Jeff Pooley’s essay “The Consuming Self: From Flappers to Facebook” introduced me to the concept of “the authenticity bind.”

The pervasiveness of what might be called “calculated authenticity” leads…to rejectionist forms of authenticity — real authenticity, untainted by the professional smile and the glad hand. These flights to deeper kinds of authenticity are, however, marketed in turn — returned, that is, to the promotional fold.

I wrote about this dilemma earlier this summer. Since then I’ve engaged in a sporadic but fruitful email interview with Pooley, who is associate professor of media & communication at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He’s got a book in the works on the “calculated authenticity” theme, which is exciting. (And another book on its way before that, about the media theorist James W. Carey.)

I love Pooley’s analysis but recoil from some of its implications. I wanted to press him on some of the questions I had about where the authenticity bind leaves us, practically speaking. And I didn’t want to wait for his book.

Here’s our exchange.

ROSENBERG: I want to start by asking about how you arrived at the concept of the authenticity bind. Authenticity is clearly a complex term, and one whose intellectual-historical pedigree you trace in your essay. But the “bind” part was new to me. Where does it come from?

POOLEY: The main source for this idea comes from my sense that markets are fundamentally dynamic and adaptive. Marx was right about this at least: there’s a manic, restless energy built into capitalism. Schumpeter celebrated this dynamism as the “perennial gale of creative destruction”—which is celebrated in turn by peddlers of Silicon Valley-style disruption porn. (There’s the irony that, in American politics, defenders of tradition make common cause with prophets of creative destruction; it’s their tradition that the market melts into air.)

My view is that this carnal, rudderless energy doesn’t just empty out Ohioan steel towns, but also courses through the cultural industries. Popular culture in a consumer society is a lot of things, not just a reflection of market pressures. But the same frantic search for new markets and higher profits is gale-like here too. Media makers are gripped by the relentless pursuit of new resonances — new bundles of consumer attention. That attention is sold to advertisers, who are also busy scavenging the flotsam of resonant meaning floating about.

To get to your “bind” question: the theme of authenticity is an especially attractive hook to sell stuff. As I describe in the article, the authenticity ideal (though of recent origin) has a strong hold on us. We want to think of ourselves as singular, expressive beings. Hence the resonance for advertisers. But the tie-in with the ad pitch discredits the very language of self-fulfillment. So we go looking for a deeper kind of authentic living, resistant to marketing.

The problem is that there is no market-free space, at least not for long. The Dionysian core of a market-driven culture — with its gleeful agnosticism — makes the dog-collar-and-safety-pin aesthetic attractive to the ad guys. In whatever new version it appears. That’s the bind: there’s nothing prude or restrained about them, as Thomas Frank has brilliantly shown. There’s no way to out-rebel them; they’ll party with you at Burning Man. And you’ll realize that they’re using you to sell stuff. Yet again.

ROSENBERG: So I guess the first set of choices this presents us with is: you can just keep trying to dig a new level down toward the authentic — knowing there’s no destination, no core, at bottom, but hoping to stay one step ahead of the marketing machine at least some of the time. Or you can turn around and say, OK, if the “real me” is going to be used to sell stuff, I might as well get the profit myself — which leads you into the realm of what you call “calculated authenticity,” the conscious choice to aim for the Real Me because you know it’s going to pay off in some way.

I keep trying to think of other creative responses but coming up dry. Is that all there is?

POOLEY: This is a big question. I should probably back up and say that I do not view the market and its cunning adaptations as the main story. The union of — and tension between — self-promotion and self-fulfillment is not a product of Madison Avenue.

Leaning a lot on the philosopher Charles Taylor, I argue that “calculated authenticity” has earlier roots in a pair of moral ideals that have taken hold in the recent history of the West. Taylor, in his Sources of the Self, tells the backstory to the sense that we have individual selves in the first place. In telling this story, he traces the emergence over time of certain moral ideals that we, in the modern West, have inherited.

One is the sense that our self is something that we possess and control — an object that we can manage and work on. Another, more recent ideal is authenticity: the sense that we all have inner depths unique to each one of us, which we should explore and express. What I am saying, following Taylor, is that there was already a tension, long before the billboards and the NYSE: On the one hand we feel like the owners of our selves — that our lives are projects to work on — but also, on the other, that we ought to find and express our true selves. I realize this all sounds pretentious and way too sweeping, but I think Taylor is basically right.

So, back to “calculated authenticity”: the contradiction is already there, but is picked up by the self-help industry, pop psychology and advertising. The message is that the best way to work on yourself is to consciously cultivate an authentic persona — to use authenticity as a means to the end of self-promotion.

We encounter calculated authenticity all the time in our daily lives: friends talking abut their “brands,” labored-over insouciance in Facebook statuses, the professional smile at Cold Stone Creamery, etc. And it’s nauseating and blatantly inauthentic. So we go looking for the real thing — maybe it’s artisanal cheese or long beach walks, or even irony-bathed Oscars viewing — all of which (as I talked about above) is then processed, repackaged, and sold back to us. Rinse and repeat.

No, I do not think that a resigned embrace of calculated authenticity is the way out. That’s too depressing. I think it’s still worth striving for authenticity in personal terms — for not being a self-promotional ass, especially if that douchiness is disguised by sustained eye contact and the gladhand. I also believe that we should call bullshit, over and over again, whenever authenticity is used for shilling. Even when — especially when — the bullshit-calling itself becomes a slogan.

This isn’t because there’s anything pure or timeless about the authenticity ideal. The sense that we should be true to ourselves in this demanding way is a product of (fairly recent) history. Strictly speaking — and as academics never tire of pointing out — there’s no such thing as “real” authenticity, nor is the ideal written into the human soul. But just because authenticity has a specific history — is not natural nor timeless — does not mean that we should dismiss its claims on us. It’s part of who we are, and we can use its high standards to call out the debased form the ideal has taken on.

ROSENBERG: It sounds like this tension you’re describing is one between treating the self as an asset and seeing it as an unexplored territory of sorts: something that we have and control and deploy and revise at will, or something that we must go on a quest to find and reveal and release. That feels to me like a reasonably subtle differential — but it’s almost as if the force of the market sticks a big pry-bar into this little fissure and cracks it wide.

I mean, plainly there’s no path back to some sort of state of innocence here, no way to press reset and lose the knowledge that personal authenticity has market value. On my previous post about the authenticity bind, Mitch Skinner posted this comment:

“Recognizing that authenticity has value doesn’t require you to glad-hand or to calculate your smile. Being aware of it doesn’t make it fake. That awareness just makes it a choice. But that choice can still be fully authentic.”

Do you think there’s any way to hang on to one’s sense of being authentic while simultaneously understanding that this quality is going to serve a practical, self-interested end? What could that look like?

Calling bullshit on crass authenticity plays and the marketing cycle is always useful, for sure. Is there anything we can point to on the other side of the ledger?

POOLEY: Can you strive to be authentic knowing that it will gain you something? The question reminded me of what philosophers (drawing on Catholic thinking) call the “doctrine of double effect.” The idea is that it’s not wrong to do something harmful if it was a side effect of trying to do something good. The classic case is killing someone to save your life. The distinction is between intending and foreseeing: Yes, you realize that the knife thrust may kill your attacker, but your intent is to spare yourself.

I realize that the example is ridiculous — we’re talking about glad-handing, after all. But I still think the idea is relevant. You may know that, in general, acting in an authentic way is likely to benefit you. It’s a foreseen side effect — the fact that you may win friends and influence people. But your intention is to be authentic.

That’s one scenario, and in my view you’re fine. You’re a long way from soulless hypocrisy. But it’s different when you set out to use authenticity as a means to get something from someone. Take Dale Carnegie’s advice as an example: “Become genuinely interested in other people,” one of “Six Ways to Make People Like You.” Extracting admiration from others, for Carnegie, isn’t merely something you foresee. It’s the whole point.

The analogy to morality and the “double effect” is not a perfect fit. In the case of killing an attacker in self-defense, the (permissible) bad action is the killing. Homicide, in almost any other context, is wrong. With Carnegie’s advice, however, the problem isn’t the instrumental motive per se; we use people for our ends (like purchasing coffee) all the time. Buying coffee isn’t murder. The problem with the Carnegie tip is that it is self-refuting. When you set out to get something (like the admiration of others) by pretending to be authentic, you’ve already abandoned the ideal. And pretending like this, with self-serving ends in mind, has bad consequences for everyone: We all come to distrust sustained eye contact and attentive listening. Maybe, we think, they’ve been trained at the Dale Carnegie Institute.

So I would stress the distinction between foreseen side effects and intention. In good faith we can attempt to act in an authentic way, even though we think that we may profit somehow. But not if the profit is the point.

In his great little one-man show, Feisty Old Jew, my old friend Charlie Varon makes copious use of the word “vigorish” or “vig” — a Yiddish word so outlandishly pungent that half the audience regularly assumes he made it up. (He actually polls the house, impromptu, each night.)

Me, I knew it was a real word. I knew that it refers to the percentage of a bet a bookie takes for himself — or, more broadly, any commission on a transaction. I knew this because “vig” had cropped up in a prominent way in the annals of the ’90s Internet boom. When I first heard it then, I couldn’t quite shake the suspicion that the man who had used it, Nathan Myhrvold of Microsoft, must have made it up, so I looked it up.

At Microsoft in the ’90s, Myhrvold was known for writing voluminous in-house memos dedicated to crystal-balling the tech future. In a much-circulated 1993 memo titled “Roadkill on the Information Highway” (RTF file) he introduced the term “vigorish” to readers. But he really put it to work in a 1994 followup — a memo that tried to make up for the previous one’s inexplicable failure to account for, or even mention, the Internet, which was not the form Myhrvold or most everyone else at Microsoft had expected the “information highway” to take.

One of the reasons the Internet took Microsoft and so much of the tech industry by surprise was that its government-and-university roots and its open-computing culture made it seem like a singularly inhospitable place to do business. Microsoft was halfway through building its own Microsoft Network as a competitor to Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL when the Web browser known first as Mosaic and then as Netscape started getting popular in 1994. Sure, the Internet was opening up to commerce thanks to recent regulatory changes; but why would you want to set up shop there?

As Ken Auletta wrote in a May 12, 1997 profile of Myhrvold for the New Yorker:

It also infuriated Myhrvold and Microsoft that the Internet was free. They saw it as a flower-child culture that disdained profits and copyrights — and Microsoft… “Nobody gets a vig on content on the Internet today,” [Myhrvold] wrote. “The question is whether this will remain true.”

We all know what happened after that: Microsoft gathered its forces and smote Netscape, preserving at least another decade of massive profits and sparking a federal antitrust suit. Meanwhile, the Internet became a pretty good place for at least some people to make a lot of money.

I revisit this tale of yore partly because the word “vigorish” is just such a treasure (as is Charlie’s show — go see it if you get the chance!), and partly for two more substantive reasons: It puts today’s news of Microsoft layoffs in perspective, and it reminds us of how heavily today’s Web business depends on “vigs.”

Sic transit gloria Microsoft

Today Microsoft announced roughly 18,000 layoffs. That’s a lot of jobs to vanish, even if more than half of them are from the company’s recent acquisition of Nokia’s phone business.

Microsoft isn’t going away; heck, IBM is still around and making plenty of money. But Microsoft isn’t exactly leading the industry the way it did when Myhrvold was writing those memos (these days, he’s busy buying up patents and publishing $600 cookbooks). It has been displaced as thoroughly as it displaced its mainframe and mini-computer predecessors.

Myhrvold’s dream of Microsoft interposing itself as the Internet’s middleman, taking a vig from every transaction, never came true, thank goodness. Microsoft already took another kind of vig from us in the form of Windows and Office licenses and upgrades, but those are less and less central to our work lives, and almost irrelevant to our casual/personal digital lives.

It was hard to imagine such an outcome in the late ’90s. It is similarly hard today to imagine a relatively near-term scenario in which any of Google, Facebook, or Apple have faded into near-irrelevance in shaping the future. Rest assured: it will happen.

Today, you can’t click without tripping on a vig

The Web remains relatively vig-free today: if you set up shop there, you need to pay for hosting, but there aren’t a lot of people squeezing a percentage from you. (There are credit-card transaction fees, but they exist offline as well.)

But as we move into the world of mobile and apps, in which private vendors maintain tighter holds on app and content distribution, we’re suddenly back in the land of the vigorish. Apple’s app store takes a big fat cut, as do most other app stores. Ditto for content marketplaces like the iTunes store and the Kindle store. Apple makes sure to get a cut of in-app purchases, too. As Mike Cane wrote in a 2011 post, the day Apple’s app store started insisting on its cut of in-app purchases was “the day Apple became Nathan Myhrvold.”

These are obvious vigs — but there are other kinds. Facebook and Twitter both take a slice of us, too, not from our transactions but from our social lives and our attention. Think of this as an emotional vigorish.

The “disintermediation” so many predicted back when Myhrvold dreamed of vigs was real enough. But today we are facing a new infestation of middlemen, in previously not-intermediated realms like finding a parking space or booking a restaurant reservation.

If you don’t like that — I don’t — it can be a frustrating moment in digital time. But hold tight: This sort of market advantage is usually fleeting.

It’s not that some competitor will come along and beat the app store at its own game. Instead, our needs and habits will change, and just as we find that we can get along OK without Microsoft Office, we will wake up one day and realize that we haven’t spent anything at an app store in ages.

If social networks are all about putting forward idealized images of ourselves for others to be impressed by, and maybe envy a little, then it makes sense that the two leading companies in this space might take on a similar behavior pattern.

Facebook and Twitter are both thriving on a scale most online services can only dream of. Yet each is eyeing the other covetously.

Twitter’s the smaller of the two, so its jealousy is more straightforward. It wants Facebook’s numbers.

From the Times:

Twitter had 255 million monthly users globally in March, up 5.8 percent from the end of December. Analysts had hoped to see more than 260 million. Growth at the end of last year was even slower. That has disappointed investors …

A mere 255 million users! Twitter went public by comparing itself to Facebook, so investors are now making the same comparison, and Facebook has five times that many users. (Never mind that both companies’ numbers are as carefully framed as the average profile photo, and that “monthly active users” is itself a statistic designed with advertisers, not users, in mind.)

But Facebook isn’t just sitting back thinking it’s got an unbeatable lead in the numbers race. It’s got stars on its mind. It wants Twitter’s Big Names.

From Peter Kafka at Re/code:

John Cantarella used to run high-profile Web sites for Time Inc. Now he has a new job: Getting high-profile people to post things on Facebook…. The big idea: Convince famous people — say, Bill Clinton or Richard Branson — to use Facebook more, and do the same for the people who run nonprofits and other “causes.”

It’s part of Facebook’s bigger push to encourage more “public content” on the site — the kind of stuff that appears on Twitter all the time.

Facebook may have the crowd, but Twitter has all the cool people. So what if its entire pitch as a network was that it was the service where you would connect with your actual friends? That’s old hat now. Twitter’s getting buzz for the way celebrities use it to connect with masses of fans. Facebook wants some of that.

Envy isn’t pretty — it will make you a monster. Facebook and Twitter know that, but by now they’ve both moved beyond the realm of conscious action; they’re creatures of the market, steered by the corporate id.

And just think: six deadly sins to go!

Independence — it’s hot! On the verge of July 4, here’s some info about a couple of independence-oriented Web projects.

When I kicked off the Wordyard Project, I wrote about my sense that we’ve reached “peak Facebook” — and are now entering a phase of digital history in which the pendulum will swing back from the collective to the individual, from the centralized to the distributed, from the corporate data silo to the personal digital homestead.

Over the last several days I’ve had brief immersion experiences in two very different — yet reasonably compatible — projects that aim to give that pendulum a big shove. One, the IndieWeb, is a classic Internet-era bottom-up movement trying to build and test working technologies and tools for autonomous, empowered individuals; the other, the Respect Network, is an attempt to jumpstart a new identity system and financial network based on individual trust and privacy. One is led by idealistic developers, the other by idealistic businesspeople.

IndieWeb Camp

Let’s start with the IndieWeb, which I introduced briefly last week. The idea here is to build systems centered on the individual and use the domain-name system as a de facto basis for identity. If you own wokcity.com (uh, someone does but they’re not doing much with it), the IndieWeb developers want to make it possible for you to use that address as home base. You could use it to sign in to other sites; to publish your posts and messages and converse with other people, in public or private as you wish; and to serve as a home for your personal data store. (Dan Gillmor’s piece earlier this year is another valuable overview of the IndieWeb vision.)

The IndieWeb effort — whose prominent contributors include folks such as Tantek Celik, Amber Case, Kevin Marks, and Aaron Parecki — is resolutely organized around diverse small projects that participants are using right now on their own sites, sharing open standards that build on existing Web technology. In other words, there are no boil-the-ocean attempts here, which is refreshing: It’s a lot easier to dream about a completed utopia than it is to take the first few steps toward an incrementally better near future. In the first situation, you get manifestos and blueprints and (often) pipe dreams; in the second, you get working demos.

At IndieWeb Camp this past weekend, enthusiasts gathered, chiefly in Portland and New York, for unconference-style discussions and a day-long hackathon-like building session. The namebadges read “Hello, my URL is…”

Here are some of the projects I saw demoed:

• Ben Werdmuller, Aaron Parecki and Emma Kuo whipped up a prototype “Indieweb Reader” — basically, a Google Reader-ish content aggregator pulling in RSS/Atom syndicated posts along with Indieweb-style messages.
• Bridgy is a nifty IndieWeb service that takes Twitter and Facebook responses to a post on your blog and feeds them back to you in the form of comments. Right now Bridgy only works if you send out a link first, so it knows the post is yours; Kyle Mahan showed a way to bypass this requirement.
• Indie-auth is an Indieweb-style single sign-on protocol that uses your domain name to authenticate your identity. It’s still more developer-focused than user-friendly, but it keeps evolving. For the moment, the most common implementation involves a slightly confusing trip to Twitter or Facebook or Google+ to associate your domain with some already-authenticated account. But Aaron Parecki showed a method for using public-key encryption (GPG) to bypass that step.
• Known is a startup that’s building a platform for personal publishing based on the Indieweb approach. The founders are Ben Werdmuller and Erin Jo Richey; you can see it at work on Werdmuller’s site at Werd.io.
• A parallel project that’s less further along in terms of publicly viewable work is Shane Becker’s Homesteading — but I’m guessing that it’s powering his own site here.
• Johannes Ernst put together a one-click “install WordPress with Indieweb extensions pre-installed” package for his Indiebox project.
• Amber Case showed how to build a quick-and-dirty private social network using WordPress and its Twitter-like P2 theme.
• Ward Cunningham — wiki inventor and pattern-repository founder — showed off the latest work on the Federated Wiki project.

There was lots more in Portland, and I’m sure even more in New York that I couldn’t track. (This wiki page has more details.) As you can see, the IndieWeb approach is to tackle its agenda of autonomy from many directions at once, with quick, agile-style stabs at getting stuff working. The result has some minuses for users: code is in flux and not always well documented, installing stuff isn’t always easy, a lot of things just don’t work yet. But the pluses, for users who are adventurous and handy with technical details, are hugely attractive — chief among them the chance to help shape the tools and platforms growing up around this privacy- and autonomy-oriented movement.

(One of my goals for Wordyard is to keep up with and write about the IndieWeb effort — while using some of the projects myself right here. For the moment, that means using Brid.gy and WordPress to collect mentions and conversations around my posts that happen on Twitter and Facebook and feed them back to my own comments system here. It’s not working perfectly yet, but it’s working, as you can see here.)

Respect Network

The Respect Network tackles the whole “take back the Web” idea from the opposite direction of the IndieWeb’s grassroots-developer tinkering. The project actually emerged from the community around the Internet Identity Workshop — a gathering very similar to IndieWeb Camp in spirit, and that has been around longer. But the Respect Network is much more conventional and institutional in its approach.

That’s understandable, given what it’s trying to accomplish: It aims to engineer an alternative financial and data infrastructure built on personal ownership of data and shared principles of trust; the model seems to be Visa/Mastercard, but where you own your data. (There’s a detailed “Trust Framework” that participating businesses must adopt.) The key elements here are:

• “Cloud names” — global personal (or business) identifiers that use an equal sign rather than, say, email/Twitter’s “@” sign or the domain-name system to represent an individual user (for example, I am “=scottros”).
• Cloud service providers — companies that provide cloud name registration and personal/business data storage under Respect Network principles.
• A single sign-in button (like the ubiquitous “sign in with Facebook/Twitter” buttons) for sites to deploy so users can log in to multiple services using their cloud names.
• All of this works under a technical standard called XDI, which should allow for the emergence of a system of competing businesses all sharing the same infrastructure. XDI has been worked on for some time now but there isn’t a ton of actual services and products using it today.

(More details at GigaOm.)

The Respect Network founders have assembled an alliance of infrastructure companies, service providers and creative thinkers — people like Doc Searls, Phil Windley, and Jerry Michalski — and begun to sign up partners and customers. Tuesday was launch day for the network in San Francisco (it’s in the middle of a global road show).

It was clear at the event that, right now, there isn’t a huge amount of Respect Network services that anyone can yet use: About all you can do is reserve a cloud name. The network’s goal is to sign up a million people for this at a special $25-for-life introductory rate. You can go today to providers like Emmett Global and do this, as I did. But you can’t do much with it yet. Eventually, the idea is that this name will serve as the address for all your data, and when you interact with businesses and other people you’ll be able to set the terms.

Respect Network is trying to bridge the worlds of privacy activism and Internet marketing, and that is unquestionably a tough challenge: The company’s leaders need to persuade the business people that they mean business, while demonstrating to the idealists who will be their first participants and customers that they are not sell-outs.

It’s hard to say how far they’ll get. On the one hand, the free/ad-supported model is powerful and everywhere today. It’s not going to just wither and die. On the other, the logic of the simple “you should own your own data” principle is potent; the world of advertising keeps finding new ways to overstep public tolerance; and the keepers of corporate silos keep stepping into their own booby traps.

Emmett founder Lionel Wolberger gave his pitch at Monday’s event with a memorable joke, envisioning what phone calls would be like if they were ad-supported the way so many web services are. The idea of companies listening in to our phone calls so they could break in and pitch products sounds ludicrous, unimaginable — yet somehow we are willing to tolerate this same dynamic in our online communications. The Respect Network will test our appetite for alternatives.

By now I’m sure you’ve heard about that Facebook study of “emotional contagion,” in which the company (along with two researchers) tinkered with the newsfeeds of 689,000 users in 2012, to explore whether moods can spread based on the tenor of posts. (This Atlantic roundup will get you up to speed.)

Many academic observers are up in arms because experimenting on people has a long tarnished history, and there are rules around it that this study may have bypassed. The facts remain fuzzy there (just look at the crossouts in this piece!), but the issue is real.

The pushback, in turn, is that Facebook, like all big tech companies, does this sort of thing all the time; nothing happens on Facebook without A/B testing! So get over it.

Finally, there is a contingent of commentary that declares the experiment to have been “creepy,” for reasons that we can’t quite express but we viscerally share. You might say the news of this study has itself become an “emotional contagion.”

The most common explanation for this creep factor is that we recoil from the study’s exposure of Facebook’s “commercial behaviorism.” The researchers appear to have callously treated Facebook users as test subjects, rats in a Skinner box. No one enjoys that role; thus the mass creep-out.

I’m sure there’s plenty to that, but I think the public recoil is based on something even simpler. Facebook’s central idea — its “value proposition,” in bizspeak — is that if we give it a list of our friends, it will provide us with a personally tailored stream of their posts and shares. That stream, the newsfeed, is a phenomenally successful product — a river not of news but of social info. We know Facebook doesn’t show us everything, but to each of us, our newsfeed feels like a space that has been put together just for us.

It feels like home. But in fact, of course, it’s a private space that someone else owns. Most of us have never read the rental agreement. And until something like this mood study comes along, we don’t even think about the terms under which we live there.

So the true creep-out in Facebook’s study isn’t about research ethics or Skinner boxes; it’s about ownership of space. The “emotional contagion” study dramatically rips off a curtain that separated Facebook’s public face and its backstage. Publicly, Facebook woos us with a vision of a social information stream shaped by our individual needs and networks; backstage, the folks behind the curtain are pulling levers to find more efficient ways to hijack our attention and sell us stuff. (The frontstage/backstage theory sounds like The Wizard of Oz but is actually Erving Goffman’s.)

It all works beautifully until something wrecks the, um, mood. Facebook’s endless privacy snafus and “context collapse” disorders do that. Ads can do it, too, which is why Facebook has moved so gingerly to insert “sponsored posts” into the newsfeed.

The mood study is a perfect storm for Facebook because it’s not about privacy or ads or any other longstanding bone of social-network contention. It’s a pure instance of frontstage/backstage collapse. All it does is dramatically illustrate that, in the space so many of us have adopted as our digital home, we don’t call the shots.

Something that we’d embraced as organic and authentic — literally, “friend-ly” — proves instead to be crudely instrumental and manipulative. Everyone hates when that happens!

Of course the dustup won’t kill Facebook. It probably won’t even materially affect its business. But it is one more step in awakening the universe of Facebook users, which is nearly all of us, to ou predicament: We only think the place is ours. And the landlords — well, they really can be creepy sometimes.