The future of Facebook is “Project Big D”
A cautionary speculative fiction about sexual permissiveness, data aggregation, and the power of memes.
“We look for people who are passionate about something. In a way, it almost doesn’t matter what you’re passionate about.” — Mark Zuckerberg
The year is 2019…
OKCupid has collapsed from the colossal mistake of hiding visitors. Turns out the whole fun was seeing who stalked you, and then stalking them back until dinner and sex ensued. All the specialized fetishy dating sites are teetering on the edge of insolvency after their nth data breach of the year.
The once stable gay app (meat) market has been thrown into chaos by those shifty young “Zennials” re-purposing seemingly tame niche messenger apps into niche gay clique dating apps… the irony being that Sarahah, an app from über-homophobic Saudi Arabia, now holds the title for world’s most prolific facilitator of hot twink action.
People continue to “swipe left” but mostly on awkward ad profiles… because you’re not really thinking about Taco Bell when you’re horny. The new Double Bacon Chalupa may be delicious, but it doesn’t make you wet.
Meanwhile, the numbers game that is Facebook isn’t looking good. Traffic counts are dwindling, and an attempt to bet the farm on more intrusive video “content” (*cough*ads*cough*) has alienated some of the most lucrative groups of users. Things are getting desperate in Menlo Park. There are rumblings that they’re about to institute a nominal fee for dry cleaning and laundry services, so you know it’s getting bad.
As Mark Zuckerberg’s presidential ambitions rise with every Trump tweet — though rumor is he’s actually settled on aiming for a retiring Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat* — there’s a leadership vacuum at the top… something needs to be done to turn the ship around before Zuck becomes the next “Tom from MySpace” …albeit one with a choice appointment to the Senate Appropriations Committee.
[*The Great Central California Quake and Tsunami of October 2018 has led to an unique emergency extension of term, ending in 2020.]
Though the budget isn’t looking good, one area where Facebook isn’t skimping is internships. Still shelling out for the best-and-brightest, they’re starting to bet the farm on some fresh blood invigorating their bloated middle-age-for-tech platform …as the last twenty or so “bet the farm” attempts always managed to lose the farm. Once, quite literally — the cows in Utah never recovered, and they’re still finding not-so-fresh entrails in the data center cooling system.
And boy did that whole “fresh blood” strategy work… at least at first…
Nineteen year-old Thomas Ranker arrived in early June after being discovered by Facebook’s recruiting algorithms, which determined he was living a life of bubbling genius on the margins of an underappreciated annex (Cowichan Valley) of the already underwhelming Vancouver Island University.
Almost comically appropriate for his name, Mr. Ranker — in a quirk of personality for his age cohort, he always prefers to be called Mr. Ranker — had a background in deftly gaming search engine rankings for a nominal fee, a hobby cultivated as a pre-teen. Just the sort of stat cruncher valued in any digital marketing team.
And speaking of stats, in spite of Mr. Ranker’s seemingly anonymous vaguely-Anglo name (according to him, there are 273 known Thomas Rankers in the Anglosphere — because of course he’d researched that), he was actually a great boost to Facebook’s employee diversity numbers… son of a first-generation Jamaican immigrant father and a third-generation “old stock Canadian” (for B.C.) Punjabi mother. This gifted him with the beautiful and rapidly prevailing recently-new-to-Canada skin tone jokingly called “Maple.” And in spite of his preferred masculine appellation, he [pronouns: he, his, him] also ran a popular Tumblr of “genderqueer” identity memes… well, at least until post-Yahoo Tumblr died a sclerotic death, but it remains a popular entry in archive.org nonetheless.
He hated the idea of being a “diversity hire,” but he knew the algorithm was supposedly colorblind. And the placement gave him a chance to escape the summer of asthma-inducing forest fires constantly threatening his small-town home… “beautiful on the five days a year we don’t have orange haze.”
Two days in from getting off a plane in San Jose, Mr. Ranker was put on a vague but important blue-skies project: devise a means — any means — of boosting Facebook’s dwindling monthly repeat users* by 40% within the next 6 months. [*Deemed any unique user who registers a visit of 1 minute or more on Facebook twice or more per month; an admittedly pathetic threshold.]
As Twitter — Twitter! — gained more new users the previous month than Facebook, this was looking like a bleak mission. #futile
But Mr. Ranker was enthusiastic, observant, and insightful. Something most of the Facebook staff were not after getting fat-and-happy on stock options, and then turning alarmingly pessimistic as their value tanked.
In spite of his “Maple” good looks and open-minded views on gender, Mr. Ranker struggled in the world of online dating, and his own non-existent love-life made him acutely aware of the crisis fomenting in the restive dating app sector. Seeing this landscape of failure, he thought there may be opportunity in turning Facebook into a new kind of matchmaker.
It had been tried before, but through third-party garbage like “Zoosk” — “WTF kind of name was that? Zoosk — sounds like a search engine for cute animal memes, not a dating site,” Thomas proclaimed via the Project Big D Slack channel… D being “dick.” Mr. Ranker and his motley A-Team of interns had quickly settled on the essence of what this project would be about; and more shockingly, they were using Slack (!!!). The messianic driver of future Facebook revenue, “Workplace,” recently died a quick and violent death, following the fate of many false prophets before it.
Mr. Ranker started voraciously gathering every data set he could find about the vagaries of the online dating scene… answering obscure but fascinating questions like:
“What percentage of users use Christian Mingle to cheat on their spouse? And of that group, how many are Evangelicals who express political beliefs in protecting the sanctity of heterosexual marriage?”
“Is a plurality of members of FarmersOnly actually comprised of people from high-density urban areas? Is there evidence these members express a sexualization of otherwise workaday rural lifestyles?”
“How many vegans defect from OKCupid to Plenty of Fish on a weekly basis, ostensibly driven by the irony of the pescatarian site name?”
The specificity of questions that could be answered with once-overhyped “Big Data” tools never failed to astound. Even more astounding was that most of their data set was siphoned off pastes of breached databases… as online dating sailed through a sea of new icebergs, the first to jump ship were the security engineers. Somewhere in this vast sea of FTC Privacy Enforcement Orders there had to be the weapon for winning the online dating war.
In just a couple weeks the kernel of Project Big D’s big idea started to sprout… “What if we built a dating site that’s everything to everyone within Facebook. We have the most diverse user base of all social media apps, so that means we have the most diverse possibilities for connecting people regardless of the kind of relationship they’re seeking.”
Initially the idea was scoffed at by the jaded Marketing Communication Coordinator who supervised the Big D team — officially referred to by the more prudent title of Operation 40, coincidentally the age of Mr. Ranker’s once-youthful supervisor. Their response was: “Being everything to everyone is exactly why we’re in a bind. Facebook is so diluted that nobody cares anymore.”
But Mr. Ranker would not, could not, be discouraged… “What if we do ‘everything’ but with a twist? Emphasize something that appeals to most users in a way that will at least pique the interest of everyone?” Now they were on to something. But what constituted a “twist” in the dating world?
A few more days of probing database queries revealed what should have been obvious. Everyone today, or at least pretty-damn-close-to everyone, is a big fucking pervert. At least by the standards of previous generations.
Most “obscure” fetishes were now mainstream. Dildos — no longer even euphemistically called “personal massagers” — could be found in pretty much every Walgreens and Target across North America. The latest release in the “Shades of Grey” series brought co-branded (and affordable!) light-weight rope floggers to the aisles of small-town Wal-Marts.
The most grotesque keyword combos possible seemed to perennially appear in widely hyped reports of the top ranked search phrases on xHamster, a site which recently debuted a new sex-sitcom in conjunction with Netflix… a more overtly obscene reboot of MTV’s 90s sleeper hit “Undressed” — now with more whips, chains, and fisting! An instant hit among Baby Boomer and Millennial viewers alike!
The rapid decline in public prudishness seemed to be accelerating in reaction to, if not actively promoted by, having an unchecked “Pervert in Chief” in charge of the world’s most reliably destructive nuclear arsenal.
“We’ll emphasize connections and content based on fetishes. Nothing too weird… we’ll filter for ‘scat’ and ‘emetophilia,’ things like that, but otherwise we’ll be open to pretty much anything until the authorities object to something.”
The cautious response of their Operation 40 coordinator honed in on that last part: “Whoa, but what about countries where just holding hands in public is dangerous?”
Mr. Ranker quickly made the brilliant counterpoint: “Exactly! We can promote even totally mundane ‘fetishes’ by framing things within a global perspective! More traditional users will click on sappy content about young lovers in Yemen struggling for the right to walk hand-in-hand along the beach, while we’ll be poring over the hottest new latex catsuits!* It’s a gateway to permissiveness no matter where you are on the spectrum!” [*this sentence was stated seething with comic sarcasm in a way only a Canadian could truly master]
A few minutes of banter toned down the emphasis on fetishes per se — they quickly realized their conversation was deep in “Bay Area” territory far from the borders of Kansas — but there was an immediate realization that there was power in people’s secret desires.
With the surprising speed that is often born of corporate desperation, Engineering quickly got to work on “perving up the platform” as they laughingly described their task.
Of course, a geofenced age-restriction scheme would wrap around the whole thing. That was the most difficult piece to design, so work started there first, knowing the whole enterprise would depend on this fig-leaf of easily circumvented public morality.
Luckily some of OKCupid’s brilliant security engineers were just picked up on the cheap after only 3 days notice… the Facebook perks package still has sway, even with fluff-and-fold imminently costing $1.50 per pound. They quickly adjusted their subway trips and bike share routes to descend upon Facebook’s Manhattan offices.
Meanwhile, scores of workers were assigned to fleshing out the details of how this would all work… Mr. Ranker had an idea for that too: “We have an amazing content aggregation model we can leverage to identify people’s relationship interests and connect them with like-minded people across their network. Even if people aren’t interested in finding new partners, they still might find the content intriguing enough to engage with it.” The flurry of pitch terms acquired in just a few weeks in the Valley swayed the committee now in charge of steering Operation 40, and they set to work turning “The Ranker Model” — if ever there was a better euphemism for a social media platform — into a reality.
A cleverly phrased banner would appear atop your feed inquiring if you were interested in opting into Facebook’s latest feature… it would offer hints of dating opportunities. And hints of somewhat more risqué content. But hinting at nothing more threatening than unrequited furtive glances of longing across a Starbucks…
You would start to see articles and other content dealing with “relationships” and “sexual health” enter your feed, with a new reaction model, initially prototyped as “I’m into it vs. Ewww!” Soon another banner would appear to gauge your interest in “seeking new relationships and intimate possibilities” …again, prototype phrasing — the real phrasing took weeks of dogfooding to get right, using a playful test environment mocked up on the rotting flesh of the “Workplace” platform (Engineering had a vulture-like appetite for re-using working but abandoned code).
A side-effect of early research from within was a remarkably instantaneous jump in wedding bells ringing across Silicon Valley and an eventual mini-baby boom at Facebook… people were finally threatening to cash in on that generously expensive parental leave package… quickly making the Big D-40 project “too big to fail.”
As the engine started to aggregate your into it! versus ewww! it would start flinging edgier content towards you… content that scratched a similar sexual itch among friends-of-friends-of-friends. Getting the tame stuff natively-hosted and mobile-optimized for Facebook was easy. The LiveStrongs and WebMDs of the world were already talking about relationships and better sex in non-confrontational terms… and were already on the platform. The real nut to crack was (very quietly!) collecting carefully censored teasers for more “extreme” content into the Facebook fold.
The xHamster folks had made a vital breakthrough… their Netflix hit opened the floodgates for overtly sexual content packaged — like a vibrator at your neighborhood CVS — in a way that didn’t seem to really offend anyone. In adequately “progressive” corners of the world, this all started appearing on feeds without anymore a peep of protest than would arise from the average “Antifa” meme. Mr. Ranker’s number-crunching in fact revealed that the most clicks on the new content were coming from the most “outraged” demographics… no surprise there. And the brilliance of the content-aggregating algorithms meant that for the most part, no one’s boundaries were pushed too far… unless they were into it!
Three months into their creeping public beta, which still had no external name in part due to an Apple-like shroud of Silence-or-Death, the return user stats were already skyrocketing. Folks around the world — or at least the countries where the new naughtier Facebook was allowed to make an appearance — seemed to enjoy a more sultry spin on their social media feeds.
In more conservative lands, there was a parallel push of more tame “relationships” news that had yet to invoke any meaningful outrage from their pseudo-democratic leaders, and numbers in those lands also started a modest climb above projections for mere “natural growth due to network penetration” (as-if Operation 40 could find any more innocent but sexually euphemistic-sounding phrase). It was time for the next phase…
The dating component was ready. For years Facebook had quietly collected data on key points like sexual orientation — “We know kids are gay before they know,” according to the blunt assessment of one intern — and already knew where people liked to hang out, what they liked to do when hanging out, and who they liked to hang out with. The tough part was knowing the most elusive and intrusive bit of data: what makes people’s dicks hard? Or, continuing the euphemisms spreading like wildfire among the Engineering team, “what activates the hardware interface?” (a perfect “inclusive” way of stating their conundrum).
Luckily the first phase had already started figuring out the answers. People were all to willing to express how into it! they were when it came to “puppy play” or “ball-busting.” Now all they had to do was get people to opt-in to a special but prominent feature of Facebook that would do what Facebook does best — shove people you barely know into your daily life — but with an explicitly “hey maybe go have dinner and fuck!” element to it.
The problem their Marketing Communication Coordinator supervisor struggled with was how to generate interest… in just a few weeks, the new content model was starting to show good but rapidly diminishing returns. They needed a Hail Mary pass of a branding effort to get people clicking frantically on opt-in buttons for their dating platform. They needed a really fucking great name.
And so we come back to Mr. Ranker, who at this point in his tenure is now twitchingly acclimated to accepting “Thomas” — but never “Tom!” — as a form of address, and his initial presentation… with his internship now an eternity of *weeks* behind him, and in spite of wielding a swank hybrid Engineering & Marketing role (for what seemed like a billion times the average starting income he would’ve had upon graduating from Van Isle U-Cowichan Extension after 5 years of asthma attacks), he still had not forgotten that in-retrospect kind-of-squicky conversation about the power of perversion.
“Let’s call it ‘Pervert’!” he exclaimed (with a pre-arranged affirmative nod from his supervisor) to the Marketing team’s morning stand-up meeting.
On first impression, it was almost laughably “extreme” but really damn intriguing. It was sort of a winking hint at what dating apps were already filled with, certainly easy to remember, and was conveniently one syllable under the three syllable limit for any new Silicon Valley creation worth its weight in venture capital funding rounds. And the algorithms were quickly discerning that just about everyone on Facebook was indeed a “pervert” in their own special way.
Amazingly, Zuck — perhaps distracted by sorting out a campaign fundraising fiasco involving mysterious checks arriving from a Cayman Islands account — signed off with a nod and a verbal affirmation that would be best described as a “grunt.” A new Pervert was born.
Just a few days of frantic international focus grouping would be needed to settle on the whole branding package. The underlying framework of how it would all work was already there, and was so mature that it already had “failed forward” through its first three annulments or divorces between estranged Facebook employees, for whom the alpha-phase algorithm hadn’t quite worked out.
Really all they truly needed was a cute icon.
The answer for North America, Scandinavia, Japan, Australia, Argentina, parts of the UK, and Israel ended up being a surprisingly cutesy rendering of a dark-purple Cat o’ Nine Tails (BDSM being all the rage!).
For the rest of the “progressive” markets: an image of a diaper. It focus-grouped amazingly well across Europe, Asia, and most of South America. (Thomas’s reaction: “What the fuck does *that* say about the rest of the world?” followed by futile attempts at putting his IBM Watson account to work at understanding this revelation.)
More uptight locales would get a tamer name: “Intimacy,” “Lovelines” (the sex line of same name just went belly-up; because who in 2019 calls a sex line?), or “Connections” — depending on the country’s perceived level of openness and romanticism — along with a generic but universal heart icon.
The opt-ins were already being collected through a sly limited beta for weeks, so quite unceremoniously at 3:14 AM — chosen for “mathlete reasons” — on a Sunday, the Pervert icon went live. Those who already weren’t opted in certainly proved to be very intrigued, and clicks started pouring in as viral media notified the remaining folks for whom the icon wasn’t already obvious.
Within a week, new and return user counts were through the stratosphere (“Like pre-IPO ‘Snapchat’ big!” per Thomas) and ubiquitous listicles of “The 10 Best ‘Pervert’ Pairs Finding Love” only added fuel to the fire, and provided fodder for countless local news human interest stories.
The algorithm was almost too good.
The quiet, near-subconscious tells from years of “reacting” to articles, boosted by the new platform’s more voyeuristic hints of what people were really into, made Facebook’s Pervert an instant juggernaut in online dating.
It was so good that within a month of launch, nearly all the niche sites for “Ace” (that is “asexual”) dating just gave up the ghost… Facebook was too good at setting up bowling dates for those libido-lacking folks who shared ZIP codes (a coup notably turning around the fate of America’s remaining bowling alleys); and for a few, the really on-point matching revealed that maybe they were at least just a bit sexual, now that they finally found their soulmate who was also turned on in just that right puzzling and slightly self-shaming way by mid-90s Disney movie villains.
Within a month, more sexual liberation probably occurred in the Developed World than across the entire decade of the 1960s. You know you’ve found post-millennial gold when Weekend New York Times columnists just can’t shut up about it, yet nobody complains about it, and that was exactly the world’s reaction to Pervert.
There were some “downsides” to this rapidly unfolding revolution, but they were more in the form of embarrassing surprises that people managed to get over quickly. Pre-teens (who “jumped the fence faster than refugees in Ceuta” in the words of an ex-OKCupid engineer) were inadvertently finding out that their favorite aunt shared the same now-mundane golden showers fetish — which made people blush for only a moment before it led to a family-unifying giggle at the next reunion.
Somehow such discoveries broke through the customary awkwardness of modern social interactions. Certainly that discovery would somehow be less shameful than admitting to your Blue State cousins that you voted for the Golden Shower Enthusiast-in-Chief… who was still mired in trying to shake off that rumor in congressional hearings (soon to include Senator and Unrepentant Golden Shower Enabler Zuckerberg: “Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.”)
Authorities in the European Union were scrutinizing the new intimacies of Facebook’s data collection, while simultaneously rejoicing at the initial signs of a promising boom in marriage and conception rates… and wasting far less time identifying their next Brussels mistresses and boy-toys.
Normally shy but super-pervy Japan also saw a rapid uptick in young people copulating, far more impactful than Shinzo Abe’s previous attempts at playing a bureaucratic Cupid.
Australia quickly demanded a more potent geofence to save the children, as their “mate culture” started to reveal that more mates than expected were comfortable wanting to “cop a root” with each other.
And across the Arab world it now became increasingly ok for non-arranged-but-engaged couples to hold each other’s hands as they strolled towards shopping mall Starbucks locations.
Sure, the social conservatives and prudes made a fuss, as always, but their hypocrisy became more apparent as they accidentally found their previously-unacknowledged taste for leather was shared by their old high school sweethearts.
Sixty-something Boomers were now stumbling alongside teens into the few remaining Hot Topic locations, trying to find something vaguely “kinky enough” for their romantic getaway in Scottsdale.
The world had become amazing. The sexual singularity slid ever closer into view.
And then it happened…
Facebook was always a little pervy… closed groups provided a forum for like-minded people to share interests a bit sheltered from the scrutiny of censors and the general public. And of course, sexual interests were always part of the Facebook (Closed) Groups ecosystem.
With the arrival of Pervert however, many fetish-oriented groups felt the time was right to come out of the proverbial closet. Why hide when you know so many other people are eager to try on your latex catsuit collection? (Thomas was right about the catsuits!) Many groups threw open the doors and opted into the oxymoronic “Pervert security fence” to keep away all the immature-but-alarmingly-sexually-mature youths. But the sexual influences of youth still caught up with them… and not just in the standard “Hot Asian Teens!” trope sort of way.
Late in the night, about a full year after Facebook fully embraced its new found perversion, an 18-year old joined the Frankfort (KY) Fetish Fun Club’s open group after embracing the more liberal social regime they* [*newly preferred pronoun] had encountered amid the dorms of Kentucky State University.
The first thing they did after perusing the pinned post of group guidelines? After consideration of said guidelines, they posted a meme.
A meme to end all memes.
A meme totally within group guidelines. Totally kosher under Facebook’s new censorship framework. A meme this kid thought would get “way too many” Into it! clicks (indeed… it did). And a meme that somehow violated “community standards” in a way that no one could even fathom before that fateful click to post it.
This seemingly well-adjusted young “straight” — whatever that means at this point — guy had a background as American as a Korean-Polish gastropub’s fare (which includes a savory kimchi-apple pierogi, as a bridge to the iconic apple pie) and a seemingly innocent fixation set early in his youth.
That fixation was nothing requiring an order of specialized sexual apparatus from Babeland or Fort Troff, or anything eliciting attendance at obscure transcontinental cos-play conventions (though that would prove to be an extension of said fixation for others), or even anything driving him to seek out various niche porn purveyors.
He just found that the crease in his pants got bigger whenever he thought of certain characters in sexualized situations. And a friend who slogged around deep in the bowels of the n-Chan network of sites found just the meme for him, and he was so excited he just had to share… the Frankfort (KY) Fetish Fun Club would love it!
And so it began.
The first (totally permitted) viral posting of a Minion sucking off another Minion* appeared on an open group of Facebook’s Pervert community.
[*very un-Minion-like genitalia crudely photoshopped in for emphasis… the X-rated Reddit posters of the world will not stand for Cinemax-level vague hints of fellatio. Even Cinemax has higher standards now.]
You’d think given the speed of social media virality and the everlasting power of Minion memes that this sort of thing would already be all over Facebook. And they already were.
But the Minion fetishists, the ones who felt comfortable enough to create X-rated memes (which only acceptably delved into the most basic of sex acts… Minions engaged in anilingus was a bridge too far!), were still in closed communities. They didn’t have the cross-cultural confidence of Pokémon cosplayers or erstwhile-asexual Disney sexualizers. Quite simply, the world was not ready for sexy Minions, ironic Halloween costume kits notwithstanding.
As the members of the Frankfort (KY) Fetish Fun Club awoke after dawn and flipped through the feeds on their phones while in line at Starbucks, a distinct pattern of “reactions” arose. Now that capital-P Perversion was fully integrated into Facebook, the standard set of reactions now applied to sexualized content as well.
A small but sizable minority enthusiastically reinforced our young KSU student’s confirmation bias with a collection of reactions from “Like” to “hearting it” and lots of eggplant emoji action in the comments.
An even more sizable middle-ground of ambiguous “Wow” reactions greeted the post… some people weren’t sure what to think, but they knew somehow a line had been crossed.
But overwhelmingly, the anger and sadness responses started to pile up disproportionate to all the others.
Clearly Minion fetishization was off-the-table for the “normal” American pervert.
Through the power of the network, the ones who did like the post were quickly put in contact with each other.
Surprise… surprise… they all were in a similar age cohort, and had experienced the same weird formative “what’s happening down there?” feelings of introspection every time they saw a Minion, until the hormonal onslaught of the late-pre-teen years finally made them start figuring things out and changed their view of the “Despicable Me” series forever (Was Gru really sort of a stand-in for a leather-daddy master type of figure?).
And now that they found each other — Facebook doing what it does best — they were empowered! Within a week, two Minions blowing each other (there was an inevitable Minion-69 follow-up in the comments section mere minutes after the first post) had become the catalyst for a reaction of thousands of Minion Fetish Fan Clubs popping up around the world, both in a virtual and very-real sense.
That cos-play stuff stuff our innocent Fetish Fun Club member stuff had no interest in was a very real interest for many others, and within weeks, various fetish meet-ups were overwhelmed by new attendees clad in Minion costumes modified with specially-placed cut-outs and easy-open flaps. Good for them! Another harmless sexual expression had been liberated! Though it was all more than a bit annoying for the folks who showed up hoping for a little nipple play in their yellow-latex Pikachu costume… somehow there was never really a synergy between the Minion and Pokémon crowd… fetishes can be irrationally specific.
Oh, but it wasn’t all as simple as mere disruption to the dungeons and sex clubs of the world.
Minions had become a prized reference-basket currency in the Meme Economy. Much like the greenback and Euro come with a dark side of criminal money laundering that most folks don’t want to think about as they open their wallet, the revelation of sexualized Minions was something most folks around the world had tucked away in that special corner of the mind we reserve for “things we know probably exist, but don’t really want to ever encounter.”
The minute you saw a meme of Minions mounting, you couldn’t un-see it, and in that moment more than a decade’s worth of cute but simplistic memes re-posted several times a day by your Aunt Carol (and we all have an Aunt Carol, right?) were now just RUINED.
The immediate pan-generational, cross-cultural, international outrage generated by the instant explosion of lecherous Minion Memes in Facebook feeds everywhere turned into a tidal wave the Facebook team — and Mr. Ranker, aka Thomas, now begrudgingly Tom! (“from Facebook!”) — could neither quite comprehend or control.
Worse yet, the image recognition algorithms that underpinned Facebook’s automatic censorship API couldn’t learn quickly enough how to differentiate a good-ol’-fashion Minion Meme from the prurient Masturbatory Minion Memes …and now you also knew the “innocent” memes were seen through a lecherous lens by many of your friends and neighbors.
And thus the floodgates of moral panic burst open as tweens around the world started really awkwardly expressing interest in finding the last “Minions” sequel on Netflix… after all, they had just been awakeningly assailed by the sensory overload of “Undressed 2.o — curated by xHamster.”
The proto-democratic autocrats of various conservatively-tilted nations were quick to executive order *the shit out of* their telecommunications ministries and parastatal fiber-to-the-home providers until every last Minion meme was banished from within the borders of their land… which meant a new geofence against Facebook, even in countries which just got Facebook last week!
In the free-speech valuing lands where the product was always unambiguously branded as “Pervert,” and thus full — mostly benignly so — of actual perverts, the crisis at Facebook wasn’t due to blocking (though the blocks quickly went up for schools, libraries, and ISP opt-ins) but because they were bleeding users at an unprecedented rate…
No matter how many times you hit the “Hide this” dropdown, or picked an equivalent “reaction” mapped to the “Ewww!” API (yes, a whole API existed to process a single reaction, in conjunction with a full stack of other arousal-based software), the onslaught of distasteful Minion dreck just kept engulfing your feed.There was just enough of a critical mass of unapologetic True Believers in the erotic power of Minion sex to keep the social media world in a death spiral of memes.
Facebook apps were being deleted from smartphones around the world. People were actually voluntarily starting to use Twitter — Twitter! — again… and LinkedIn had somehow become actually “fun.”
Tom From Facebook (!) was forced to admit at the morning marketing stand-up: “Oh shit, the drop in repeat user count is starting to get post-IPO ‘Snapchat’ big!”
Over just a few weeks, an even bigger problem emerged: Senator Zuckerberg (D-CA) was now being forced to recuse himself from a growing number of Congressional hearings about “Miniongate.”
Several outraged Republican representatives, including one newly crowned Arkansas Mr. Leather, were quick to channel the moral panic into a witch trial conveniently streamed on Facebook Live.
Soon the Senator from California wasn’t just recusing himself from committee hearings… he was being subpoenaed for them. (awkward!)
An even more pressing problem was the coalition of hedge fund managers recruited by the recently founded American Coalition for Progressive Traditional Family Values (ACPTFV).
“Ack-ptfff!” — as it quickly become acronymized by cable news pundits — had a deep-pocketed group of founders dedicated to defending the new normal:
“Consensual anal sex in a loving and open homosexual marriage… OK!”
“Polyamorous Minions simulating consentual rape-fantasy anal sex on the iPhones of our children! DEFINITELY NOT OK!”
The hedge fund managers acquired a critical mass of Facebook shares to overpower the critical mass of Minion fetishists in the Facebook calculus of power. And as critical masses tend to turn out, they were all hell-bent on Mutually Assured Destruction. As the memes kept flowing, a deliberate strategy of undervaluation and short-selling started to hit Senator Zuckerberg’s future re-election fund and make Tom From Facebook! cynical about the size of the parachute he’d impendingly need to make use of.
The message of Ack-put-five! was crystal clear, at least compared to the pronunciation of their name: “Shut down Pervert and have your minions stop all the Minions, or we’re going to gleefully burn a trivial amount of our wealth to destroy you all!” And to the Minion fetishists: “Get ye to church! We hear the UCC is accepting of your kind, and the LDS are starting to come around.”
Somewhere around 1 year and 8 months or so into Facebook going “full perv” (as the mathletes flipping the switch at 3:14AM deemed the situation), under the pressure of both plummeting stock prices and a torrent of indignant record-breaking re-tweets of the Golden Shower Enthusiast in Chief (who was *not pleased* by golden showers “Minion-style,” even though he was initially caught on camera calling said meme “cute!”), the plug was pulled on Pervert.
The final straw was an all-staff conference call from “Senator Mark” — beamed in via Facebook Live, wearing a DNC hoodie, with Capitol Hill in the background. Now fully divested from Facebook and having no formal relationship with the corporation whatsoever, he pleaded with his former charges to re-interpret his old mantra and bring an end to this global nightmare:
“I once famously said ‘Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.’ — you’ve seen this quote from me all around campus and taken it to heart…
Let me tell you what I’ve learned in my time here in the Swamp of Washington. You’re all *great* at breaking stuff, but now we’ve gone too far. There was a time where I thought finding any connection — just about anything at all — to unite people was a noble goal. But through these weeks of hearings, I’ve found that some connections just shouldn’t be made… at least not in plain view of the world as a whole.
It’s time we accept that some things are meant to be secrets. It’s time we accept that our mission is to unite people, but also not ruin their lives through weaponizing one group’s interests against another.
So I implore you: Move fast, and break things, and most importantly, know when to fix them. May God bless Facebook and may God bless America!”
Over the next three days, a Herculean (or in the view of some, Sisyphean) effort began to wind down Pervert, which was so intertwined into the Facebook architecture that some worried they could never escape it, much like Microsoft could never escape the legacy of Internet Explorer (one Pervert Engineering Slack comment: “We still code workarounds for IE 6 twenty years later even though we’re supposed to use Edge… how are we supposed to create a workaround for the libido of the entire human race?”).
But in less than a week, after dealing with some initial hiccups, the automated censorship filters could spot a Minion cock with 98.9995% accuracy…. so close to “5 nines!” considering the short time frame. Minion pussy would be a tougher nut to crack, but they were already achieving test environment results above 80%.
Crack teams recruited from across Facebook’s dwindling ranks went far above their pay grades to root out X-rated (or, in the new normal, really PG-13) groups and shoved them back into the Closed Group Closet. It took only two weeks for the Turkish government to “provisionally” unblock Facebook… they still had to show progress on rooting out Kurdish Nationalist Minions if it was going to last.
They had plugged the holes in the sinking ship. Membership stabilized, return views leveled off, people started to share memes again… but not Minion ones. Those were too controversial to bring up in polite company.
The saving grace of Facebook was the complete implosion of Snapchat (a shell of which was recently purchased by Sararah — name slightly tweaked since everyone was pronouncing it that way anyway), and various blocks of Twitter “out of national interest” across the world, in response to a particularly obscene Presidential rant against several major trading blocs. ASEAN may have been represented by a Minion in the accompanying graphic.
All in all, Tom (formerly) From Facebook’s mission did work out, much in alignment with his former company’s founder’s dedication to unite the passions of the world, even though his project descended into a meme-driven dystopia.
People across the planet learned to have fun twiddling their respective bits in ways they previously were ashamed to admit, and the collective gulf of oxytocin launched a demographic revolution that re-ignited much needed population growth in the Developed World and helped spread a now-very-necessary enthusiasm for birth control in the Developing World.
More importantly, people became far more open-minded almost everywhere there was an Internet connection — just look at those “arch-conservative” members of Ack-pat-fave! — and the “network penetration rate” just keeps on growing. In spite of a seemingly intolerant master in charge of the Free World, the world as a whole suddenly became more tolerant. And Senator Zuckerberg was leading the charge against what intolerance remained.
Tom didn’t have much free time to coast on his Facebook cash-out… the diminished share value could barely cover rent for a couple months in his post-quake-chique commuter neighborhood in Fresno… or even just pay off the no-longer-subsidized yearly pass for his high-speed rail connection to CalTrain’s railhead at the edge of Silicon Valley. Maybe sleeping on the train was an option?
He pondered returning to VIU-Cowichan, now the premier place in the world to finish his degree in Disaster Planning & Management (Fire Risk concentration), and finally dedicating himself to tackling the cause of those asthma attacks that plagued him on every visit back home. But after a few weeks of dejectedly surfing the plethora of niche sites that filled Pervert’s void, Tom had no problem finding a lucrative job after a spur-of-the-moment move to booming Detroit.
Tom (formerly) From Facebook is now Chief of Social Media Strategy and Engineering at TigerHood, billed as the “World’s Premier ‘Daniel Tiger’ Fetish Site.”
