Facebook needs to make maintaining a Facebook account as compelling as creating one. And it’s not clear how Facebook can incentivize people to update their accounts — to trim old friends, to add new ones, to adjust all the various sliders and dials that power Facebook today. This is labor; it feels like doing repairs, not creating something exciting and new

The critic Michael J. Arlen recognized the profound moral implications of this arrangement more than 40 years ago: the manner in which, for example, the propagandistic early coverage of Vietnam helped build public support for the war. Like Trow, Arlen regarded television not as a window onto the actual state of the world but a set of corporate-carved keyholes offering fragmented and often misleading visions.

It’s painful to read Trow or Arlen today because their intuitions about the effects of visual mass media have proved so eerily prescient. Our latest innovation, the Internet, was hailed as an information highway that would help us manage the world’s complexity. In theory, it grants all of us tremendous narrative power, by providing instant access to our assembled archive of human knowledge and endeavor.

In practice, the Internet functions more frequently as a hive of distraction, a simulated world through which most of us flit from one context to the next, from Facebook post to Tumblr feed to YouTube clip, from ego moment to snarky rant to carnal wormhole. The pleasures of surfing the Web — a retreat from sustained attention and self-reflection — are the opposite of those offered by a novel.

We haven’t lost the capacity to tell stories. Artists and journalists and academics still work heroically to make sense of the world. But theirs are niche products, operating on the margins of a popular culture dominated by glittering fantasies of violence and fame. On a grand scale, we’ve traded perspective for immediacy, depth for speed, emotion for sensation, the panoramic vision of a narrator for a series of bright beckoning keyholes.

Now, Facebook has introduced what it calls Graph Search. One of the main signals that Facebook is using to rank results is, not surprisingly, the “Likes” that it tracks via the Like buttons and other links it has spread across the web like so many dandelion seeds. Search companies in the past usually tried to choose uncorrupted signals as the criteria for their rankings. They wanted to give good, objective results in order to attract users. The corruption of the signals came later, after it became clear that the search results had commercial value. Facebook is taking a different tack. It’s starting with a signal—Likes—that is already corrupted, that in fact has always been corrupted. People routinely Like a thing not because they actually like it, not because they have (to use a favorite Facebook word) any real affiliation with it, but because they’ve been, in one way or another, bribed to Like it.

Like us on Facebook to download our new single! Like us on Facebook to get 10% off your next purchase! Like us on Facebook to get a chapter of our new e-book for free! Like us on Facebook to enter our sweepstakes! Like us on Facebook so our dad will give us a puppy!…

…It might seem kind of strange for a company to build a search engine — a pretty costly undertaking — using criteria that it knows to be debased, to be anything but objective. But to Facebook, it’s business-as-usual. Here’s the difference between Google and Facebook: Larry Page recognized that commercial corruption was a threat to his ideal. For Mark Zuckerberg, commercial corruption is the ideal.