Tom Hodgkinson of the UK Guardian has done an excellent report, With friends like these …, on the background and motivations of the investors behind Facebook. The teaser from his article:

Facebook has 59 million users - and 2 million new ones join each week. But you won’t catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not now that he knows the politics of the people behind the social networking site

Another choice quote:

He and his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been labelled “The PayPal Mafia” by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLaren supercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely competitive. He has been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury when losing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitveness, saying: “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”

But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist. He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth, which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the “multiculture” led to a lessening of individual freedoms.

It is a nice piece of investigative reporting, though there is little in it to surprise me. Capital does what Capital will do, and in this late-stage, deeply corrupt society, such ideological extremism — cloaked in “conservatism,” but in truth serving the interests of an oligarchic elite thoroughly disconnected from the interests of the rest of society — is to be expected. I place conservatism in quotes because the conservatism that reigns today bears little resemblance to anything that may have had that name in the past (I should also offer the disclaimer that I have little respect for the extremes of the left of the last century or so; it is difficult to sort out who has more blood on their hands).

It is a shame, however, to see that so many so readily abandon their privacy and freedom. Remember: the “web” is not the internet, it is merely one application that rides on it. To communicate directly with other people, one need not use the AOLs, Facebooks, Googles, or Yahoos of the world — one need only be connected to the internet.

And so long as ISPs and the Telecom companies respect one’s bits, then the medium retains its usefulness. To that end: Sonic.net is my ISP, and unlike Yahoo/SBC/AT&T and the like they regard themselves as providers of bandwidth, not as providers and regulators of “content” (whatever that is). Hence, their terms of service lack onerous restrictions on what kind of packets one may ship back and forth and do not prohibit one from running servers.

Tor is a web anonymiser service (free) that permits one to browse web sites without giving corporations detailed records of one’s every eyeblink.

And: How To Bypass Comcast’s BitTorrent Throttling. (And for those who do not know what BitTorrent is: the Wikipedia entry on BitTorrent. The short version: BitTorrent is a protocol, just like SNMP of email fame, and HTTP of the web. BitTorrent is extremely useful because it is so profoundly efficient at utilizing bandwidth.)

Finally, keep the telcos from strangling the goose that laid the golden egg: Save The Internet. For more in depth information, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I particularly like the work of legal scholar Eben Moglen on the issue of liberty in cyberspace, and as always the best source of muckraking on technology oligopolists’ machinations can be found at Groklaw.

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