fresh crazycakes, courtesy of f-book

“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly… Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” – Mark Zuckerberg

This rad post--"What DuBois can tell us about Facebook puts recent statements by Zuckerberg in conversation with DuBois and the notion of the double consciousness...

"In other words, while DuBois tried to describe the psychic burden of being both white and black at the same time — since black people live in and conform to both a white world and a black world — he also argued that this gave black people a particular kind of insight into both worlds that white people lacked, a parallactic view through which reality became a three-dimensional Picasso painting instead of being defined by (and limited to) the single-perspectivism of whiteness.

Which is why I think the categorical disparagement of people who don’t fit into a single category by a callow white male of Harvardian privilege like Zuckerberg isn’t inadvertent or coincidental, and is worth lingering on. "'
...

"And here’s the thing: powerful people don’t have to worry about any of that. Just as Hitchens never has to worry about Muslim women telling him what not to wear, neither need the owner of facebook ever need to worry about being surveilled against his interest or will, or of it mattering much if he is. Knowledge is power not in a Friedman-esque globalization-will-democratize-the-world kind of way, where opening up barriers makes us all the same, but in a much more Foucaultian sense: when you have power, knowledge is the medium through which you exert it (including the ability to believe what you want and make it authoritative). Knowledge without power is forgotten, ignored, and impotent while power without knowledge just creates new “knowledge” (as in Hitchens’ ability to k
now whatever he needs to know about Muslim women). But since powerful white men can experience that power through their singular and unambiguous identity — and since white privilege is about enjoying the benefits of being the default category without having to do anything to claim it — the sight of people whose identities limit and subordinate them exerting control over those identities becomes a threat, a limit that has to be vaulted over. What Muslim women hid, Hitchens will demand his right to see. And what you make private, Facebook will monetize."

-P