I Joined Steemit Because Of Increasing Concern About The Role Of Internet Monopolies In Society And On Our Health. Looking At You, Facebook!

I'm a Chicago-based food scientist who writes for leading US and European food and technology publications. I'm a devotee of all things shiny, electronic and buzzing, with a passion for building on-line communities and conservation. I am the founder of a sustainability and social media startup that turned five in 2017, and sometimes moonlight as DJ Moongirl on Moonalice Radio.

My concerns about Facebook started as a niggle - based on talking to Silicon Valley VC and early Facebook investor, Roger McNamee, and a series of articles he began writing on the topic. I had met Roger via Twitter in 2009 and had become a fan of his band Moonalice. We were both fascinated by social media, and I helped him to grow the band's Facebook presence from a few hundred in 2009 to more than 422K today. Moonalice's success on Facebook was a source of great pride for me, so you can imagine the dissonance I felt as I became increasingly concerned about the platform, and its role in democracy and also our health.

To track whether I was seeing the start of a trend, in October last year I created a Moment on Twitter to start collecting articles. There weren't that many at first apart from those by Roger, but by end of the year the few had become a flood with concern about Facebook's business model even from one of the founders, Sean Parker. Here's the Moment: https://twitter.com/i/moments/916072409375105026

Yesterday Roger published an essay in Washington Monthly on Facebook. The title says it all: How To Fix Facebook -Before It Fixes Us. https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/january-february-march-2018/how-to-fix-facebook-before-it-fixes-us/

Prof. David Carroll associate professor of media design at the Parsons School Of Design had this to say about the article, "Critically important to read this by Roger McNamee chronicling his role as Zuckerberg’s mentor to working with Tristan Harris and Renee DiResta to ignite an overdue rethinking of the civic duty of monopoly platforms."

The essay left me thinking, "There has to be a better way." Which is how I found my way to Steemit.