Facebook has hit two billion monthly active users. That’s two billion souls united in sharing inspirational memes, stalking their exes, and engaging in nasty arguments with people they have never met. There are now more people active on this 13-year-old social network than were even alive on planet Earth a century ago.
In the heady, utopian early days of the world wide web, techno-evangelists used to argue that it would lay waste to all media centralization, liberating us from corporate control. Facebook is the dialectical reflux that came to crush that naïve hope, giving us a level of centralization more centralized than anything one could have imagined in the age of big top-down media. Everyone depends on the same site to get into the stream. read more