more.)

• Douglas Rushkoff, our first Skeptech speaker last year (and past WFMU host): on CNN.com, I ditched Facebook in 2013, and it's been fine. ("You can ditch Facebook. It's OK. You will survive. And.. your life will get better.") ...and in the Los Angeles Times, How Facebook Exploited Us All:

Facebook figures out who or what each of us fears most, and then sells that information to the creators of false memes and the like, who deliver those fears directly to our news feeds. This, in turn, makes the world a more fearful, hostile and dangerous place. . . .

When Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook, a friend of his expressed surprise that people were surrendering so much personal data to the platform. “I don’t know why,” Zuckerberg said. “They trust me. Dumb ...”

We may have been dumb to trust Facebook with our data in the first place. Now we know they've been using the data to make us even dumber.

• WFMU's own Amanda Nazario posts: "I'm hopeful for a society totally free from Facebook. Without feels so much better than with."

• A research paper explains: in Quitting Facebook Leads to Higher Levels of Well-Being, researchers found that quitting Facebook has "positive effects on the two dimensions of well-being: our life satisfaction increases and our emotions become more positive." (from the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking)

• And by the way, you need to delete Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp. Zuck owns them all. As Zeynep Tufekci put it, "You’d be surprised how many people don’t know that Facebook owns Instagram and WhatsApp."

• TechCrunch's Josh Constine: Facebook has allowed so many worst-case scenarios to come true there’s too many to count, but I’m going to try *deep breath*... see also his accompanying TechCrunch piece.

• Google's Francois Chollet posted an anti-Facebook thread: "If Facebook gets to decide, over the span of many years, which news you will see (real or fake), whose political status updates you’ll see, and who will see yours, then Facebook is in effect in control of your political beliefs and your worldview." Good point, Francois! (And don't worry, we'll get to Google soon.)

• Matt Yglesias puts it well in Vox: The case against Facebook is "not just about privacy; its core function makes people lonely and sad." Yglesias suggests that Zuck "simply walk away from it, shut it down, salt the earth, and move on to doing something entirely new." Unrealistic, yes, but let's state the case: Zuck should just shut down Facebook.

• Unfortunately, Zuck is digging in: it's all someone else's fault! In this NYT interview, Zuck asks: "were there [other] apps that could have.. done something that violated people's trust?" I don't know, Zuck, maybe you should rack your brains to think who might have violated people's trust. As Open Markets Institute's Matt Stoller puts it, Zuck's defense is "increasingly bizarre. He sees himself as the victim here, that he, a powerless man worth $70B+, was tricked. He still thinks Facebook is a 'community'. And he doesn't acknowledge he threatened to sue the newspapers reporting the scandal."

• Then yesterday, Zuck bought a full-page ad in the NYT, WSJ, Washington Post, and six papers in the UK - claiming the breach was caused by "a quiz app built by a university researcher." Lame attempt to reframe the story away from his own culpability. In other words, "pay no attention to my surveillance of you - we're going to punish that bad, bad 3rd party for misusing the data we surveilled!"

• Fact is, Facebook is toxic. As Mike Caulfield put it, forget the tobacco-industry comparisons, as it's more accurate to compare Facebook to Union Carbide: "Facebook is in an industry with a lot of risk and they seek out countries with low regulation and low institutional power to experiment in."

• As Kelvin Yu put it, "In retrospect, it might have been a mistake to give Facebook all of my personal information in exchange for seeing what my high school friends eat for dinner"

...and news from TODAY, Monday:

• The FTC Is Officially Investigating Facebook for the Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal: The Federal Trade Commission announced on Monday that it has opened an investigation into Facebook and whether it violated its stated privacy policy. Here's the official FTC statement.

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And go ahead and delete Facebook! (Here's how.)