No like: Facebook, let us show the finger

There's a market for the "dislike" button. But is the "dislike" button market-friendly? This, pretty much, sums up Facebook's man-boy CEO Mark Zuckerberg's procrastination over the much-in-demand dislike kit, which, many want as an antidote to the syrupy universe of selfie-generating like charges populating the social networking site.

In a public Q & A at the internet giant's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, the 31-year-old Zuckerberg has now acknowledged that team Facebook is "very close" to having the item ready for user testing. Tech sites have given their interpretations to Z's nod - it won't be called a "dislike" button. In Z's own words, "We didn't just want to build a Dislike button because we don't want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people's post… What they really want is to be able to express empathy."

So, Z wants you to express empathy. In other words, Z, and his multi-billion-dollar digital behemoth, wants to monetise your empathy, chaperon it into their circuits of marketable social sentiments, insert it into their algorithms of user-consumer behaviour, so that Big Government, Big Business and of course Big Media (of which Facebook itself is fast becoming the top dog) can map you better. A dislike button, despite its theoretical appeal, and half-a-promise of some reality-TVish inane mudslinging garnering increased traffic and hits on site, nevertheless, has the potential to seriously rock the happy boat.

Unlike Twitter or Reddit - where Aylan Kurdi, meat ban, Greek debt, Jeremy Corbyn, Skill India versus labour laws, net neutrality and Prism programme - become hashtags and subject to mind-bending debates covering spectra of possible opinions, Facebook remains a glorified selfie album awash with a rotten gentility that snuffs out any political edge it ever had. (Many seriously doubt it. As David Fincher's Z biopic The Social Network aptly shows, Z, from his "They're dumbf%cks" Harvard days, simply bothered with harnessing the enormous commercial potential of a database of personal/private information. Feeding off privacy is Facebook's open secret.)

The barrage of feel-good exchanges on Facebook, the inundation of happy pictures projecting consumer-users living the customised, customer online life, afloat in a matrix of "likes" - a sort of a vague great/go-for-it/I-envy-you-but-I-will-cloak-it-with-a-digital-thumbsup - eminently giving off manageable information to the software sentinels called algorithms always on the prowl. Pouting selfies masquerading as women's lib in a thoroughly Amazon-ed/Apple-ed/Flipkart-ed/Tinder-ed world, gleam with information on shopping and dining patterns of financially tappable, sexually clappable, politically sterile (or not) females, and males, of almost every nationality.    

In other words, Facebook is a capitalist utopia, a multiplex of selfhoods on display, the shelves of which are packed with itemised selves measured in likes and pixels, with the occasional "viral" story on a drowned Syrian boy, ISIS beheading video, cat lecturing Obama, and similar must-share pieces. A cartography of Facebook timeline of the average Indian or American would automatically put the selfie/photo on top, jokes/memes in the middle, and hardcore political news and opinion along with serious debate at the rock bottom.

It is self-evident: Facebook, with its unbearable likeness of being, positions itself as the apolitical, average individual's social network - the socialising network. What good does a "dislike" button do to socialising? Turns it into a brawl. Albeit a digital one.

At a time when cyber spats and voracious, often ugly, debates form the crux of the online template that is Twitter or Reddit, where opinion-centric traffic keeps buoyant billion-plus user matrix that sets media agenda and chariots public discourse, why should a "dislike" button pose a threat to Facebook's, particularly Mark Zuckerberg's, innate vision?

Flashback. Zuckerberg's initial "The Facebook" (from which the definite article was summarily dropped after Sean "Napster" Parker's sound advice) was designed to cultivate likes. (In frat-boy lingo that translates to "get the girls".) Likeability, despite its sedate, conformist implications, is what drove the Harvardians and other Ivy Leaguers into the online arms of Facebook in the first place. Now, with over 1.18 billion monthly active users as of August 2015, that blue print has catapulted Facebook to become a NASDAQ-listed, 12.46 billion US dollar revenue generating company in a matter of just over a decade.

Because "liking" allows for direct, commercially translatable data, Facebook has been the one-stop destination for every brand and seller, from Wal-Mart to pepperfry.com to happilyunmarried.com, to advertise their merchandise streamlined to user likes. Facebook is a veritable mine of socially observable behaviours, which become the lubricants to grease the wheels of the only acceptable modes of contemporary existence - buying and selling.

A "dislike" button pricks this inflated gas balloon of likes. A dislike button insists on disturbing the happy communion of users and those mining them for salability/surveillance purposes because it draws attention to opinion, particularly an unsettling, oppositional one. A dislike cannot be read and translated adequately into the language of profit-making. A dislike is the doorway to a true and functional democracy, which Facebook, with its sugarcoated galaxy of oppressively nice and commercially viable people, shies away from.

On the other hand, "dislike" perpetuates the infantile binary of like versus not-like, which is far removed from the complex, multifaceted response individuals usually have towards any and everything. Like a like, a dislike too is lame, though in refusal, some dose of self-reflection is possibly gained.

But what Zuckerberg has in mind, the empathy button, will do wonders to keep the sanitised, armchair reactions to far-off crises, such as drowning of Aylan Kurdi, in vogue. Empathy, a faux political fashion statement from the smug but superficially guilt-ridden, would keep the digital dabblers engaged in the same old catharsis game. It's old boy Zuckerberg at his chameleon, slithery best again.

Why don't you get a middle finger button instead, Mark? Or, is it too street, too folk devil for you? Hah!