Nations, however, are great candidates for guidebooks. Indeed, Facebook is routinely described as a country. It is not too uncommon to read things like ‘if Facebook were a country, it would be the largest in the world’, or to hear Mark Zuckerberg being referred to as the head of the Facebook nation. While careful to not frame itself explicitly as a nation (with all that this entails), the metaphor has been used in several of Facebook’s public-facing ad campaigns as a way of describing how nations are like Facebook. In a cinematic ad entitled ‘The Things That Connect Us’ from 2012, the voice-over lists all the things that are just like Facebook, including ‘great nations’, because it ‘is something people build, so that they can have a place where they belong’ (more on this ad in Chapter 2).
In fact, Mark Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to frame himself and Facebook as a global do-gooder and democratic force. In a longer piece about Facebook’s mission to build a global community, Zuckerberg (2017a) puts Facebook firmly in the democratic driving seat. Zuckerberg notes how Facebook’s mission is to develop social infrastructure for a community – ‘for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all’. Whether it is about developing new drone, satellite or laser technologies to build the next-generation broadband infrastructure, or disaster relief funds and safety check functionalities, Facebook’s social services and infrastructure projects are often framed in terms of a humanitarian and democratic effort. For example, in 2013 when launching Internet.org, a consortium between Facebook, mobile handset makers, a browser company (Opera) and network infrastructure manufacturers, Zuckerberg basically outlined a techno-political vision for addressing economic disparities by means of internet connectivity.
Zuckerberg does not merely invoke global politics in public discourse about Facebook. He is also more directly involved in domestic and foreign politics. He is, for example, the co-founder of the political lobby organization fwd.us, a bipartisan immigration reform advocacy group who are pressing for immigrant rights. If Zuckerberg’s framing of immigrants as ‘dreamers’ and Silicon Valley as ‘an idealistic place’ is not exemplary of political rhetoric, then what is?
Despite Facebook’s attempts to define itself as a social infrastructure and community builder, ‘Zuckerberg is careful to avoid indicating that the site is anything more than a simple tool’ (Rider and Murakami, 2019: 646). Against the allegation of filter bubbles or fake news, for example, Zuckerberg has consistently framed Facebook as a facilitator and conduit of information rather than a gatekeeper or publisher. When Zuckerberg had to testify in front of congress after the Cambridge Analytica scandal in spring 2018, he explicitly told them that Facebook is not a media company. ‘I consider us to be a technology company’, Zuckerberg said, ‘because the primary thing that we do is have engineers who write code and build product and services for other people’ (Castillo, 2018). So, in Zuckerberg’s terms, having a workforce made up primarily of coders, makes Facebook a tech company. In addition, Rider and Murakami (2019) note how Zuckerberg draws consistently on the idea of Facebook as a facilitator by hosting networks. Accordingly, when pressed for answers on the spreading of mis- and disinformation, for example, Zuckerberg is quick to point out that it is people’s networks, not Facebook, that show us content. When drawing on the network metaphor for an explanation, Zuckerberg is clearly leaning on the myth of the internet as a stateless, democratic force that knows and shows no boundaries. The idea of the internet as a stateless cyberspace is not well founded. We know from the body of literature on internet governance and internet infrastructure (Mueller, 2010; DeNardis, 2014) that the internet knows and obeys state boundaries. The locality of the internet matters. Although largely regulated through multi-stakeholder groups and global organizations, the internet is both a very physical and political entity that is not just controlled by state actors but looks and feels different in different geographical locations.
Where does this selective and strategic differential framing of Facebook as either a town or nation leave us in terms of locating Facebook? If Facebook’s locality depends on who and when you ask, what, then, is the guidebook for? Put differently, what territory is being mapped out? Rather than thinking of Facebook in terms of fixed spatial metaphors such as squares, cities or states, the notion of topology offers a language for articulating the instabilities and fluctuations characteristic of malleable and changing entities such as Facebook. In its mathematical origin, topology is concerned with the theorem of the continuum, of how the properties of objects are preserved under continuous deformations (Lury et al., 2012). In contrast to ‘“Euclidean” space with its familiar geometry of stable, singular entities positioned against the external backdrop of a static space and linear time’, a topological approach accentuates how the infinite and differential character of relations has the capacity to generate its own ‘space-time, with its particular scales, extension and rhythms’ (Marres, 2012: 292). Whereas Cartesian coordinates enable us to measure a certain space, topology is not concerned with size and measurement as such but with the ways in which ‘relationships between various points/agents enact a space themselves’ (Decuypere and Simons, 2016: 374). A topological approach, especially as it has been adopted within the social sciences and the humanities, sees space and time not as a priori but as something produced by ‘entities-in-relation’ (Marres, 2012: 289). The primary analytic category is relationality, where change is not an exception but fundamental to how spaces are configured.
Bringing a topological approach to bear on Facebook means paying close attention to unfolding configurations and reconfigurations (Suchman, 2007), and grappling with the variations and multiplicities that Facebook produces. Such a view has multiple implications. First, it means we have to get rid of thinking of Facebook as one thing, with a stable and invariant core. In this sense, Facebook is multiple, coming together in various ways as a result of different configurations. This means that what we take Facebook to be is a result of different elements being gathered in a specific way at a specific time. For example, patents, earning reports, profit margins, code stacks and features may come together in a board meeting temporality stabilizing and producing one single object that we conventionally call Facebook. In a different instance, for the human rights activist in Tunisia, what is called Facebook comes together through government censorship, content policies, the lack of information about political ad spending, the inexplicable removal of an activist’s video and content moderation. This brings us to a second point that we need to get rid of when adopting a topological approach to Facebook, which is the idea that these stories and configurations hang easily together or cohere. Although the world, especially the scientific world, generally demands some form of consistency, we need to recognize that Facebook and the telling of stories about Facebook are much messier than that. As John Law argues (2004), coherence can only be achieved in theory and not in practice. The fact that there are different stories and gatherings of elements should not be confused with perspectivalism, the idea that there are different perspectives on a stable object (Mol, 2002). When we talk about non-coherence with regard to Facebook it is to acknowledge its elusiveness and ambivalence. While it might be challenging to work with multiplicity, relationality, non-coherence or gatherings as analytical categories, this is only the case if we expect the story to follow a ‘smooth and singular narrative of the kind offered by a textbook’ (Law, 2004: 98). Alas, this is not the goal of this book.
It’s complicated
Facebook is no easy target. Just as telling the story of Facebook, as if there was one coherent and neat story to tell, is not really possible; neither is delineating the target in the first place. What Facebook is depends not just on whom you ask but when you ask. Ontologically, we might say that Facebook is not just variable in the technical sense as it is constantly evolving, changing and developing as a programmed entity with certain features