Is this the end of facebook? Has it faced its last book? Booked its… whatever. Is it even possible that the world’s biggest… errr… thing, with 27million users, possibly 3.7 billion or 1.43 trillion (neither know nor care), and valued at about 426 billion dollars (or was til last tuesday), could simply vanish from our phones/screens/lives?? What would happen to Mark Zuckerberg? Would he just die? Vanish. Or get unliked by everyone who has ever heard of him?

Because, like all tech companies, facebook is a ‘smoke’n’mirrors’ kind of deal. Its just a facility for processing data. In the normal case, our personal data that we ‘share’ and ‘like’, like ‘I’ve just checked in to Burger King in Leighton Buzzard with a woman named Zenith who used to be a man named Kevin. Please don’t tell my wife. Who used to be my husband.’ Very important information that could change the future of the entire democratic structure of the entire planet!!

But following recent revelations, it would appear that this information has a value beyond rubies in the electoral world and has been somewhat abused by facebook with the aid of the Cambridge Analyticas of this world. Because I’m sure they weren’t the only company to benefit from facebook’s immense wealth of personal data it stores about us.

So first Mozilla decided to take away its adverts on facebook. Then, very tellingly, Mr Technology himself, Elon Musk, deleted his facebook pages for both his Space-X and Tesla cars businesses. And that’s big. Because Elon Musk, as well as probably being the cleverest man on the planet (no competition at all now that Stephen Hawking has gone to his black hole in the ground), is a lover of innovation and techno-inspiration. Others will follow and abandon facebook, doubtlessly, even though they haven’t done anything strictly illegal. Other than selling personal data without permission. Though it did have kind of permission, at least to hold that information and we all know that such details are used in marketing, because we see it every day. And as they say; all the data in the world can’t make a shitty politician electable (though if there was a case for that argument it looks a lot like Donald J. Trump), but it can help to discredit a good politician, either like Hillary Clinton, or even an honest one.

Or it maybe that facebook has just run its course. It does get a bit boring after a while. That ‘while’ being about 3 months. He who lives by hi-tech wizardry may possibly die the same way. Who knows?

Happy Saturday

A xxxx