There's a really full-throated takedown of Facebook over at the Guardian. Tom Hodgkinson sounds a bit like a cranky old man for the first part of his piece (Facebook, he argues, "encourages a disturbing competitivness [sic] around friendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts for nothing and quantity is king" -- as though Facebook users were no longer making distinctions between Facebook-only "friends" and real-life friends), but ends up with an effective, multi-pronged attack on the site. He covers everything from the super-creepy philosophies of the site's small cadre of top-level backers (one of whom co-wrote "The Diversity Myth," "a detailed attack on liberalism and... multiculturalist ideology") to the weird, salivating attention Facebook has received from the CIA.

But Hodgkinson's most effective arguments are about the nature of the site itself: what it really is and how it will inevitably be used. He writes:

The creators of the site need do very little bar fiddle with the programme. In the main, they simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts voluntarily upload their ID details, photographs and lists of their favourite consumer objects. Once in receipt of this vast database of human beings, Facebook then simply has to sell the information back to advertisers, or, as Zuckerberg puts it in a recent blog post, "to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web". And indeed, this is precisely what's happening. On November 6 last year, Facebook announced that 12 global brands had climbed on board. They included Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, Verizon, Sony Pictures and Condé Nast.

[snip]

Now, by comparision with Facebook, newspapers, for example, begin to look hopelessly outdated as a business model. A newspaper sells advertising space to businesses looking to sell stuff to their readers. But the system is far less sophisticated than Facebook for two reasons. One is that newspapers have to put up with the irksome expense of paying journalists to provide the content. Facebook gets its content for free. The other is that Facebook can target advertising with far greater precision than a newspaper. Admit on Facebook that your favourite film is This Is Spinal Tap, and when a Spinal Tap-esque movie comes out, you can be sure that they'll be sending ads your way.

When you really examine Facebook, when you sit down and look at the heaps upon heaps of bells and whistles that have been hung on the site since it was rolled out a few years ago, it becomes hard to argue with Hodgkinson's view that "Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway."

But I'm going to keep using it anyway.