From Jose Antonio Vargas’ profile of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, for The New Yorker:

Zuckerberg’s ultimate goal is to create, and dominate, a different kind of Internet. Google and other search engines may index the Web, but, he says, “most of the information that we care about is things that are in our heads, right? And that’s not out there to be indexed, right?” Zuckerberg was in middle school when Google launched, and he seems to have a deep desire to build something that moves beyond it. “It’s like hardwired into us in a deeper way: you really want to know what’s going on with the people around you,” he said.

Translation: “I’d like to put your life on a database.”

Creeps me out. It really does. Not because of the old “Shy nerd needs computer to understand people in front on him” cliché, but because of the deeper philosophy of mind implications, which are not theoretical anymore. “Information” waiting to be “indexed”. Come on! Is that what people think it is? That they’re made of data? That communication is actually telepathy? That individual relations can be accurately graphed?

It’s not just Facebook. It’s all this semantic web bullshit. Tim Berners-Lee’s (and many others) big dream of categorizing whatever the world is made of—from books to your ice-cream parlor’s opening hours—to put it in a big searchable database that computers can keep collating on. Maybe we need to reopen the old designers vs. structuralists debate that the web design community so elegantly transcended with both mighty design and strong architectural principles.

Our minds are not made of data. Ideas aren’t information. Thoughts don’t get transmitted as bits do. You communicate a thought by expressing it. By finding new words each time to get your point out. And in doing so, you get to understand it better. You get to understand better what you thought. What you thought wasn’t written in a secret script inside your brain, waiting to be indexed. There’s no separation of content and presentation in real life. Another presentation means another content. The thought is in the expression, not in the intent.

This I believe deeply. That’s what reading Merleau-Ponty and many others taught me. That’s what the act of writing taught me. That’s what gives relevance to every form of art—there’s no “meaning” being communicated underneath the actual execution of every single book, play, painting or movie. There’s only expression. And that’s why I much prefer tumblr and the likes to Facebook, which I don’t despise, but that I try to avoid. On tumblr, you have to use words, sentences even.

So, remember. These people are creeps. They’re smart and they have the best intentions for sure. But I can’t help but disagree with what they’re creating.