"Instead of describing Facebook as providing social infrastructure, we could simply say that it utilizes social interactions for profit through the means of production (by owning lots of computers and cables) and dispel the illusion of kind civic intentions."

"While Facebook brands itself as a benevolent archon that lends immediate access to contemporary data in the name of transparency, it also keeps away citizens from accessing information that may cause political scandal (i.e. excluding targeting information, shutting down researchers’ access to its API), sets a time limit to the availability of records and ensures its monopoly on record-keeping.

If we are to accept that Facebook functions as one of the archons of data colonialism, then post-API research methods may also borrow from methods of resistance to colonial powers, such as ‘counter-mapping’ and ‘counter-archiving’. The epistemic premise behind these methods affirms the power of colonial instruments, such as maps, archives and museums in shaping knowledge, subjects, nations, and geopolitical and racial boundaries according to colonial interests (Anderson, 1983), yet uses the same techniques to uncover injustice, reclaim rights or to propose epistemic alternatives to such hegemonic structures (Peluso, 1995)."

"In my personal experience on social applications like Instagram and Facebook, I see posts of friends, artists, and consumable goods all flattened into the same clean white architecture. This subtle insertion of advertisements next to posts from people we know imbues the advertisements with a sense of familiarity, while simultaneously causing our friends and acquaintances to adopt the aesthetic vocabulary of consumption in their own personal posts. As a result, each person exerts normative biopower on another, re-affirming trending fashion, food and lifestyles."

"We continually evaluate our current experience in terms of its future metric potential on Facebook—and that this process changes what we do and/or seek out in daily life. Going back to your earlier question re artists on Instagram, it seems many artists are perhaps now unable to avoid evaluating their efforts within the studio without considering how what they’ve made will look/function in online spaces? In other words, social media (and its engineering of the user) has broadly infiltrated the studio, turning the artist into a user. No wonder it’s harder to find a critical avant-garde in today’s social media age."

"Facebook allows for the full experience and expression of the self by melting into the background. Consider baseball: After enough practice, you don't think through every individual movement of your body when you swing at a pitch; the body does what it does seamlessly, without conscious thought. Facebook, more than any other mental model, has created such an impeccable complement to social reality that we pour ourselves into it, with a seamlessness akin to that of a baseball swing.

This is the scariest element of Facebook's growing role in modern political systems: It doesn't just hoover up data—it also sets the terms for how and where the self is expressed. French philosopher Michel Foucault had his 'medical gaze,' the mode of institutional examination that both observes and reduces subjects to state-defined clinical categories that are at the root of governmental 'biopower'; in the era of social media, we get the 'Facebook Eye,' where we actively perceive the world in terms of presenting the self on Facebook. For centuries, government institutions determined the identities of its subjects and monopolized the power that's rooted in those definitions. Now, Facebook exercises this power by literally monetizing the self."