The Metropolis

Facebook Places, Foursquare: let me sin in peace

Mike Pollitt | Sunday 3 October, 2010 19:30

Photo by Andrew E. Larsen

It’s like scene from Bourne, or an updated Le Carre. You slip silently out of your house, a bag of nerves, tiptoeing down the stairs lest your housemates hear. You scuttle quickly down the road, heart pulsating as you pass your friendly neighbour’s door, dodging the attentions of their amicable dog.

A furtive glance over your shoulder, then a dive down a warren of back alleys, keeping well clear of the exposed main roads. Finally you arrive at your second favourite coffee place (because they know your favourite, they’d be able to find you there. They’ll never find you here). You sit down, in a corner far from the window. You take out your book. You’ve made it; achieved the impossible. You’ve found a moment for yourself in this time-devouring city. It’s nothing less than a modern urban miracle.

At last you can breathe out, and relax. But that’s a mistake. Because before you reach the end of the first page of your book, a chilling voice cuts across the muzak, sending shivers of dread down your spine. Someone wants to talk to you. And it’s worse than a stranger, it’s a friend.

Welcome to the world of Facebook places, of geolocation, of Foursquare. Every where you go, every step you take, detectors in your phone post updates to the world. Anyone can find you. You’re never alone. We’re our own Big Brothers, we’re bugging ourselves. Even Orwell at his most prescient never thought it would come to this.

And that’s before we get to the practical objections. Pleaserobme.com does a nice job of pointing out the idiocy of advertising to burglars when your house is empty while you’re busy checking in at McDonalds. Although you might be forgiven for thinking that anyone who uses Foursquare – essentially a tool for corporations to get idiots to become walking advertisements in exchange for a made up title (you want to be Mayor of your nearest Starbucks? Really?!) – deserves to be robbed of everything they have.

And what of stalking? I like to think that I’m not too weird. I have a job; both my eyes point in the same direction; I don’t collect dead moths. And yet I confess that I always get on the same tube carriage on my morning commute, partly because said carriage is occasionally occupied by a very pretty girl from somewhere out East. Of course, commutes being what they are, it rarely happens that we both end up on the same carriage of the same train. But it brightens my mornings when we do. I would submit that this behaviour, while not entirely savoury, is nevertheless at the socially acceptable end of the stalking spectrum. But suppose I found out this girl’s name, or her online presence? Suppose I discovered one day that she’d checked in to a local pub. Would I resist the urge to drop by? If I did, I would be sliding dangerously towards the “weird” region of the stalker spectrum. Some of us, it turns out, are clinging to normality by a very fine thread. We don’t need technology giving any help to our darker desires.

And the reason all this – the check-ins, the location mapping, the relentless status updates – is a bad idea is that human society functions on deceit. White lies, faked excuses, deliberately missed calls – without these things we’d have no option but to tell each the truth. All the time. About everything. No relationship, friendship or family could survive such an intolerable strain.

Social media evangelists believe that not just online, but as humans in the real world we should be set to share as a default. There’s a naïve nobility to the thought. But they’re disastrously wrong. We need boundaries. We need privacy. We need lies. Otherwise we find ourselves living not in freedom, but in a tyranny of everybody else. So reader, resist! Don’t share. Don’t tell the truth. Be secretive and furtive and coy. That way, together, we can truly build a better world.

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