Facebook seeks to satisfy an emptiness, a need for attention, that I do not have.
I don't think that's true. It's a tool that can definitely be used in this way, but it's also very useful for a variety of other purposes, which I would say do not simply defer to attention-seeking as the main purpose. It's an excellent tool for communicating instantly, discreetly, and cheaply, as well as the organisation of events, which is the way I have used it (and have seen it used). I use it to organise semi-regular board game nights between friends, or to casually chat to friends from other states. Very rarely (twice, in my recollection) have I used it to satisfy a need for attention. In fact, by and large, I avoid using it for long periods of time, because I often don't want attention, and the feeling of exposure is not pleasant. In fact, I've had facebook for at least four years now, but have only actually started logging in in the last 12 months.
Am I right in thinking that you've never used it? Your impressions of it sound like you've mostly read about its most negative aspects, so reinforced and repeated that they've become stereotypes and cliches, rather than its less heralded positive aspects. I suspect that if you tried using it for a decent amount of time, you'd find that you and your friends would not use for attention-seeking, and just enjoy the extra communication that it affords. Basically, I don't believe that you have invested the necessary time and gathered the necessary information to support your claim that "Facebook has little or nothing to offer me in exchange for the privacy I am giving up."
Of course, that's up to you. Nobody is forcing you to be completely informed in your decision against Facebook. However, I would think twice before pidgeonholing people who do use it.
You can call that "just my opinion" in the sense that other people don't feel that way, but I can say that one of those is definitely superior.
What does superior mean in this context? It certainly doesn't mean that everyone on earth prefers one to the other. What other metric could you be using to judge one superior over the other? Take the example of a celebrity. They have almost no privacy. If they put themselves on Facebook, they basically lose no privacy. The type of information that you can derive from facebook is not the type of information that a celebrity can hide from the public. Are you saying that their (lack of) privacy is worth more than the benefits of facebook? Even if your contention that its primary use is for attention-seeking, this may still be valuable to a celebrity. For example, to Paris Hilton, I can't imagine a downside to facebook!
I don't believe in absolute superiority, because I am (more or less) a logical positivist. As of yet, nobody has provided a method of verifying that some "thing" X is superior to another "thing" Y in such a way that people generally agree that it is superiority that its measuring (for example, I could say person A is superior to person B if A is older than B, but nobody would call it superiority that I was measuring), and thus the statement that X is superior to Y is, as of yet, meaningless.
People in general are not geeks. That's where I was coming from earlier. Geeks would be a much, much smaller market. Designing devices just for geeks would alienate "people in general". It would not be a good business decision. It wouldn't have produced the results I personally observed -- people who are not technically inclined who bought Macs and suddenly stopped having frequent "computer problems".
Sure, and this I agree with. However, it is fallacious to conclude the converse: if a person buys a non-geek computer like apple, then they are not a geek (and consequently have to hand in their geek card).