Two different takes questioning why we should want to buy into the virtual republic that is Facebook:

Stephen Fry in his Dork talk column:

what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states?

Tom Hodgkinson in With friends like these …

Facebook pretends to be about freedom, but isn’t it really more like an ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a population that will very soon exceed the UK’s? [They] have created their own country, a country of consumers. …

you might reflect that you don’t really want to be part of this heavily-funded programme to create an arid global virtual republic, where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodites on sale to giant global brands. You may decide that you don’t want to be part of this takeover bid for the world.

Now, let’s not get too excited, Tom. Savvy users can establish citizenship and get something out of it without buying into the regime completely. I give away the minimum, pick my friends carefully and don’t talk to strangers. I’m not troubled by ads any more than elsewhere on the web and I cannot see that I’ve yet been converted into a commodity. As to what I’ve got out of it: very little so far, but I’ll hang around to see where this goes once the media hype has died down. For me the web is the network and Facebook is just an app: I won’t pledge my life to it.