Unplugged (Part Two)

Oh, Facebook and Gen X.

They’re besties, they surely are.

That blue-faced archangel of Judgment Day.

How you’ve shaped our Gen X lives.

Zuckerberg’s Frankenstein monster ended up being an alpha-omega herald of post-millennium globalism. I was addicted to it, as everyone in my lost generation was, and many who still are. The vicarious windows into each others’ lives satisfied a good number of neurological chemical rushes. That fucking website was sometimes as bad as the jones for a heroin fix, in its formative years anyway.

MySpace was dying out, Facebook came into its own in ’08 and ’09, and because I’m an official member of Generation X, I jumped fully on board and fell into its trappings and routines much as the rest of the world, and eagerly began finding fringe family members and long lost friends, looking up exes and former high school crushes (and risking all the inherent dangers therein), posting pictures of doggies and kids and checking into cool places and marking seminal events and humblebragging about this, that, or the other. Seemed like a good thing at the time.

That was before the leaks and sales of personal information, the Russian trolls and hackers, the ad walls and malware bots, the incessant political soap boxing, the catfishing and the aliasing and the stalking, the corporate shilling, the failure in regulating or moderating the proliferation and augmentation of hate speech, racism and sexism, the passive stance on tolerating conspiracy groups leading to real world hate-mongering movements like QAnon, all of which contributed to Facebook’s eventual transition into a stinking cesspool of internet toxicity.

Do I sound bitter? Overstating a bit, mayhap? Nah. That’s what Facebook is all about. The commentary threads from any significant media fan pages are proof enough that unchecked bigotry on public forums is a real and present danger to a moral society. I never, ever, advocate for any kind of censorship, especially the written word. There is, however, a difference between free speech and hate speech.

You actually don’t have the right to threaten harm on others, emotional or physical or intellectual abuses, because of your philosophical differences with them. That’s a form of assault. It’s illegal and prosecutable. Facebook was a primary source of online bullying. Teenagers committed suicide because of unchecked Facebooking. A great deal of white supremacist sentiment is tolerated by Facebook. Zuckerberg’s a whiteboy, he knows where his bread is buttered. Online bullying, be it political or social, is an unbridled habit for Americans, left or right.

I must be answerable to that myself, particularly in the early days of the internet, back in the ‘oughts of the new millennium. I used to participate in flame wars, mostly on cultural fan pages and message boards. While it was fun for a time, using wordplay to wire people up, it’s an empty pursuit and lacks any real purpose save for alleviating boredom.

The problem is, someone on the other side of the keyboard may get psychologically harmed by what you think is casual tit-for-tat rhetoric, and what you may not realize is they might take your smarmy horseshit personally and feel assaulted. I made that mistake for years, thinking it was all in good fun. I never took any internet threats or disparages seriously. It’s the internet, right? Who gives a fuck?

It’s all cyber sludge, you think, whether you’re hashing someone on a Reddit message board or you’re in a heated exchange on politico forums. Internet anonymity, keyboard jockeying, expression of angst, venting in a commonly utilized medium, passions flaring, defense mechanisms kicking in, validation of viewpoints via consensus of like minded users, it’s not hard to follow that trail of bread crumbs.

I know now, as should we all, sometimes the internet isn’t fucking around and people have died in the real world because of what’s transpired on their LED screens.  

We love that Facebook keeps us in touch with that second cousin of ours, we love that social media is free, yet the tradeoff has become more than unwieldy. Staying on Facebook has essentially required our society to sell its soul, with all its corrupted overlap in politics, business, and personal privacy.

But damn, even given all its faults it’s still a draw, ain’t it, with its freebie mass communication, its outlet for validation in showing off the best parts of your life and omitting its lesser glories, its lure of virtual interactions with sociopolitical and entertainment fan pages of worldwide culture, its passive voyeurism of friends and family. In some ways it’s the biggest gimme gimmick of all time.

Yes, I’m still on Facebook-Meta. Barely. I haven’t posted in years. In a desperate bid to kick my addiction, I deactivated my account for a couple years. I cyber de-toxed, the withdrawals honestly weren’t that bad. But then I returned. I’m human. I know Facebook shouldn’t hold sway over me. I’m sure there’s a time coming when I’ll delete my account for good. Hopefully I’m fast approaching that ceremonious Facebook finale I’m due, as I still find myself occasionally responding to Russian farm ‘bot accounts when they post outlandish bullshit clearly designed to stir pots and influence lazy minds, and that’s a colossal waste of energy and a good sign it’s time to wrap it up.

Instagram-Meta is little different. I mostly use it as a doggie photo online storage hub. I still post photos there, mostly for myself. I don’t often set my posts to public. I used to have several thousand followers on IG, not a bad showing for a middling whiteboy. When I was promoting my debut book I used to accept random friend requests from literary fans, I quickly learned the hard way having your personal page mixed with your professional page was not a great idea, and after a handful of unexpected showdowns with female literature fans and a couple of restraining orders later, I removed all the fan followers from both of my private account platforms.

At least Insta’s primarily photographic content allows for less accessibility to sociopolitical soap boxing, though again, the commentary threads on more popular accounts can get just as poisonous as Facebook, and there’s no shortage of malware bots there either.

About Twitter-X, that’s a whole other ball game. Before Elon bought it out and changed the name, I was on Twitter for all of twenty-four hours before I deleted my account and gave it up for good. The limitations of 140 characters allows for a massive amount of endless spamming and mindless sludge, and it’s become the primary message delivery system for white supremacists.

Social media and texting are tanking us.

They’re dictating political policy, shaping social norms, and supporting and reinforcing society’s darkest sides.

Most importantly, they’re systematically removing a fundamental requisite of human society, that of face to face or voice to voice interpersonal interaction. We aren’t hardwired to live our lives through screens. Our most effective and essential means of communication, those of our physical senses of sight and sound and touch and taste and smell, shouldn’t be surrogated through secondhand facsimiles of real life like the internet.

Because that’s what the internet is, kids. It’s one step removed from bona fide virtual reality, which is near ready to launch to worldwide acclaim. Given our tendencies in embracing fake worlds, VR will be an addiction that makes Benzos and Opioids look like Skittles. We’re biological creatures. We haven’t gained enough access to the unknown avenues of our brain and its unmapped synapses to adequately compartmentalize virtual realities as a hobby, as a lark, rather than embracing it as a legitimate, fully functioning method of interacting, absorbing, and interpreting the real world off screen.  

Social media’s eventual culmination in virtual reality will convince many, as it’s so often portrayed in science fiction tropes, to forsake the real world entirely. It’s only an illusion that’s convinced people they’re more connected through social media and smart phones. Those advents have pushed us farther apart than ever.

Here’s where I quote my favorite movie of all time, Blade Runner, wherein Rutger Hauer’s replicant antagonist Roy Batty tells William Sanderson’s J.F. Sebastian the following:

“We’re not computers, Sebastian. We’re physical.”

We’ve passed the year in which the dystopian world of Blade Runner was set. In the early eighties, 2019 seemed a long ways off.  Apart from the lack of flying cars and murderous robots, the stark landscape of Ridley Scott’s future Los Angeles is disturbingly prophetic.

Giant widescreen consumer advertisements on the sides of skyscrapers, we’ve got that.

Ruinous weather patterns brought on by climate change, we’ve got that too.

Mass animal extinctions, corporate globalization, metaphorical Christian parables, disaffected paranoid populations, police state brutalities perpetuated on a lower caste based on slavery…hell, we’ve got all of that, plus we just stumbled through a deadly plague for good measure.  

Radical as it may sound, as hard as it would be to reach consensus, if every person on this planet made a choice tonight to permanently delete all their social media accounts, Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and SnapChat and TikTok, or if their respective CEOs disregarded their profit margins and future projections and permanently shuttered their respective companies, quality of life across the world would immediately improve, though the uproar of dissent and cyber de-tox would be considerable.

Nothing worth doing is ever easy.

If every person abandoned their texting habit and traded in their smart phones for flip phones much as we had at the turn of the millennium, there’d be an adjustment period, but I expect we’d adapt far quicker than we think. Shallow constructs aren’t missed for very long after they’re gone. Our innate muscle memory of interpersonal interaction would kick in. It’s biological and it’s not extinguished. It’s dormant.

It’s not terribly realistic. It’s not impossible. It’s improbable. It could happen, if we really desired it. There are more pressing issues facing humanity than a need to dismantle social media platforms and return to real time discourse, no question. But it would help, immensely so.

How do I know?

Because we’re missing that real time connection that’s so crucial for our well being. Social media was a good idea in its inception, enabling us to reach out and connect to those with whom we’d lost touch as well as finding new friends we’d never have gotten to know at all without the assistance of an online public forum. Regrettably, we kinked it up, letting our fears and prejudices overrun the medium.

And now, upon reflecting on this latest rave about cyber realities adding to our pending apocalypse, it’s clear I sound exactly like one of those raggedy old hermits in post-apocalyptic stories and films, either warning intrepid travelers of pending doom, or lamenting the good old days to awestruck survivors. Blaggh. What a cliché.

‘Scuse me, I gotta go find my sawed-off shotgun and my mutant sidekick.

*Compiled from August 19, 2020