There are a lot of aspects of the recent Facebook privacy debacle that evoke hostility towards the website. A shift in privacy context and the assumed consent of users likely the top list for most. However, I believe that Mark Zuckerberg and company are doing a lot to take would could have been a heated public debate about the nature of privacy online and turning it into a national flamewar. What are they doing exactly? They are acting like condescending assholes.

For most of the 90s and the early 2000s the home PC served as the foundation for an incredibly generative computing platform. By generative I mean that this PC platform allowed for relatively easy innovation and modification. Pretty much anybody was able to install whatever software was available to them, either at a store or on the Internet, in order to modify their PC foundation to meet their needs and desires. At the same time, because the PC platform was so open, a great number of people were able to create programs to meet their needs and desires, and with the advent of the Internet these programs could easily be distributed to users all over the world who wished to install them.

            During this period a set of social, economic, and technical norms were established regarding a user’s ability to modify and define their personal computing platform. In general, users either purchased a finished piece of software or they acquired free (as in beer) software in order to modify the functionality of the PC hardware that they owned. The user knew what features he/she was acquiring and therefore, in theory, knew exactly what features his/her computing platform had and what activities occurred on it. Further, mostly due to the technical limitations of the time (especially the limitations of the Internet) as well as the ownership that users had over their computing platform, the norm of the time was that any changes that the software producer wanted to make to the software required some conscious act of permission on the part of the user, such as purchasing and installing an upgrade. Therefore, the user was fully aware of any changes that were occurring to his/her computing platform.

            This paradigm is currently shifting. Beginning in the mid to late years of the first decade of the 21^st century, the Internet became a feasible foundation for a cloud based computing platform. While the cloud has not yet replaced the PC as the favorite computing platform of society, users are recognizing the benefits of cloud based services, especially the link to a ubiquitously available network, and making use of cloud based services. As the cloud becomes a new foundation for a generative computing platform the question has been raised: so what?