Exit Facebook

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“WEIGHTLESS” / AMBIENT TRANSMISSIONS / MARCONI UNION

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Key Points:

• Examination of a pragmatic outlier and deserter of social media accounts
• The Facebook/Twitter lifestyle ripples with blowback, undermining our ability to concentrate (on work, our surroundings and other human beings)
• Low-key virtues of detached disinformation in an age of digital fetishism
• Social media is but one consumable in The Stack
• Authority hides in the Overton Window and participatory surveillance
• Art of social scarcity and forgotten power of absence
• Anatomy of a disconnect

Cause for and against Social Media Abandonment

The overshare—you know the moment. Just look how long this article is, so you know I’m about to do it. Its definition is subjective and fluid, but it’s out there, happening all the time; it strikes an arpeggiated chord within the ruling inner faculties. Perhaps you thought you gave the data reapers little. The hints about your life and identity were buried, obscure, scarce and sporadic. And that might already be too much. Staved off some ephemeral ennui with a slip of the tongue/keyboard, but overdid it. With eyes wide open, a multigenerational cross-section of society joined a post-privacy era, no membership card, to observe contaminated pathways of social validation in a digital age. The slanted crystal window of software processed distortions of unknowable sentient beings, and made coded diagnoses, the kind inspired by fictionalized prototypes like HAL 9K. The tireless algorithm “enjoys” unencrypting and assimilating the biological realm it was never a part of. An undeniable logic, sifting through your mental metadata, it wants to know a baby before it is born. A social media-styled life offers something utilitarian but also fraught with a paradox of hedonism and the wary millions circling for access, intrusion, whatever you want to call it…while parts of it defy description. Truth-telling is good for the soul, bringing reflection upon complicity and hypocrisy in the Thunder Dome of social media.

The online political earthquake of grievances before and after major global upset phenomena like the UK’s Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential elections unleashed an enormous rush of tweets/posts/memes fighting for mindshare in the central neural net. They scan for ways to elicit shivers and rally the noncommittal, encouraging psychosomatic reactions normally reserved for the original world outside the screen. Amidst the swarm of emotion, a machine is quietly committing heads and hearts to peak traffic and a barrage of advertising. Having even briefly or intermittently wallowed, a select sub-population might one day find out how best to say goodbye to this ultramodern communications test bed.

Electronic social media has made cultivating friendships and connections easier, but shallower. Without colluding with it directly, Facebook’s popularity has taken off mostly without me and risen to the point of becoming the digital home base and validation station for first-world life, at which point users demand that the platform be capable of managing the complexities of human interaction. As its intellectual property (IP) grew into our backyards, how much could we complain when we collectively made it this way? Now it doesn’t matter if you “need your space” or take a time capsule back to 2005 and reset the socially media-driven side of the much larger technology-based New World Order. It brings parallel rods of treasure and poison—same as our 3D life—plus the ability to set off outbreaks of alarming invasiveness. Inevitably, some say, the day comes when too much innovation is traumatic, and can lead to revolt, internally or otherwise. This also ushers in a counter-move to disconnect or slow it down.

Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract, but on the day-to-day level people are creatures of habit. In an illuminating dichotomy, people also don’t want to cling to nostalgia or tokens of the past; the rapid pace of technology and next-level artificial intelligence (AI) creates dissonance and mirroring effects of varying degrees, depending on how much or how deeply the user interacts with Facebook, its features, and how they expressed the outgoing “life content stream” they custom-edited for public consumption on the web. The Hawthorne Effect is well, in full effect, and we enter a hall of mirrors…

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The Downside

A brief cynic’s quiz should reveal your position before you dedicate any serious amount of time to the subject at hand: Is your Facebook feed a black hole of completely worthless information? Some say yes, almost certainly. Others claim its roles in the professional, academic and scientific spheres (and elsewhere) are vital, as is its power to create opportunities in general—nobody wants to be invisible to the job market, and social media is now its primary conveyance. Do you enjoy the forfeiture of your privacy? You do realize the first thing a potential employer will do after interviewing you is look you up on Facebook. They are basically searching for any and every reason not to hire you. Most of the people you’re dating are running FBI-level background checks on you at the flick of an index finger, and so are your neighbors. Do you still require an overbearing parent in your life? If you use Facebook a lot, you obviously do. Facebook proactively controls the discourse of its children, eagerly censoring content that might rub someone the wrong way. Do you like seeing how Facebook can bring out the vileness in people? Counterintuitively, the Internet often liberates people to be their worst selves; on the spectrum of orators, activists and firebrands, we also get bombarded by ruthless trolls, stalkers and “doxers.” The energy is frenetic.

The Upside

Next, kick said cynic to curb (even if merely to play devil’s advocate). There is a lot of natural talent and brilliance on display across the web and blogosphere. Uncanny achievements surface from the swamp and take flight. The next Leonardo da Vinci might soon be procured from the digital seed bank as the mediocre get sorted out from a wafer-thin Group A. Some onboard to social media and quickly become attached to their digital avatars and a crossover identity, only to eventually have their dreams crushed and bulldozed (at least temporarily), and move on to more practical matters, having lost pole position and tripped down the ranks. It gives us exposure to a concept that high IQ cannot explain future achievement, and big ideas occasionally erupt from hidden places. This is one of many facets that make the social media landscape interesting. Social media can help answer some of our most important questions over talent and hierarchy, exceptional things that actually drive the human race forward through unprecedented levels of collaborative thought. Mozarts will be revealed.

Does Facebook have any redeeming qualities? It’s hard to completely deny the merits. This brings us to what would be a long digression into technology and its place in society in general, and is beyond the reach of this article. Sufficiently said, Facebook is a step forward when it comes to managing our social lives in the real world. It is a lot easier to retain a messaging network with distant relatives or create an event and summon everyone you know with a few clicks than it is to call people one-by-one or send circular, irritating email chain letters. In this day and age, more than one billion users think firing Facebook entirely is like giving up the cell phone, so they meld with the agenda.

In weighing the pros and cons, all social media is a double-edged sword, and is inert in its unused state. It has the power to be damaging and helpful in the same package. If you’re using it to build a brand or a business then it could be a good investment of your time, simply because so many people actively use it. We’ve also witnessed the joy it brings to older users connecting with long lost friends they haven’t seen in decades. But the truth is that in many cases, Facebook does cause more trouble than it’s worth, with worth being measured by delving deep and finding useful things in the Facebook Matrix.

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Beyond Polarity, a Narrative of Ambivalent Passivity

The positive veneer of uninterrupted network contact and “likes” can mask a world that seems increasingly beyond our control. Our livelihoods are often at the whim of globalized forces, social media being one of them. The problems that we face—economic, environmental, etc.—cannot be solved by our individual actions. Our politicians are distant and unresponsive to our desires. A natural reaction when people feel overwhelmed is to gather in forums or retreat into various forms of passivity; you could call unplugging yourself from social media a passive withdrawal from the mainstream. If we don’t try too much in life, if we limit our sphere of action, we can give ourselves the illusion of control. The less we attempt, the less the chances of failure. For this reason we become attracted to certain narratives: it is genetics that determines much of what we do; we are products of our times; the individual is just a myth; human behavior can be reduced to statistical trends. When we are harnessed to Facebook, or piped into Google’s DeepMind or the like, an unseen trap is sprung when the rebuke of passivity does nothing to slow Facebook and the new world communications order it’s supposedly helping give rise to. We’ll eventually be left to explore why Facebook prefers your passivity and the sleep of reason. It does not want you to discover the affirmative ethos of “Exit Facebook.”

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Mediated passivity in the digital garden creates a grand delusion of reward for being lazy. The fact that someone might have to expend much effort to get what they want out of life has been eroded by the proliferation of devices that do so much of the work for them, fostering the idea that they deserve all of this, and they can inherently consume what they want. So we get to this decayed affirmation in the vein of “Why bother working for years to attain mastery when we can have so much power with very little effort in cyberspace? Technology will solve everything.” This passivity has even assumed a moral stance: “Mastery and power are evil; they are the domain and dogma of patriarchal elites who oppress us; power is inherently bad; better to opt out of the system altogether,” or at least make it look that way. Many have exited Facebook because they see their attempt at attaining mastery as something extremely necessary and positive. The world is teeming with problems, many of them of our own creation. To solve them will require a tremendous amount of effort and creativity. Relying on genetics, technology, magic, pleasant religious bromides or being nice and neutral will not save us. What we won’t find wasting time on Facebook is the energy required not only to address practical matters, but also to forge new institutions and orders that fit our changed circumstances. We are constantly reminded of why we need to find our way back to the conception of mastery that defined us as a species so many millions of years ago, in order to operate the world and move it forward. This is not mastery for the purpose of dominating nature or other people, but for determining our fate. A passive attitude cannot survive in this atmosphere.

The passive-ironic attitude we see all over Facebook (and the “Facebook Life” it has been leaking all over the rest of our world) is not cool or romantic, but pathetic and destructive. We were told once by elders that we are setting an example of what can be achieved as a master in the modern world. We are contributing to the most important cause of all—the survival and prosperity of the human race in times of strife or stagnation. It may take a profound willpower to shake young and future generations from the disconnect of chasing Facebook versus real-world needs and to keep it from hard-wiring the thoughts that determine the functionality of the mental landscape.

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Sleeping through this at our Peril

Before fading too far down some faux highbrow negativist rabbit hole, an unrefined clarity of “basics” supersedes everything written above—Facebook has led itself to exactly what it has already revealed itself to be: The most blithely megalomaniacal, data-sucking company on Earth; a vast and ominous succubus of information (mostly of the self/psychology) and potent, AI-driven conduit through which forcibly flows all human activity, both social and domestic, public and personal. It is 100% housed and parsed in remote and all-encompassing databases with open options to recombine themselves with other databases and next-generation algorithms. It develops a subversive understanding of what you are in the simulacra and tries not to spook you, so as to defuse wariness and exploit desires. Sleep and reveal. Five hundred or so years ago in a feudal age of shoguns and rōnin this type of insidious soul extraction might have been called witchcraft, followed by recalibration hunts and beheadings. And like witchcraft or the backstory to some fabled, tainted Eden, wanted and unwanted knowledge is delivered in a tasty Apple, the lustrous code is caramelized, and ushers us sweetly into the hall of temptations with free, 24-7 access and the promise of happiness, social/career promotion and the big mushy alphanumeric hug of all-consuming “likes” (the default emotion for everything in the FB walled garden). This is digital fetishism and, when you’re submerged in it, it creates a new kind of You. Even as you feel as though you are engaging in a free and conscious choice, it’s detecting patterns and “harvest points” in your identity. If people are naïve or stupid enough to detail their everyday experiences and share on social media they should not be surprised if it bites them on the nose five years down the line. There was a quaint era when Americans valued privacy beyond the long-form government census at once-per-decade intervals; now we have this.

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Facebook is a latticework for the planet’s largest ongoing conversation, and a relentless data-mining wonderland/wasteland. Beyond coping with its sheer scope, on the inside we see the part of FB’s programming that’s exclusively built by us as a reflection of society itself, and the mob mentality in the world of ideas. When the music stops, whose career just got destroyed, what gossip-y kid is going to catch fresh shit at the playground tomorrow and whose reputation was ruined because their behavior offended a morally pitiless and self-righteous digital mob? Another downside is that we often see what our friends’ political beliefs and value systems look like. Judgment follows; are you “with” or “versus” the central narrative of the zeitgeist?

There is the obvious reason why someone would want to cut back on the Facebook usage, namely that it is a perpetual sump for one’s time and attention. Facebook is a productivity vacuum, and while that fact seems to be lost on Millennials, it is clear to me that my fellow Gen-Xers are well aware of it. However, I believe there are deeper and more troubling reasons why we should seek to eliminate or mitigate our use of mass-social media platforms like Facebook: namely, that Facebook is riven with dehumanizing, emasculated, politically-correct groupthink cooked in an Orwellian nightmare.

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Facebook’s Dusty Dead End

Small Picture, Digital Individual: Material/Immaterial Self

In the course of my wanderings, I’ve begun swimming upstream against the idea that Internet-driven social media is some great masterpiece of human civilization. At first it was innocent and breezy—I logged on in 2008 and saw how the material world that used to be densely physical could become a frictionless, weightless, fantastic abstraction. Marshall McLuhan could hardly imagine how his dark, logical media prophecies would come to fruition: Just assume you’re being recorded and people will behave accordingly. Combine the Facebook Matrix with a smartphone, and what do you have? A scenario where practically anyone can be intruded upon, not only at some fixed address, but everywhere and at all times. Before this, I had expectations that were ordinary—that during the course of the day I could be left alone, unobserved, occasionally unsustained and unburdened by public or familial roles. That era has now come to an end.

A newly pervasive, permeable, transient sense of self has replaced what William James called the “material self” (the experience and emotion that exists within the confines of the self, in intimate relations, and in unchanging tangible objects) has migrated to the phone and digital “cloud,” and is subject to the shapeshifting judgments of the crowd. Like the target of Earth’s heaviest and most muscular living snake—the anaconda—a person can be figuratively killed by the pressure of mass opinion alone; Twitter can squeeze its victims so tightly that their circulation ceases and, as prey, they suffocate and drop off as a casualty of the social media panopticon. It happens every day and crosses over into the mudslinging mainstream media instantaneously; punishment and drama sells, so they manufacture it. Some ersatz “journalists” simply amplify Twitter, Instagram and FB feeds and call it tabloid news. They can’t even be bothered to do the groundwork or fall back on messy journalistic ethics.

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Experience can never be archived, preserved, or duplicated. Emotions cannot be conveyed digitally. On Facebook, we replace any true emotional connection with others in the form of “likes.” This is eerily reminiscent of Orwell’s system of Newspeak. “Double-plus good,” in Nineteen Eighty-Four, was an attempt to quantify and roboticize the unquantifiability of mankind’s spiritual and emotional nature. It is hideously reductive.

If this side of the social media matrix is mismanaged, it can cause real-life and even legal consequences for you. It’s not a harmless toy anymore, and the Millennials dig in and absolutely work for it; their parents are nearly powerless to stop them. This is how the social media faithful develop and evolve—the events of your life did not really happen unless they were archived in the Matrix. Your thoughts are continually referencing how and when and what experiences and emotions should be posted, boasted, vented and validated on the Matrix. The social media matrix has an ever-increasing percentage of the human race in it, so it’s tipped over the critical mass to become the status quo. It is used by governments and law enforcement personnel to help spread propaganda, root out dissenters and entrap those that commit victimless crimes. At the very least, you ought to assume you’ll get “unfriended” (there goes the 1984-speak again) if you point out any statistical red herrings in a contentious subject like the gender income inequality gap or race politics. In the manner of picking a poison, do you stick by your principles or crumble into a frustrated, formless mound of passivity?

Should FB and its ilk be avoided for the sake of your own health and sanity? Is it essentially reengineering our cognitive functioning abilities, and as a result, leading to this epidemic of people who seek instant gratification and can no longer have the willingness or the discipline of developing patience? While the Internet and the capacity of smartphones provided us the ability to interact and get in touch with our loved ones and people who live far away, it is nonetheless a hindrance on our capabilities of actually being human.

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Big Picture, Encoded Individual:

Your Presence is Requested in “The Stack”

Each and every web site and web user is subject to the Google drones’ all-seeing multiple eyes of Sauron, a Skynet-like sweeper program with never-ending arrays of boxes to check off as it refines itself (and linked to an entity the NSA doesn’t even attempt to mask as SKYNET). Monitoring and surveillance. Time begets growth, when some grow jaded and cease frolicking openly in the lush landscape of Internet CGIcandy® interspersed with noxious herds of obsequious groupthinkers. To tamp down, sit back and put the pieces together, the unfamiliar calm can reveal how smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, the Internet of Things and automation are like novel species evolving on their own, yet forming a coherent whole as they crunch Us into numbers—an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture for the human race. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us. We fool ourselves to think we’ve placed distance from it by turning off the phone or PC. That phone actually doesn’t even turn off; “off” is an illusion Apple and Samsung wanted you to feel good about. That button is a marketing gimmick. You have to break and pry open the sealed case, then awkwardly rip out a user-unfriendly battery to truly stop the signal. In this little black slice of life your identity is a crop to be picked and your emojified feelings waft through The Stack as the Technorati gather to thin-slice your marketing profile. As your rights to privacy are whittled down, Facebook and Google send off a whiff of their more nefarious plans to be the omniscient, money-sucking catch-all for life in the simulacra. Then they feed your data to the NSA and FBI, and make yet more money, this time by siphoning tax dollars. And you? You’ll get nothing and “like” it.

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Facebook Shifts the Overton Window (and free speech)

After further contemplation, society was forced to change its earlier perspective about what Mark Zuckerberg wrought, and what his central tenet was exactly. One way of looking at it is that in our age, you can create a fortune out of rubbish, out of stuff that’s discarded. The trick is in how cleverly you posit these images and ideas, so that they are “made unique” once more even if they were originally mass produced. This is where your online identity gets recycled and assimilated into next-level AI. Zuckerberg clearly understood this in a whole new way, and gained watershed leverage worthy of Hollywood biopics before 30. But as it gained momentum, one of the keys to Zuckerberg’s ascendancy meant tethering FB’s digital social hub to the esoteric engines of the tech illuminati. World-moving shifts could be orchestrated from within, games of disinformation could be tested in the programmer’s “God mode”…the mental experimentation options were seemingly endless. These moves, classically thrust into a somewhat hidden ruling concept called the Overton Window (or window of discourse), get precocious entrepreneurs invited to hear heartfelt recitations of Marcus Aurelius proverbs over crustless egg sandwiches in Bohemian Grove by age 29.

As Zuckerberg engineers Facebook to shift the Overton Window to his preferred political leanings, “unacceptable” thought and true free speech is suppressed, and exchanged instead for a dumbed-down groupthink that has its own set of moral Stormtroopers. Free speech is fundamentally about honesty of public discourse. There cannot be topics that are automatically precluded as being not acceptable because it might, no matter how abstractly, offend someone out there. That’s what free speech actually means, a dialogue between all of the people and not just what’s prescribed as “acceptable” from some ideological set of concepts. I find it not just insulting, but dangerous to our democratic instincts to allow debates on crucial issues of State and society to be dictated in advance by what a person can and cannot say. This is a form of self-imposed dictatorship. This is what I see on FB as in American culture at large.

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Americans are proud of their First Amendment right to free speech but even today that doesn’t mean that you have the right to say anything. Expect the current damper on free speech to accelerate on the private social media platforms. It has already happened to Facebook. You are allowed to freely espouse any political opinion as long as that opinion comports with what Mark Zuckerberg deems acceptable political discourse. The same is becoming true of Twitter. Most experts in the field say we should expect this trend to continue with the encouragement of the federal government.

There’s sincerity in the “don’t-tread-on-me” vibe as millions cherish ideas like “break free of the rat race and don’t be manipulated.” It sounds great on the face of it, but thinking for yourself can come at a price. You could quickly be branded an intellectual/cultural dissident if you veer off course or aim beyond the Overton window. This will be your punishment for menacing or trying to tamper with an important tool governments and the globalist intelligentsia use to manipulate public perceptions and opinions. This tool is the Overton Window, and once it is fully understood, the enlightened can fortify pragmatism and media literacy, or facilitate exit strategies.

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How Ideas are Deemed Extreme on Facebook

First created by Joseph Overton, a former senior Vice President of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the Overton window is a mechanism used by the intelligentsia and political elite to determine the viability of a movement or idea. If something is within “the window,” it is seen as a “normal” or “respectable” position or belief that a citizen is allowed to possess. If a belief or movement is placed on the outside of the window, it is deemed “extreme,” “outlandish,” or “foolish” by the powers that be. This is an incredibly effective tool that can be used to subjugate an entire population because it only requires a powerful individual or small group of individuals to first decide what is acceptable or extreme, and then use the government, religious institutions, and the media to push ideas that are deemed “acceptable.” It is especially potent because this “window” is never fixed in one place, meaning that it can be moved in any direction based on both external factors and the user’s beliefs. When the window shifts, a prevailing acceptable identity is made mainstream, and any criticism of that spectral avatar is now shaded “bigoted” or “extreme.”

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All too Human: Nobody Misses you when you are Never Absent

There is a paradox of power in the ether of social media. Considering the toll it takes on its users, you’d think people were getting some sort of meaningful traction in the form of social power by lighting up their feed five times each day. Nothing could be further from the truth, despite the impression and feelings that 127 “up-votes” might invoke in validating our existence and releasing some endorphins. I’ve occasionally chased a story in that rat-and-food-pellet kind of way. We can all point to those who are garrulous power users on the Facebook feed, but the undertones of repetitive self-validation tend to erode perceptions of power, and the most habitual segment of Facebook/Twitter users may fail to realize this.

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True social power is a moving target and relies on things that are not always blatant. Among the prevalent patterns on FB is the need—particularly among the young—to saturate (abundance) the field of play with visual and text-based evidence of your existence. Along the way, something critical is lost—one of the natural laws of power, which has been plied for thousands of years by legends such as Sun Tzu and Machiavelli, is to use absence to increase respect and honor. Don’t let them see you too much, and definitely don’t let them see you crying or whining about anything. This power’s motivation requires other powers as a precursor—people have to actually give a damn about you or it backfires. That said, some level of early-phase omnipresence (on social media and elsewhere in life) is key to making yourself not rare but seen, appreciated and maybe even loved, so that you shall be missed in absentia.

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As social currency goes, too much circulation makes the price go down. The more you are seen and heard from, the more common you appear. To create value through scarcity, we must learn when to leave. Perhaps by leaving social media, periphery friendships will decay and even some of your inner circles might warp as select members simply won’t feel the same about you, or won’t feel you at all. A swath of the population barely believes they are real unless it has been blasted across the social-engineering Matrix on the daily. Without it, the unreconciled would feel alone again, even if it diminished them and created subtly self-styled paranoid aphorisms such as FoMO and YOLO, and left the rest up to their imagination. That’s all collected into the “it’s your own damn fault” basket. The simulacra makes it possible to forget that beyond the electronic Eden is where we actually heighten our presence with dancing and falconry (fill in the underlined words with whatever pleases you most), and find the kind of events that go unrecorded and post to nowhere. On Facebook as in life itself—once you’re gone, will your withdrawal and scarcity suddenly seem to deserve respect and honor? Did it matter at all that you whiled away huge chunks of time in a void of socio-commercial productions? La Rochefoucauld explained it well as it ever-so-faintly resonates in this millennium:

“Absence diminishes minor passions and inflames great ones,
as the wind douses a candle
and fans a fire.”

Everything in the world depends on absence and presence. I think many of us have seen moments where it was better to be rewarded for being rare and valuable. It works the same way in a capitalist economy. There is a misguided notion toward social omnipresence in the 21^st century that challenges the over-marketing of social media abundance; it never achieves fulfillment. If you are successful and interesting, you become more valuable to the marketplace; good things will find you. You don’t need social media’s help to attract them. Furthermore, the tasks many of us perform on a daily basis require long periods of unbroken concentration. We’ve got to “be gone” (and undistracted by the triviality of social media) to get things done. Problem: Cannot have these services diminishing my ability or fragmenting my concentration. Solution: Take the passive approach to cultivating social media brand/identity.

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A strong presence will draw different forms of power and attention to you—you might outwardly shine more brightly than those around you. But a point is inevitably reached where too much presence creates the opposite effect: The more you are seen and heard from, the more your value degrades. You become a habit. No matter how hard you try to be different, subtly, without your knowing why, people respect you less and less. At the right moment you must learn to withdraw yourself before they unconsciously push you away, like hide-and-seek. The problem with those who might have trouble disconnecting (from Facebook or anything else) is that they fear and regret that their absence might create a kind of death before death. It might be possible to build a more cult-like following by knowing when to disappear, and today’s digital addicts and “attention whores” fail to understand how this resonates with truth.

There is no art in knowing when to retire, only knowing that I have overstayed my welcome. That is why I am leaving. I might not turn monastic as a recluse, but thinking there is power in my presence on the social network is mostly ridiculous and denies the rich inner kernel derived from the outside world.

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Breaking the Black Box: A Warholian Mirror Moment

I cannot miss what never stuck to me in the first place. My FB page is a neglected abstract of useless information and uninteresting moments that nearly starves the site’s marketing algorithm. I didn’t share and therefore barely exist. I like the outside, 3D world far too much. Inside the social media Matrix there are patterns and symmetry, an imitation of a familiar and seductive hunting ground embedded in the reveries of our ancient DNA. Outside that walled garden? Pablo Picasso.

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A rebellious and slightly bitter sampling of the US citizenry across the right, left and center recommends understanding and then breaking Facebook’s Black Box. For them, a boundary line has been reached, and a path to discrete revenge for being deceived and outmaneuvered splinters outward. Their views were cited, revealing the shared dread that what’s called information now looks like disinformation. So why not supply your own disinformation and blockages to safeguard your remaining stash of privacy and throw stones at the Goliath? From a privacy point of view, this is a sensible thing—it’s disinformation. For someone seeking your private information, thinking they know something, but being wrong, is worse than not knowing that thing. In this fashion, the old Soviet Union was a master at spreading different forms of disinformation to its enemies.

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Facebook is little more than a big content marketing scheme—draw hype around having people post about their lives as a way to sell things to them. Other social media, Instagram for example, is equally simple. The great ones are always so simple and obvious that we generally miss them. It’s a type of cultural myopia that despite our best efforts hems us into not seeing the self-evident sometimes.

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Even the idea of Facebook, which the chattering classes laud as something profound and singular to humanity, is a ridiculously basic idea as it’s nothing more than an electronic billboard. There is nothing world-shattering here at all, but what Zuck realized is that you don’t need to develop a brilliant, smart and elegant device to make your fortune, all you need is something that appeals to the mass mind that’s cheap in every sense, and makes people “think they’re important” while also “making humanity better.” He realized in his Harvard dormitory that it’s the same old salesman’s technique of “stack them high and sell them cheap.”

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Beneath the skin of a digital social revolution there is an inelegant and comical sense of our collective self-importance, similar to the riggings of the Pop Art movement that Andy Warhol espoused. If you call garbage art for long enough, well, presto, perhaps it really does then become the art for the modern era. And you know, despite being a bit of a snob, Warhol was on the money when he came to this ironical conclusion, which he minted while enjoying the gullibility of the nattering art experts and connoisseurs, who he showed up to be the fools, frauds and posers he knew them to be.

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All those Shiny Toys at “Participatory Surveillance ‘R’ Us”

Big Data fulfills what it sees in you. Over time, we began to understand Facebook’s intent and marketing revolution and see it as a lie that forces itself into our world, so that it may triumph in the realms of consumer culture and government/corporate surveillance. I simply do not want its excessive intrusions—its key point of success—to come through me directly. I won’t let it. If Facebook and social media are seen as brave new digital worlds, well then symbolically I have chosen to stay home, where the world seems less distorted.

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No sense in complaining about it—we used FB and FB used us back. Playground of the mind, at a price. In exchange for magical connectivity, you give them your life as content. Their entire arsenal was spelled out in the tiny type with a big “agree” button beneath it. Crafty super-users fend off the low domain of boredom when they ask in computer code: “Remake my identity with the clues I select for you.” Let’s see how good the Almighty Algorithm is, and basically tempt ourselves to be frightened by the algorithm. There’s a chess-like excitement in the individual, some form of empowerment to stave off feeling like the hapless victim of data snoop-mining tactics. We all loved Grumpy Cat a bunch and the Interwebz parkour was top notch. After the idea of “neat-O” passes, we could be vaguely haunted by the idea of “how did Big Data see me?” and wonder how it’s scaling up in remaking America and the world. Into the Paranoid Forest we go…

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It illustrates the complex mathematical models that are increasingly being used by businesses and government to sort people out into groups—and studies show this is reinforcing human biases instead of correcting them. You become a semi-fictional entity that appears in patterns. There’s an assessment metric on LinkedIn—is it discounting your talent because the digital cupboard was left unstocked? Will what it finds out about you online get you fired somehow? Is it administering a personality test on you and barring you from a job, or worse? What happens if or when the models reinforce inequality (like paying higher car insurance or being denied credit for living in a low-income neighborhood) or silently cost people opportunities if the computer model discovers your day-to-day surroundings is in a high-crime zone? Here’s the story of how Facebook and Big Data make their own kinds of judgments and build an alternate narrative of You. On top of this, you’ll have to consider the risks of being honest in your opinions, seeing how people disagree about facts, and being subjected to micro-targeting by partisan political groups or direct threats from trolls and psychos. On the upside, the superstructure that FB data feeds into has failed to properly demystify most of us, its renderings of our internal system or marketing persona are often clumsy. The bottom line is data isn’t truth and data tools can do real harm if we fail to police their use. They pretend that because they wield the most numbers, they have the right answers. We comply to be monetized in the natural progression of their business model. Shareholders and VCs need their money back. Every time FB rearranges the way is Timeline works, it reveals a core characteristic of the business model and the errors of inaccurately harvesting people and mispricing the yield. When it shifts from a chronological timeline to an algorithmic one, it gives FB curatorial control, so they can better monetize the information on there, and play to your attention via socio-psychological profiling models.

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We could have guessed that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, matchmaking sites and the like would change considerably over short periods of time as the medium still contains unwritten paths. The venture capital world drives tech companies down the same business model that it has. We knew how this would end up—on one hand, we’ve built a truly revolutionary neural network for the planet; on the other, its future and potential are inexorably tied to the more toxic “people farm” notion that reminds you of young Neo’s revelations in The Matrix. He wanted to make 100% red pill maneuvers in this digital simulacrum, but he also compromised that mission just to fit in.

Instagram can be included with the same ilk as the above. Instagram creates a persistent behavioral loop. The app both triggers a need and provides a momentary solution to it. It as a habit-forming product, and users make it a part of their daily routines. Its genius was to create angst around the fear of somehow losing a special moment. Facebook saw how addictive Instagram was and had to have it. These apps demonstrate the increasing power of habit-forming technology.

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Quiescence and Conclusion

I’d like to think the modernity that social media helps create is a success story whose best days are ahead. I’d also prefer a place where identity isn’t hollowed out or foredoomed by the push and pull of dynamists and catastrophists in their current arrangements, even if there is wisdom in both archetypes. At the same time, it’s hard to shake the idea that global civilization, despite its achievements, is becoming more atomized and morally bankrupt, environmentally despoiled and on a trajectory of crisis. The future is terrifying; Facebook says let’s try to be happy about the present. Facebook has a sneaky way of letting me know it’s no longer possible to deny in its presence that daily life itself has become empty or mechanical. A basic, speechless instinct welled up to fuel an insignificant rascal who dared to tell you that Facebook is creating money out of nothing. In so doing, does he avoid becoming a “Man of Air”? A Man of Air is about the anonymity, passivity, and lack of critical thinking that is expected of those who take part in the corporate system.

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Optimistically, scraps of future-forward enlightenment float their way in on the dismal tide of digital drawbacks, and I am reminded of Kant. For Kant enlightenment was mankind’s final coming of age, the emancipation of human consciousness from an immature state of ignorance and error. He believed that this process of mental liberation was actively at work in his own lifetime. The advancement of knowledge—understanding of nature, but human self-knowledge no less—would propel this giant leap forward. That would have to be here, between the lines, now, to justify social media’s intrusion upon privacy and the public sentiment.

Considering how my Facebook posts have trickled down to a glacial pace of roughly one or two per year, I may as well enlist trusty ol’ Paramind to handle my social media outreach from here. To some Millennials this sounds like life in a hermitage. Zuckerberg has his test monkeys all in a row. Avast…there lies the dusty dead end, just around the bend from generational conformity. The withdrawal maneuver is complicated—before I leave the Digital Oasis, I have to ask “What does it cost to not do Facebook?”

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