AUTUMN 2016 (II): DEM411 Facebook Tomb

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ALL UNDERWATER PHOTOS: DUSTIN HUMPHREY

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Key Points:

Last light before the fade
Wide-open final critique (not so elegiac)
Top 5 posts (and the stories behind them)
Fame and gratuitous name-dropping

Facebook doom. Put a fork in it. Take it out back and shoot the irredeemable bastard. Long walk off a short plank. The social media fade maneuver doesn’t qualify as a real departure, though there have been more than a few days when the leaking, stabby, raging side of “the community” was ripe for a nice face-down-in-the-freezing-river death. With Facebook, the living web software product, the most common outcome is a neutral/ambivalent departure for those who tried it and left. For 6.5 billion people trying to survive day to day, getting up into a FaceNook is not on the list of priorities; the other billion are Facebook members but how many of those really have presence? You could save a perfectly good middle finger for something more meaningful. An inability to rejoin the natural world would be the more dreaded departure scenario, if one were to get trapped in a techno-simulacrum that pulls harder the longer one inhabits circuitry and the Internet backbone. In some ways we may be headed toward such a fusion, with VR enhancement, the “Internet of Things” and progressive AI. The Net won relevance, cleverly designed itself to be an integral gear in society’s standards-setting mechanism, and forced 95-year-olds who are baffled by computers to figure the contraption out so they can obtain workable knowledge or medical care. Ultimately, I have an agenda and want to find reasons to believe it’s not a big deal—memories are stabilized on timelines, internal and virtual. We govern ourselves. Separately, it’s hard not to admire the transformative ambitions of Jobs, Gates, Brin and Zuckerberg, the kinds of visionaries known to flip the paradigm the way Miles Davis or The Beatles did in their areas of expertise. When I think of one early-adopting group that understood the art of technology-driven transformation to a T, you could see how The Beatles were at it long before most:

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“TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS” / REVOLVER / THE BEATLES

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The “It is Not Dying” Parallel

They cued sitar, samples, “laughing seagulls” sound board tricks, concentric programmed loops and backward masking, pushed boundaries to the outer limits and said it a second time: “It is not dyyyyy-ing.” One timeless line from “Tomorrow Never Knows,” which audiophiles understood as a technological breakthrough by the Beatles (album: Revolver), and they were suddenly veering off into a completely unheard-of realm. Among the very first to coax audio art from a microchip, they set the foundation for not only “Manchester sound” but the hidden bedrock of techno music and electronica. In the last millennium, it resonated with meaning and optimism when the Fab Four and a deep crew of brainy producers thought about the future and the unknown. In particular, experimental producer George Martin guided the Beatles and reshaped the sound of pop music. The song was an enormous hit and an ambitious departure from anything they’d done before. Countless modern bands have been quietly influenced by faint virtuoso pulses from the 1960s, even those who dismiss the stony musings of British hippies from outer space. This kind of sonic power stroke required technical wisdom derived from a pragmatic high ground that altered the genre’s blueprint forever. Any type of musician can recognize it immediately. It helped create an everlasting cultural nostalgia for a band that finished its career before my arrival, and still plants ear-worms in the minds of children, and may just go on forever like Bach or Wagner (they don’t die, they become music). In a roundabout way, this is what any Facebook-style social media platform wanted to evolve into…something undying that penetrates the collective consciousness by changing the dimensions…a.k.a. “disruption.” The Beatles were intrepid disrupters in the ear drums of society. Disruption, a concept brimming with shop-worn hyperbole, becomes most real in a time of stagnation and finds ways to reach disruptive end points faster via online media and social networks.

George Martin /// crazy scientist

The global communications matrix idealizes the sort of shapeshifting, transformative optimism and soaring techno-creative achievements that make genre-defining songs like “Tomorrow Never Knows” legendary. Alas, only songs or artworks can capsulize the crux of something glimmering, sublime and perfect we could never obtain in the dirty, error-prone real world. They’re aspirational anti-realism. Despite a brand-new set of drawbacks and negative realities, the core of the social media ethos is not entirely rotten—it wishes to epitomize open-mindedness, a quest for truth and meaning, and a willingness to explore the unfamiliar, which is alluring (and also shrewd marketing). By analyzing the thread or timeline of the past (individually or as a societal whole) we can find practical launch trajectories into choose-able futures. We like an atmosphere that hints at limitlessness, and it smolders online. It sounds empowering even if it’s a maze route through obscure crypts and ossified vestiges of Friendster or The WELL, just before FB, Tumblr and Insta threw them into the tar pits of obscurity.

With a few sublime and vaguely satisfying laps around social media under the belt, I’m one of millions who have already downshifted to a leisurely, barely-there pace. A detached deconstruction is not possible—cannot un-see, too late. Crossed fingers and a sneak peek of the future might still linger in the now-default “global conversation” roosting inside social media matrices, and we’ve got our mementos.

Being “there” in the Land of the There-less

Never saw the appeal of slings and arrows on mercurial Twitter, which throws shade on digital introversion. It has effectively made a case for its own uselessness. Well done. Studies show it interferes with real news more frequently than when it enhances it. Donald Trump needs to have his Twitter fingers duct-taped together…forever; even his most ardent supporters agree. Twitter has become an unlikely new mainstream communication port because it bobs in the cross currents of the Overton Window, and gets validated at scale during riots and other crises. What kind of person exists to develop a taste for an ephemeral, closely-monitored platform chock full of curated false news, false alarms and snarky self-promotional skew designed to confound the gullible? This question provokes defensiveness and counter-aggressiveness from the sea of Twitter feeds. Is it OK if we catch ourselves reveling in a perverse joy by watching Twitter and Facebook served up in the mainstream media as a cleansing agent to remove defectives from the gene pool? Within the wild media vapor trail lays a wake of impulses that took over for common sense. Cautionary tales galore. It’s unsettling how something with little actual substance can undeservedly invade and lay waste to a human life in ways we haven’t seen before, or perhaps stare in resignation as it shifts the central psyche of an entire generation and the way it communicates.

I’ve so far avoided using Instagram or LinkedIn except to open each account as a “placeholder” so no one else hijacks the name connected to my identity. Claims staked, owned and then abandoned. My social media usage since 2015 is averaging maybe 20 minutes or less per month. I also now see stretches of months with zero logins and a complete blackout on incoming alerts. I’ve customized, blocked feeds and automated email notifications, and have filtered and narrowed my experience—friends are still there, and I can still see their feeds and what they’re posting. The critical difference is that I must seek out this information manually, and I do so when I choose to. This flips the equation of how FB is designed to operate: the information gathering process is a conscious, active choice, versus a passive forced-feeding that contains all sorts of useless information.

Facebook reintroduced me to the generational pop culture archives of Atari and other benignly nostalgic triggers through its highly-specialized groupings. Such two-dimensional stuff may stoke a momentary wave of fun or fascination with a bygone era but it won’t give us even the remotest sense of closure about previous development phases of our lives. It’s just a revolving door of flashbacks and innovative self-directed mirror play. Closing time at the Social Matrix Saloon…

Two Other Douglas Metzners (I didn’t want to know)

People with semi-unique names can easily find out if anyone exists with the same name. Idle moments can drive you toward cyberspace random walks through the back channels, and it didn’t take much hiking to find Planet Earth’s two other “Douglas Metzners” on Facebook. One lives in the US Midwest, while the other is in Brazil; we retain some distinction since none of us share a middle name. The American is a burly biker dude of age 56; the other is a 17-year-old Brazilian kid who’s clearly got some German lineage presiding over his namesake in a land where most people go by Da Silva. The young Douglas Metzner is good-looking, rich, and apparently more popular than I was in high school. Once or twice each year I receive his wayward, mistaken friend requests from teenage Brazilian girls. This kid’s feed is wide open; he sends all sorts of smoke signals through Facebook and he gets noticed. I illogically found myself rooting for him. Good for you, young buck…work that game. Get adored. Fare thee well, other Douglases.

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“COLD OUT THERE” / OPALESCENT / JON HOPKINS

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House of Fame

Bumping into famous people is startling and a little disturbing; we almost aren’t ready for them to exist in three dimensions. You find yourself rationalizing the mediated construct in your head with the human being standing before you as the situation unfolds. In the Facebook carnival full of games and prizes, a gossamer “mini fame” is seemingly within reach at all times, blurring the lines between the microcosm on the screen and the luck-based ability to simply wander into random people on the path of prosaic daily life, some of whom were famous in the flattened extensions of media. It is destabilizing and blows to fragments a world that was once local, full of immediacy and tangible.

This final section of my two-part foray into Facebook and the effects of social media doesn’t require photos. You already know who they are. There’s not much need to say you sat next to Malcom Gladwell in a cafe and Liv Tyler waited in line behind you in a bagel shop; such encounters happen to about 8,000 New Yorkers before lunch. Also excluded were the occasionally famous bands or people met during my brief stint in the music industry (see “music” page for full rundown).

1. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: New York City, 1990s, on the elevator at Bantam Doubleday Dell, and just moments after an interview I scored via a Rutgers University friend and classmate Deborah Ackerman (who was there full time after graduation). This is where Kennedy-Onassis spent her later years after being a consulting editor at Viking Press, and was shortly before she received a cancer diagnosis. A lot of people have no idea she was into publishing or books to this extent. After interviewing for the entry-level editorial assistant position, I stepped on an empty elevator to head home. That’s when her assistant ran over and swiped his hand through the narrowing crack while the door was closing. As the gap swung back open, there she was—Jackie Kennedy, with me and her assistant and no one else, readying for a 30+ story ride down a slow elevator. She appeared frail, positioned her headscarf carefully around her face and may have been fending off a cold or other illness, but also possessed a curious energy. She sized up a moment, then engaged me: What job did I just interview for, what did I like to do in publishing, who did I know on her floor? She knew Deborah well, I told her we went to school together. She replied in that unforgettable lilting voice “Oh, Rutgers…one of the most respectable schools outside the Ivy League.” I appreciated how she said “outside” the Ivy League. That was some truth, but delivered politely. Every bit the class act you heard she was, in such a minor moment, even when stuck in an elevator with a total stranger. As we parted in the lobby, she wished me luck with the job offer and moved toward a limousine waiting curbside, and I walked out into the midtown Manhattan bustle. The air just felt different for a second or two there. Such a friendly gesture, when she could just as well say nothing. It sunk in about an hour later that I had just had a real encounter with one of the most famous and beloved women on Earth. I got the job offer, then turned it down. It was a fortunate week full of better options.

2. Sean Penn: An ex-girlfriend worked production with Penn and studied with Francis Ford Coppola in the early 2000s, and she maintained a small office perched in Coppola’s iconic building in North Beach, San Francisco. She and Penn lived near each other in Ross and Fairfax, north side of the bay in Marin County, and were genuine friends in a neutral and platonic way (beyond the work). The first time I met Sean was in the course of stopping by to pick her up for lunch plans elsewhere. So in the process you’d end up filing through Penn’s basic “high-status player” sentry gate; not long after that you’re in the kitchen. So of course he’s going to walk directly into his own kitchen. It was a daytime go-to thing and feels normal under the canopy of live oak that shades Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, despite it being the wealthiest enclave in Northern California. A few other people were there working. At the time, they were all going overtime to wrap up production on “The Pledge,” which Penn directed. His production company is called Clyde is Hungry; there’s a damn good in-joke tied to that. Nobody was fawning and the scene was 100% normal.

3. Mark Zuckerberg (March 2013): Noe Valley in an empty Pasta Pomodoro restaurant: Yep – I’ve been face to face with the creator of my digital ire!!! The whole Facebook thing just circled back on itself that day…at a restaurant for lunch in my district, empty, and in comes thee Mark Zuckerberg, his wife and dog…staff does not recognize him, I pretend not to…we had mellow direct eye contact, no blown covers. He held his gaze on me for a few seconds to see if I was going to pounce or starting going gaga. Not even. He lives five blocks away in Liberty Heights, just had a house built there. He was definitely casing the place for safety and privacy. Paparazzi nailed him on the sidewalk out front 10 minutes later. The Papz even said “Gotcha Mark!” as he went by. Just brilliant to see Zuck get served with a blowback mirror moment. If you think Facebook invades your space, well then its top Space Invader just got invaded.

4. Alan Ginsberg (via professor Miguel Algarin and Nuyorican Poet’s Café): Here’s one where I come off critical of someone universally seen as my better in the realm of literature. Let me start by saying I’ll take a gonzo Hunter S Thompson rant over Alan Ginsberg any day. I met Ginsberg up close at Rutgers University in the 1990s; he surprised us in a Shakespeare class because he knew Miguel Algarin very well (they may have even been lovers at one point), and did an impromptu poetry reading on the spot. This was a tiny class, maybe 13 students, so we were right at the table with him. He came across as a homoerotic Bob Dylan character, without the singing. Ginsberg was not trying to be an entertainer, because he conveyed something more intellectual in the foundation of his political agenda. Although I knew I was supposed to be dazzled or awed by his emphatic award-winning prose, the rawness he was famous for felt embarrassingly forced as he tried too hard to be prurient for shock value’s sake. So his central narrative seemed lost in space, not just lost on me. I took it in with an open mind, but was soon pining again for Shakespeare and Marlowe to come back into the room and put old Ginsberg out of his misery. It was odd to see a venerated and so-called literary genius, one so galvanized by this big movement, sort of come across flat and insubstantial…I was braced for something more profound, but ended up seeing his poetry as healing words for weirdos and misanthropes. He chatted with me, Miguel and a few other students afterward and I kept my interior cheap shots out of it, seeing how I was a 20-year-old man-child who couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag, and humbly knew it.

5. Michael Stipe (of REM): While living for 13 months in Miami/Ft. Lauderdale in the mid-1990s, there was an even earlier “with girlfriend” moment that arose from meeting the lead singer-songwriter for REM. She knew a top promoter who offered her a cheap but prominent space to show art at a large, professionally planned rave site in Orlando one Friday night. She knew no one would buy art there, and it might even get ruined, and thought money could be best generated by running a smoothie/smart bar instead, and asked me to help make it real. It seemed strange because she owned and operated an art gallery in Miami, and we both had jobs already, but her business wasn’t making money and she was 23 and needed money. I thought it might be interesting and embraced the logistics of gathering up two solid recipes for choline cocktail-enhanced “smart drinks” (keyed up a notch or two over ordinary smoothies), all the ingredients, multiple blenders, and made sure there was a giant load of ice in spare coolers. I knew we needed a third hand on deck and hired my buddy Dorian to tend the smart bar with us. After spending hundreds of dollars and filling the car with bananas, strawberries, and a dozen other ingredients, I still wasn’t sure if we had enough, envisioning a thousand thirsty ecstasy-heads rolling through the party. Apparently, there were no other vendors selling what we had, and we got mobbed. The enthusiasm was infectious, it was so much better that we didn’t bring the artworks, and it rapidly netted us just under $2,400 in profit (after expenses) in about four hours, in a room that was a total blast, just wall-to-wall dancing and packed to the hilt. The two flavors of smoothie and the secret ingredients we put in them synthesized well with the extremely high people…It was also a humid night, indoor/outdoor style in a nature setting on the edge of the city. By 1:00 in the morning, the smoothie bar is completely overwhelmed with sweaty people, money is flying, and we would eventually go through every ounce and drop of product by 3:00. Roughly 20 minutes before the ingredients started running out, Michael Stipe parked himself and guzzled two icy smoothies in a row, and he starts talking to us a mile a minute, loving crushed ice, and he’s not leaving! Me, girlfriend (Toni) and Dorian are among the very last sober people in the party now, and we have a great time making people laugh and bring up their energies. We have Michael Stipe in stitches, he’s digging the scene—hell, he’s electric at this point. Pretty much out of his gourd, pupils dilated with some sort of ecstasy drizzle and maybe overdoing it, hard to tell, and not even trying to hide it. Fun guy. Huge tipper. After we closed up the smoothie stand, we packed what was left, I pay Dorian double what I initially told him he’d receive, then hide the rest of the money in the vehicle and joined Michael Stipe’s direct invitation for us to join him on the dance floor. As the very pre-dawn light starts to filter into the night my girlfriend and I invited him and three others to join us for a hot air balloon ride in the nearby tropical wetlands (it had been going all night, adjacent to the party). He declined, but we spent several minutes sitting on the end of a dock, our feet dangling in the water, and we’re watching a fine mist evaporate between the mangroves. It was still at least 30 minutes to sunrise in the middle of summer. Michael Stipe took his posse back to his hotel, and the rest of us took flight by balloon shortly thereafter. An hour later, we go back to our own nearby hotel for 6:00 a.m. swimming and pancakes, then nap until early Saturday afternoon. Kinda magical.

6. Martin Sheen (a completely nonverbal conversation): I didn’t want to break the ice with this uber-famous guy but we were seated facing each other (less than six feet away) for at least 20 minutes or so in an uncrowded public space. We’re together in an otherwise deserted arrivals gate in the San Francisco Airport. The flight was coming to SFO from Kona, Hawaii, where I was picking up two friends. Sheen was holding flowers for whoever he was receiving. I didn’t look at his face at first, so it took several minutes and we were strangely alone nearly the whole time in this little offshoot wing / cul-de-sac. He gets my attention when I sense him trying to sense if I’m recognizing him. I guessed he was frequently spotted or mobbed. Then it occurred to me I had just ID’ed the President of the United States (from TV’s “The West Wing”). My face changed and a silent (100% nonverbal) conversation unfolded:

Martin Sheen (nonverbal voice based purely on facial expression / body language): “You don’t look like paparazzi, you look like you’re just here waiting for someone.”

Me (nodding my head in acknowledgment with a bit of shrug): “Indeed, but yo, now I know who you are; facial recognition lock! Oh but it’s cool…I’m here for people on the same (apparently deserted) incoming jet, so I have my seat here and I can play it cool man…cool…not going to go wild on you, dude, cool-cool-cool.”

MS (cracks a wide grin, message delivered and he found it genuine): “Cool, yeah kid…we cool.”

Me: “Yup, super cool Martin Sheen, sir…ummm, right. Yup. We’re just sitting here alone in a room making direct eye contact for way too long now. No bother. Not about to flip out on you in this unique and now very uncomfortable silence with fame-recognition static swirled into it. Nah – sssss’aaalllll good over here Mr. Martin Sheen!”

MS (nodding, glint in the eye with a hint of that knowing, not-to-worry face): “I’m going to go back to ignoring your presence now, son…coooooool.”

His lady got off the plane first – First Class. Sheen’s face lit up and the moment looked pretty golden for both of them. As the Sheen-y glow faded sauntering slowly down the hall and out of view, my bedraggled peasant friends emerged from steerage accompanied by live chickens, a fully-laden donkey with mange and the scurrying sound of stowaway rats. They were forced to pee in bottles and their burlap hobo bags were hastily dumped on the tarmac.

7. Penn Jillette (once with Teller, who does indeed talk): Was good friends with our band’s producer (Kramer) in the 1990s. Kramer and Jillette (who had his own band, Captain Howdy) would pal around and often show up at some of the same SoHo parties, and we’ve chatted backstage at Knitting Factory. This guy is off the chart in terms of IQ.

8. Chloë Sevigny, Lady Miss Kier (of Dee-Lite) / club kids NYC: When you get involved with techno and the NYC techno underground and NASA, you’re bound to bump into people like these (and Moby) in the 1990s. Lady Kier gave me the pointy end at a Liquid Sky party in NoHo once, and suggests that it was likely preferable to be a Nobody…meaning she thought I was a Nobody. It oddly stabilized my opinion of myself, this sarcastic, bleating techno pharmacopeia princess, and she was about as perceptive as a monkey with glaucoma. Good times.

9. Tina Turner. Another elevator story. This time, elevator of the Philadelphia Four Seasons, where my mother was sequestered by the city court system as a psychological expert for the contentious MOVE (black power movement) member trials. I had driven over to drop off something she forgot at her home, and wasn’t staying long. The diminutive Tina Turner was surrounded by a contrasting duo of towering bodyguards who stared blankly at us the entire ride up. She made eye contact but said nothing. Huge hair was like a lion’s mane. Her commitment to cool was thoroughly on lock-down that night.

10. Maynard Ferguson (“Rocky” theme song, etc.): My high school jazz band jammed like wild banshees with the Grammy and Oscar winner at a competition in Philadelphia. He utterly ripped it up on trumpet…a certain adventurous face-contorting energy backed by abnormal lung power, and he knew how to ration his breath for dramatic high-note sustains. Our band instructor, Mr. Tweed, was losing his mind. We were floored by the sheer projection derived from Ferguson’s instrument.

And that…is all there is.

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The DEM411 Facebook Tomb