The three social media or Web 2.0 sites that I’ve deactivated since March 10th are AFH Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. I also stopped directing email to my Blackberry. This Tumblr is currently serving as the main site for Art for Humans.

I started using Myspace in earnest in late 2005, on the hunch that a Lead Artist might utilize its burgeoning popular appeal and features to assemble a collective of qualified artists for collective projects. AFH formed the AFH Friend Collective to this end, and we launched several exhibits in 2006 and -7 that drew from the AFHFC pool of artists: “Stop Fucking Praying for the Apocalypse,” and “HUM 10 +1” were the two most successful. The latter formed the basis for AFH Gallery Chinatown.

Myspace was a difficult system to use. MS never seemed to resolve whether its operations were command-control or open source. The code hacks turned out to be the open source. The MS management, strangely assigned the “Tom” persona of artificial singular user, proved to be weird and arbitrary in applying force and restraint. To be sure, preventing spam and other abuses on and by such a big pool of users is no mean task. Still, there were head-scratcher moments.

One artist friend and ultimately collaborator Christian Moeller, developed a massive following of 30,000 MS friends. He devoted thousands of hours to his MS project. One day, MS shut down his site, without explanation, and Christian was forced to rebuild his site from scratch, a task that he could no longer instill with his initial enthusiasm for the wired community of MS. Such interventions were hardly uncommon.

Facebook came along at a lucky time for Facebook. Dependency is not something netters, especially young ones, long tolerate. The clumsiness of the MS platform and its limitations, as well as the lowest-common-denominator culture it encouraged by its structure, made some users crave a more elegant and exclusive - meaningful - solution. The cryptic drive-by commenter and friend harvester on MS contributed a lot to FB’s cause for existence, as a negation. Twitter, I guess, proved to be the second negation in this respect.

It should be recalled that Google in the meantime was crushing search engine competitors - harmlessly (?) - throughout the compressed timeline. The portable mobile devices of the telecoms were expanding their apps and utility simultaneously. The dimensional phenomena in the domain proved a perfect storm for MS. When Murdoch bought the company, it was over. I think he acquired MS to kill it, Gannett-style. The organizing promise these popular platforms presented for bottom-top democracy were apparent to any analyst worth his salt.

Which leads to a topic: the channeling effect of MGT society. A good metaphor is the food industry’s mechanism for pushing cattle to slaughter, then distributing the parts to retail outlets, and ultimately to the stomachs of consumers. Social media, for all the boosterism, has been co-opted to serve as a processing tool for online social exchange by the usual corporate syndicates.

While it’s very true that individual participants are still finding excellent uses for the systems, and that beautiful community organizing movements can work on Web 2.0 platforms, the macro is slaughtering the micro into media bits for consumption, and the promise of broadband and universal web access is failing to deliver democracy. What mostly occurs in today’s social media is an extension of media syndication, for commercial purposes.

This analysis doesn’t reach the real problem, however. The power-value of MS, FB and Twitter isn’t primarily in their advertiser apps. The juice fueling these platforms is their value as data pools, as case study environments, and back-door surveillance networks. An average user, enjoying FB for its capacity for reconnecting people separated by time and distance, isn’t usually aware of or concerned that an anonymous administrator or analyst or Homeland Security agent can acquire and apply data contained in a FB profile, 4Dimensionally integrating that information into massive databases to whatever end.

When the financial sector giants, the ones who caused the financial catastrophes of 2007 through the present and for the foreseeable future, began to divvy up the major social media sites among themselves, using blood-money from their US racket to do so, I’d had enough. If my high school friends want to let me know what they’re up to, they can email me at art at artforhumans dot com. I’ll be dumping all Google apps soon. “Do no harm,” my ass.

Animation Still, “The Marriage of Art and Science,” for the DDDD installation “Sirens + Conflagrations” (1999)