No Shepherd and One Herd: The Facebook Menace Part 1
“No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra
Prologue: “Been there all the while waiting for you; To find an abomination, we shall find a god”
“I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. We know things are bad — worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is: ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ “ — Howard Beale, Network (1976)
The whites in their eyes were the reflection of a computer screen and a mobile phone, attention divided between the two devices, as their mouths hung agape and their food remained cold and untouched for the past half hour, their priority to feed their ego and self-worth before their bellies. It is the digital abyss they gaze into that inspires the void-like emptiness in their faces, interrupted only by the notification sounds of their phones and browser tabs that invites momentary excitement and anxiety. To see them all uniformly disengaged from the physical reality we share in order to connect to a virtual reality on their phones, tablets, and laptops is to find everyone, regardless of age, sex, race, creed, or craft, all have the same strings pulling them and manipulating them. It is the blue and white screen that reads FACEBOOK, but to them, it is the name of their god. God is in the algorithms, the profile name and account, the browser history, database, passwords and PINs, photo albums and friends list, and the absence of God inspires anxiety and fear, so the egregore* is fed daily and hourly their attention, and in turn rewards them with fleeting validations in the form of likes and comments, reminders, and offers.
It is 2018 and this is the world we live in: where an active Facebook account is what fuels our lives more than actual life, and offline lives are moments to be exaggerated in photo albums and status updates or posted to invite validation from others who would be watching them. Jealousy and Fear penetrate the collective anxiety for approval from an audience that may or may not even be interested in your success because it inspires the same insecurity in them to wonder where their place in the world is. The addiction and the hunger are there, and the programmers and shareholders encourage those feelings of lack in order to inspire the demand that they are only too happy to provide their soma holiday to hapless users.
Where did this come from and how did we get here? What have we lost? What have we suffered? Why do we still feed the laughing god that cares not for our well-being or happiness, but its own survival? How do we kill God and move forward into a life unplugged from the lie machine that is Facebook?
Those questions have been seldom pondered without action, and our lack of action has been what keeps us in the thralls of of the diabolical machinations of Silicon Valley’s golden boy, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Hobbesian leviathan we have become has abandoned its humanity for conformity and instant gratification.
I remember a world without Facebook, and the excitement that came when it first arrived to grace us with its digital presence. I remember how the problems began surfacing very shortly after, and the toll it took on my life, and the struggle to free myself from its grasp, and now the necessity to invite others to answer the call to walk away from Facebook for what it has done to us and to our world.
*an occult concept representing a “thoughtform” or “collective group mind”, an autonomous psychic entity made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people.
Part 1: “The life you ought to be living”
“When I was 20, I was worried about what others thought about me. When I was 30, I did not give a damn about what others thought about me. When I was 40, I realized nobody was thinking about me because they were thinking about what others thought about them.” — Anonymous
It was the summer of 2005 and I was visiting my family after community college. In my excitement to be accepted into my university after suffering for three years in community college, I was checking every e-mail from them and waiting to register for a new school e-mail account to show my prestige. Within the barrage of communications, including with my new roommates to be, a few mentions of something caught my attention due to the repetitious nature that made it seem imperative for me to know what it was and not be left behind when trying to fully integrate into college life. I had to know more about “the face book” and I couldn’t do anything without a university e-mail address. It was a whole new world for me, college, and if this is what college kids were doing now, I wasn’t going to miss out after being deprived of a “real” college experience by “only going to junior college”.
I received my official college e-mail address and registered with The Facebook, and waited a day or two to be verified and accepted as a member to use The Facebook. I immediately started playing with the site and set my profile picture and filled out the about me section. I looked for the names of my roommates and only two of them had accounts, as the others had not registered yet. I sent them e-mails and friend requests on The Facebook, and got a reply by e-mail the same day but a reply by The Facebook a week later because they “didn’t check their account much since they don’t know what to do with it” besides look at faces of classmates and roommates to be in the coming summer orientation and fall term. I spent a lot of time just looking at the faces of my prospective schoolmates and was excited and felt like a kid again, with the theme song from the old 1996 Disney animated series, Brand Spanking New Doug playing in my head. I was vicariously experiencing college a few months early and digitally by using The Facebook. It was just for college kids and alumni, so it felt cool to be part of this elite and unique group of people my age.
On MSN Messenger, I saw one friend change her screen name to read, “Addicted to Facebook”. My cousin Isaac* in Sydney said he hadn’t heard of Facebook until the other week, and said he had no interest in it, especially because it was only for people in North America. I told him recently they opened up to Australia, New Zealand, and Western Europe, and with a school e-mail account, he could register for Facebook. He said he might look it up, but he didn’t think it was that interesting. Two weeks later, his MSN screen name read, “Everyone get a Facebook account!”
My younger sister was annoyed because she was still in community college that summer and for one more year, and because it wasn’t a university, she couldn’t qualify for registering a Facebook account. She rolled her eyes every time she saw me look so engrossed in staring at the same pictures again and again, pictures of people whom I had never met and was trying to meet, especially cute girls I was hoping to meet when starting school. She expressed open disdain for me trying to make my photographs show off a more attractive version of myself, and my profile trying to sound unique and witty, and said that I was one step away from being as pathetic as those guys who can’t get girls and have to resort to using online dating websites.
My father did not care about what I did with my time on his computer, so long as he could have it back when he needed it, as he was the only one with a computer at home and I wasn’t a kid who had my own computer for school (yet). He only got annoyed with me, not The Facebook, because he said whatever it is that’s asking him for just five more minutes or fifteen more minutes, even it’s the same stupid website again and again, he doesn’t care, he just wants me off his computer. But I couldn’t leave the site, and I was just looking at people again and again. Nothing but pictures and a few interest groups… and poking.
I would look up people from the schools I attended growing up and found one or two names because I wasn’t sure who was still alive and who had gone to college, where they went to college, and if they had a Facebook account. I checked every day to see if I could reunite with some old middle school friends. I checked to see who amongst my high school friends signed up that day or that week. It was a summer where I burned my eyes on my father’s computer screen and tanned my skin under the sun when he forced me out of his room and my room to get active or go to college fat, because my sister pointed out to him that all my pictures on Facebook were of me before I gained weight that final year in community college before transferring to my university [not unlike how people curate their profiles now to look better than they actually are].
By the time I moved into my dorm room and began preparing for the school term, I was meeting other students in the dormitories and residence halls, and checking to see who registered in my classes when I added them to my profile on my Facebook account. I immediately looked for all the cute girls, and messaged them asking if they wanted to start a study group or if they knew anything about the course, as some of them were not transfer students like me, but had already taken classes and had an account longer than me on The Facebook. I found my neighbors in my residence hall on The Facebook because they listed the dorm building as their physical home address before I had even walked around the area to meet them in person. College was a blast and I was living each moment like I had been dreaming about it my whole life. Little did I know that this is where the problems began when the idyllic college community I imagined would be very different than what I was seeing online, and the heartbreak would come to be more prevalent and remembered far more than the honeymoon period I was enjoying.
Part 2: “You begin to meet people; We shall slay ourselves”
“You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces.” — John Kennedy Toole A Confederacy of Dunces
It is the fall of 2006 and I have already expressed frustration several times on Facebook with the site itself and the people who use it. The first was in my profile in the fall term calling it a complete waste of time and a joke, and people saw it because random people in my school would look me up through their classes or mutual friends, as this was long before status updates were something we could do with our profiles. The second was in the spring term after status updates became available and had limited characters to type as well as had to follow the template of “Jose is…” because I hardly got any notice for what I said and others were getting comments and like and many posts on their wall. The third was me thinking this was a waste of time and college is a time to be lived and experienced, not this nonsense and high school-like atmosphere that was Facebook.
Now what happened in barely a year’s time to create three cycles of discontent with Facebook? Was it when they dropped “the” and just called it Facebook because the platform changed around the same time to reflect what they were doing with Facebook just as more people were getting access to it, such as my sister in community college? Or did the people who were using it change because of the platform that is Facebook has magically improved their lives? Or did Facebook change because of the people using it? I can’t say which among these was true or if only one were the answer, and I can only speak of my own experience.
Perhaps because by fall term, I had already tasted the rejection of sending friend requests that were rejected or ignored, but seeing those people who ignored me and claimed they don’t check their accounts often were actively posting on other people’s walls. This is what in the modern world people would call FOMO. It was barely a year into using it that I had this distress and it is now well-documented as a consequence of using social media. How could they be so stupid as to think I wouldn’t notice this? How could I think I was rational when I was actually obsessing and stalking people for rejecting my friendship? I felt the stings of rejection even more when I saw people I barely knew deleting me and even blocking me on Facebook. How dare they! How dare they do this to me! They were doing far more immature things and saying worse things than I ever would amongst each other, and they didn’t have a lifelong friendship with each other before college, they had met each other just as recently as I had met them, and we all lived in the same vicinity of adjacent residence halls! All those albums of them having fun and I’m not there. Am I not good enough? Am I not worthy? Do I not deserve to have friends? Is my life truly pathetic? College is not the haven I dreamed of, and Facebook was showing me people’s true colors!
No. It can’t be. Facebook is just a reflection of the people using it. They were immature. Nothing wrong with that. Just passive-aggression on my part to list down how I only look to make certain kinds of friends on my profile and specifically name the assholes who rejected me as people who don’t deserve me. I am not a victim. It’s everyone else’s fault. They made me do it. I hated every minute of it, but I couldn’t get my mind away from Facebook for hours like everyone else. They were having fun in their photos and on each other’s profile wall interactions. They were having fun offline and online, but not me. How miserable college felt like, and this was before the news feed was introduced.
The news feed when it came out was confusing to me. It was more relevant for manipulating people’s emotions as proven in their own studies and to lure is in for their main revenue generator (and only one) advertising. Why would I want to know who is doing what and when they are doing it? Learning exactly what time someone poked someone else, who made a new friend, who posted new albums? Everyone’s activity was suddenly something I found unnecessary to know about because Facebook to me was just about connecting with other classmates and other college friends. Community colleges were now part of system. The level of connectivity changed as more and more people were let into Facebook. These community college kids didn’t earn their way here to the site the way I had to, which was getting into an actual college and then getting Facebook membership. Sooner or later, I predicted high school students and eventually everyone and their mom would use Facebook. And everyone was really just a cash cow for Facebook because what we put in is what advertisements we received in return. A friend could mention how much I liked Magic: The Gathering in an innocuous post or tag me in a picture, and suddenly, after liking that post, I would find ads for Magic: The Gathering in my sidebars.
I was no longer meeting people through Facebook, I was being isolated by people because of Facebook. Every moment of my day was anxiety, wondering why people didn’t invite me to events, why I was deleted or blocked, or why my wall was so barren compared to other more “popular” kids. Facebook was an ally to see who was who, and every time I met someone and got their information or saw they were in my class, I would look them up and see who they knew, and if they were good people or unworthy. Everyone I met was someone I would compare myself to, and Facebook would be my tool to investigate. Then it dawned upon me that others would be doing the same towards me when it slipped in a conversation that someone mentioned a post I made on a mutual friend’s wall before we had added each other as friends on Facebook. It was the rare surname and the “unique” manner of speech when engaging with people: long, thought-out responses common to many messages instead of the way others posted with zero punctuation and no capitalization while their attention was scattered in ten directions, likely multitasking instead of having one-pointed focus.
Big Brother wasn’t watching me anymore… I was Big Brother, and so was everyone else. Every little action, innocuous or not, was recorded in the feed, and even if one wasn’t using the feed, others, whether they comment or like or poke, are still looking at us. Little Brothers were the people around me, and I was Big Brother watching them, while when they watched me, they were Big Brother and I was Little Brother. We reported to each other knowingly and unknowingly, and The Big Brother was Facebook itself and the governments colluding with them. I could never know who was doing what at that point, but I knew that if I believed that no one would ever know how many times I looked at their page or borrowed a friend’s account to look at someone who blocked me, others could and would do the same to me. They even joked about it casually and said, “Oh yeah, I totally Facebook-stalked you” as though it were already acceptable, which frightened me because I knew I was a little crazy and unstable from watching others, but they treated it as perfectly normal. And then what of those who ran Facebook and had access to my account history? One individual wrote on a very serious need to to eliminate Facebook, because they contain everything, even what we’ve deleted. Every message we send, every poke, every like — it’s all theirs and they sell it to the advertisers. And why was nothing done when there were warning signs of people who were quite unstable, for example, Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter, if they had Facebook accounts? What could we do about suicides and ignoble behavior? What would employers do if they saw this since they were already opening up Facebook to more people, not just current students, but alumni and staff, with those alumni possibly being people who could be hiring us and checking out their alma matter?
People were already deleting me for voicing this concern and making notes about how the platform was stupid. I make one opinion about how bullying is what influences people because of my own ostracism on Facebook and some experiences offline, and suddenly, people are acting like I’m the asshole of the universe. I can’t even make an opinion without people getting angry, and I remember not long before Facebook, I could have a difference of opinion and people would just argue with me and I would have to deal with it, both offline or on an Internet messaging service or e-mail. And now it was becoming “normal” for people to take screen captures or show people arguments or pictures of me they hated and a group of people hating me because their friend hated me on Facebook.
By this point, I was a jaded user who begrudgingly accepted that it was convenient, but hated what it was becoming, and wanted to go off it, but my selfishness and my addiction were louder and stronger than my rational side. The need to connect, the need to be part of something, the need to know that I exist, god damnit was too strong, and that I was not inferior or unworthy just because I don’t have a lot of friends or activity in my feed. Digital life is not a perfect mirror of real life, but it is a mirror nonetheless, and a funhouse mirror at that with all its distortions that warp our view of ourselves as we try to make that which the looking glass shows us into what we wish we could see, rather than what others might see. And if that mirror were dirty, then whose job is it to polish it for us?
Part 2 to be published next week.
