"I despise Facebook," writes Tom Hodgkinson, the editor of The Idler, in today's G2 section of The Guardian.
Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.
Mainly, Hodgkinson has a go at Facebook's backers, Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer. But he also suggests: "Just for fun, try substituting the words 'Big Brother' whenever you read the word 'Facebook'."
Hodgkinson says: "For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook doing something useful, such as reading books."
This will not surprise anyone who remembers an earlier Hodgkinson effort: Why I decided to pull the plug on email.
Alongside my "no email" policy, I resolve to make better use of the wonderful Royal Mail, and send letters and postcards to people. There is a huge pleasure in writing a letter, putting it in an envelope and sticking the stamp on it. And huge pleasure in receiving real letters, too.
Letters and postcards? In their day, those were merely new technologies for frivolity! People didn't spend so much time writing trivia when everything had to be engraved on stone tablets....
