Under Share

I refuse to post on LinkedIn which is the only social media I am on because there level of pointless noise is so high. There really is no sense in adding to it. It turns out that there is a general decline in people posting in social media. Maybe that will create space for direct or small group conversations that are more meaningful. 

Being that platforms, especially Meta, are moving toward “computer-generated content,” flooding feeds with AI-created posts that are cheap, infinite, yet lacking in substance. As AI models increasingly mine public content posted by users, some may feel discouraged from sharing, wary their words and images will be endlessly harvested by algorithms to fuel further automation, often without credit or control.

Recent news highlights growing tensions about unauthorized AI scraping; major publishers have threatened legal action against AI companies accused of using copyrighted content to train their systems and generate new material. This feeds user reluctance: if posting online means relinquishing control to AI bots for repurposing, many prefer private channels or reduce sharing altogether. In essence, concerns about privacy, content exploitation by AI, and the rise of low-effort computer-generated posts contribute to the decline in personal social media sharing and a shift to less public, more controlled digital interaction.

An early career developer told me recently that StackOverflow is no longer the first place to ask for or get help. I thought he might be exaggerating but apparently not. 

Mirror Image

This experiment sounds a bit like recording and replaying yourself to come to independent conclusion about the error of your ways. 

Initial data on Laika is promising: 75 percent of the 60,000 students who have participated in the program since October 2023 reported that they wanted to change their relationship with social media after chatting with Laika, according to the team. However, the long-term impact of the program remains to be seen.

And Laika’s impact might be more complicated than it seems. Julia Stoyanovich, the director of NYU’s Center for Responsible AI, expressed concerns about using a project like this with children, a vulnerable population, without prior evidence of its efficacy.

The data could be viewed as promising or not. That 25 percent that did not feel moved to change their relationship with social media after interacting with the bot, could be seen as a cohort to be deeply concerned about. Maybe the exact opposite happened - they want to redouble their presence and efforts in social media to the greater exclusion of everything else. Anyone who recalls being a teen or has raised one knows that teen-brains do not follow the same logical flows as adult one. They tend to do things that cannot be explained rationally but it all computes perfectly for them. The most at-risk population likely has ways of thinking and working that are many standard deviations away even for a teen. One could assume that forms the 25 percent and their troubles just got so much worse thanks to meddlesome AI.

Socially Distant

This article about the end-times of social media for those who were there from the beginning resonates with me even though my social presence is sparse at best. I have seen people bring their digital behavior into in-person interactions as well. It is underscored by the acting social, friendly and wanting to have a real conversation when in fact the person does not have the capacity or inclination to do any of that. A typical text message from some of this ilk will read like this "Hey! you have been on my mind. It's been forever since we met. Sorry I have been busy traveling most days of the month. How is the the last of this month? I am in town and would love to grab lunch or dinner". 

All that sounds great except nothing materializes from this. In the past, I would respond with specific availability to see what worked from the other person. There would be crickets after that because the intent of the message was not to actually meet for anything at all but act social and keep the connection alive. I would be one of several dozen people in receipt of that message. Over time, I have learned to play along and respond in the manner expected. I just reply "Sounds great! Would love to meet" and then each go our separate ways for the rest of the year, not feel obligated to do any further touch-points to keep the connection alive. 

Social media today is less driven by actual social connection. It is powered by the “appearance of social connection,” says Marlon Twyman II, a quantitative social scientist at USC Annenberg who specializes in social network analysis. “Human relationships have suffered and their complexity has diminished. Because many of our interactions are now occurring in platforms designed to promote transactional interactions that provide feedback in the form of attention metrics, many people do not have much experience or practice interacting with people in settings where there are collective or communal goals for a larger group.” This has also led to people being more image-conscious and identity-focused in real-world interactions, too, Twyman adds.

This is my experience as well - the appearance of social connection is the key driver. If a real world interaction is supposed to provide feedback in the form of attention metrics, I can see why most people would shy away from it. The only in-person meeting that will make any sense is one that converts into a digital record that attracts a lot of desirable attention. I can see why meeting one such as myself for lunch or dinner is simply not going to deliver the needed metrics, so the person will not prioritize it. 

Paid Advisory

The findings of this expose are not so surprising. If the consumer is gullible enough to be influenced by an influencer on seriously big-ticket items like health, then perhaps that is the real problem - they need to be taught to be more critical and skeptical. Its one thing for a consumer to follow fashion trend on clothes or the latest in home decor (neither entirely without risk but definitely not catastrophic) but quite another if they decide to listen to advisory on what they should eat - even if that comes from a so-called dietician. 

If what they hear does not square with long-standing wisdom, they would be wise to question it. There are no new or novel trends to follow to maintain good health - the commonsense advisory includes lowering stress, being physically active, getting enough rest and eating sensibly. Those things have been true forever and will not change until the human body evolves to become something entirely different from what it has been for our recorded history. 

Shana Minei Spence, a dietitian with more than 265,000 followers on Instagram, eats pizza, French fries and ice cream in her social media videos to illustrate that no foods should be stigmatized. Spence, who works for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, describes herself as “pro-processed foods.” 

Anyone who takes such advisory seriously has bigger problems. Maybe they want an excuse to do what they know to be irresponsible and just have "professional" endorsement to support it. Maybe that is the niche these influencers and their backers have tapped into - people who want some form of validation do continue doing things that they know to be harmful for them.

Performative Food

The idea that food needs to be performative to be deemed good would sound like a novel concept of the TikTok age but it probably is not. 

..The food can’t just sit there. It must be as performative as the staff, if not more so. Nothing hooks a viewer more than items that melt and drip and stretch. “Anything cheesy is always good, because there’s some kind of action item,” says Raum. It could be syrup ladled over a dessert, rare steaks dribbling blood and hemoglobin, or strands of melted mozzarella distended between halves of a saucy meatball sub.

The first image that crossed my mind reading this was that of a street-side chai-wallah in India pouring chai and the sense of anticipation is creates in the mind of the customer waiting for the finished product. Watching the action is a very big part of the process. It would not be nearly as interesting if that chai was served at once without the pouring dance. 

A lot of street food around the world combines similar elements of performance into preparation and service. Successful vendors are able to draw the customer into the act of getting their food ready, work up the appetite and build readiness to love what ends up on their plate. Social media might have enabled the concentration of this energy but the idea is far from new.

Feedback Loop

Over the years, I  have had an on and off relationship with this blog as far as using it as a medium to connect to the world. In the alone years, it was a one of the ways to feel I existed in the world through the online conversations that started here and sometimes resulted in ongoing friendships. In the less alone or busy years, I felt the need to write whatever came to mind without desiring any communication at all. It was a keeping up the schedule and the practice so as to not lose this habit that took a while to gel. No different that keeping up the exercise and reading habits. If anything served well over time, it is worth keeping. Reading this Wired story helps me understand what drove me to taper off the social and communication elements online

Without the ability to find out how their identity is ricocheting around the virtual world, people often feel a fight-or-flight response when they’ve been online for many hours—and even after they’ve logged off.

It takes a lot of time online to grow and maintain that level of feedback loop and it comes at a certain cost. When a person is largely alone and needs to feel seen and counted, the investment may offer value. When that is not the case, it calls for carving out from the scarce resource of alone time to feed this habit. Comes a time when the value ceases to exist - that was my experience at least. 

Hidden Treasures

Nice article on the boom to bust cycle of social media. It used to be that people were creating content much in the manner of my writing this blog. The material was whatever the producer cared to produce. There was not much thought paid to the consumer. If some folks happened by and liked what they saw, they would stick around or tell others about it. Either way, it did not influence what content creator chose to produce. It was the fun part of social media - the serendipitous connections, chance discovery of interesting, offbeat stuff. People were doing their own thing with the option to share. Over time, the joy of that style of low pressure social sharing went away as this author points out. 

"Part of the reason why social media doesn't feel fun is because the communication around it is: 'You're a brand. Everyone is their own brand. Everyone is their own television network. You should be making videos,'" Merritt said. "All this pressure to produce not only content but a high level of content in conjunction with living your actual life."

Those of us who don't want to partake in this avatar of social media have only one choice - sit out of it. In my case, I have found it harder and harder to find unique content that I enjoy reading because the producer is not interested in being found by an audience. Every once in a while I run into a real treasure - a website run by someone deeply passionate about their subject with an small but devoted audience. 

Feeding Frenzy

Its been interesting reading all the opinion pieces and commentary on Musk buying Twitter. An assortment of pundits would have us take a guided trip through Musk's brain and unpack why he did this and what manner of terrible consequences it brings for us plebians. 

Seems to me that the answer is relatively simple - the man has more wealth and resources that most of us would even be able to fathom or compute. With that comes freedom and latitude to do things - some of which cost a bit of money (even on his scale) and provide for a bunch of entertainment. Its a lot like folks feeding koi in a pond or ducks in a lake. There could even be signage posted that such wanton feeding is unwelcome but the person armed with some stale bread feels in a position of power to rustle up a some creatures who were minding their own business, looking for their own food in ways that nature had intended. They have the means for this spot of entertainment and so they avail it.

The clamor that follows in the water and the the control the feeder has over the fed is exactly the kind of value Musk is deriving out of buying Twitter. Its just a matter of scale and there are consequences to actions - being it feeding ducks against the guidance of the parks and recreation personnel or monkeying around with a social media platform that is used worldwide and has been a key component of very large scale events. People will do what they want to do if they have the means to do it. Some will feed ducks and other will buy up Twitter - and a huge feeding frenzy will follow in the water on online.

The fact that the plebians have the choice to stay with or leave Twitter is not something that gets mentioned a lot - we are being treated much like those ducks in the pond who could in theory leave the pond to a place where they are left alone but don't, make the collective choice not to be fed stale bread by humans but don't. If we choose to behave brainless en-masse we probably deserve our fate. 

Feeding Evil

Interesting essay on why we use Facebook even if we know it's evil and doing way more harm than good in the world. The author identifies a few reasons why:

"...Like eating meat, ordering cheap clothes or buying Chinese products, the use of Facebook also has advantages. Through Facebook people renew ties or maintain contact; through it interest groups can be created that coalesce around a particular subject or cause; people can be made aware of new ideas; shared activities can be coordinated; alternative voices can be heard. Not everyone has access to the massive amplifiers of mass media, and Facebook allows each person to make their voice heard.

There are small businesses that reach a larger and more diverse audience and potential clientele by advertising on Facebook. There are people who specialize in creating and managing online campaigns using the platform – people who do it for a living..."

There is I think another reason - with Facebook people found a way to create meaning out of the most mundane business of their life, it fed their need for self-aggrandization, see and be counted as consequential. Depending on how many are in a person's network, they could with the right kind of effort, attain celebrity status within that group. It gives the ordinary person a  chance to experience (albeit on a microscopic scale) what it is to have paparazzi on their tail 24/7. No one wants to live their life unnoticed, irrelevant and inconsequential. 

Facebook is the platform to remedy all of that and so people stay and engage - it makes them visible. There is a parallel to buying the Chinese luxury brand knock-offs - not low-priced no-brand street fashion. It sells only because people aspire to a lifestyle well out of their reach. An alternative platform if and when it comes about will need to embrace some of the same evilness that makes Facebook work.

Saying Less

After watching the Minus promo video, I had to sign-up to see what the experience felt like. Would I be inclined to post at all or just join conversations that are happening there. What kind of crowd would such a platform gather, what might they want out of it beyond participating in an interesting experiment. Once I was in and started to read other posts, my first thought was frugality - if I had only 100 chances to say something useful, I need to think each on through. This was not the place to keep my writing muscle active like my blog is. There is not part of my life that allows writing with no end in mind, for writing without pre-defined structure or tenets. So the blog is my scratch pad to write and move on. If some thought crossed my mind, a place to keep notes. Frugality is not the driver here. 

At Minus I would assume as the older joiners get zeroed out, they would be able to influence the overall shape of the conversations by replying to what newer joiners are writing. The more well thought out the posts, the greater their staying power to stimulate conversations. It would be great to have subject matter experts post about the top hundred things that get them excited in their area of expertise - which should be a plenty of great content and cover a lot of useful ground. Then the conversations would follow and enrich the community. Love the concept and am curious to see how this morphs over time. 

Vicious Cycle

Listening to Daring Greatly these days on my walks. I have to say the book did not get off to a promising start when the author expresses great astonishment that what she wrote six years ago is still true of the human condition. At that point, I was not sure if I wanted to invest the next several hours on this - one would hope a life time of research on a topic would last much longer than six years. But I did continue listening out of curiosity and learned a lot in the process. 

That shame or fear of being ordinary and presumably invisible is rooted in the culture of scarcity which she describes thusly:

When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.

Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants. The greatest casualties of a scarcity culture are our willingness to own our vulnerabilities and our ability to engage with the world from a place of worthiness.

A few days ago, I was talking to high-school junior about Instagram and his views of what the about its deleterious effects on the mental health of young girls that has been the subject of hews yet again. This kid was of the opinion that the problem is high-school culture and it always has been, social media is only an amplifier of what is bad and wrong with it. This somewhat echoes the sentiments of a former Facebook algorithm developer who was being interviewed by NPR. 

Brene Brown's book seem to connect the dots a bit better for me. If we go with her theory that there is a culture of shame being fed by one of scarcity, it creates the perfect conditions for the likes of Facebook to gain power and control over our lives. It makes everybody who shares and overshares on social media appear narcissistic and as Brown says the desire to name and shame them for it is exactly the worst thing to do, it would turn into a vicious cycle. 

Attention Harvesting

This is news we can all use - how to get a hamster to out-perform the S&P 500. The story is a winner at so many levels. First off, it is a great lesson in marketing - how to write a headline (or email subject line) that will grab the reader's attention immediately. In this case "A hamster has been trading cryptocurrencies in a cage rigged to automatically buy and sell tokens since June - and it's currently outperforming the S&P 500"

The audience will fall in one of few categories - trades crypto and stock, trades crypto, trades stock, everyone else. Since this is in business insider the readership has basic understanding of both crypto and stock even if they are in the group that does nothing with either. That being said, that line has something for everyone. If you are trading crypto you want to know if the hamster outperformed you along with S&P 500. The stock traders among the readership will want to know if displacement by hamsters is looming in their future. For folks that dabble in both they may experience a crisis of confidence reading this line - maybe they are leaving money on the table that the hamsters are mopping up. 

Everyone else is peanut gallery in this context and experiencing a bit of schadenfreude - this is indeed the proof point of blindfolded monkey theory: “A blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper's financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.”

So no matter what group you fall into as a reader, you will want to read the rest of the story. And you will learn that the hamster has a Twitter handle and is livestreaming his work for the world to see. The idea is to draw the reader in as a participant and it will likely work. At the time of writing Mr. Goxx had about 3000 followers on Twitter and Twitch. Strictly speaking this story is not attention-harvesting but it is how to do it right, not leave the target feeling depleted. It gets their attention, gives them something to chuckle about and leave them with food for thought. 

Entirely Incidental

Read the news of the demise of Samsung's chairman around the same time as I was reading How to Kill a Unicorn. The two diametrically opposite views of the company made me wonder who if anyone had it right in such stories. It's as if fact-checking has gone out of fashion along with many other standards that content should be held up to if it meant for the consumption of the general population. In the book, the author Mark Payne writes of Samsung:

The company’s scale is mind-boggling. With 2013 global revenues of $268 billion, Samsung is the world’s tenth-largest company. We’ve worked with them on many innovation challenges and have consistently been amazed by their ability to execute with brilliance and speed against the things they consider important. Most businesses reaching that kind of scale are slow to spot new opportunities and act on them. But Samsung keeps charging forward. Fast Company magazine recently celebrated Samsung as one of the world’s most innovative companies. Two of the four innovations that were cited were ideas we’d helped shape with their world-class innovation teams. In an age where every company talks incessantly about innovation, Samsung lives it, moving with remarkable speed and decisiveness.

The WSJ story leads with "Lee Jae-yong has the challenge of transforming the South Korean conglomerate after it has failed to keep pace with rivals"

Are they talking about the same company? The times we live in are such that a strong position one way or another should be treated with skepticism. Used to be that was the result of the writer having done their diligence and come up with an original insight. Today, it is more likely a messaging decision calculated to get the most buzz. Facts are entirely incidental. 

Libra Vox

A lot is being written about Facebook's foray into crypto-currency, Libra. This piece of on Huffpost echoes my sentiments exactly

..what Facebook is proposing is a really stupid investment scheme masquerading as a digital currency. It’s a proposal that immediately demands regulatory scrutiny of Facebook from every financial authority in the world. For a company that has spent the past two years engaged in mass privacy violations, accidental corporate alliances with authoritarian agitators and livestreams of outright terrorism, Facebook’s attempt to enter the world of high finance with so slipshod an idea can only be described as delusional.

There is only a slight problem with this delusion as it concerns the rest of us. Facebook has mastered doing gross wrong, being in denial and then faking contrition in that order. So far there have been few if any consequences for that. We all collectively marvel at the imperial hubris of Zuckerberg and he continues doing even more egregious things without missing a beat. No surprise then that he would think it is time to step up the game a bit and try to control the flow of money in the world too.

Based on past performance Facebook can do a ton of damage and get away with it nice and easy. They have been emboldened by inaction on our part. Each one of us who still has a Facebook account is culpable at this point.

Digital Remains

The idea of Facebook being around even in 2100 is definitely depressing but other than that this Fast Company story on the data of the deceased is good reading. Digital remains is a new phrase I learned - something that can be too easily abused

dead profiles could be used to attract new people to the platform and continue to monetize their attention, and that “datasets of digital remains” could be used to train new models and find historical patterns, which could help drive the company’s bottom line

Digital Beyond provides a long list of service offerings to address the disposal of our digital corpse. One of them aptly named Digital Remains promises "Our encrypted and 100% secure software ensures that you can be sure that your wishes are carried out by your named digital executors". We definitely live in interesting times.

Sticky Content

Nice Fast Company article on what makes for sticky internet content. The author writes:

Marvel Studios makes its sequels bigger, louder, and funnier than the originals. When it applies to online content, it means that we’re being pushed from funny, useful, beautiful, and inspiring stuff into something that appeals to us on a much deeper, and potentially more damaging, level.

What makes us happy? For almost all the people we studied, the answer was: other people’s unhappiness. Any psychologist will tell you that this isn’t surprising. 

I wonder if that is because happiness as most people know or experience it only matters on a relative scale. To that end, it may be hard to feel or quantify happiness unless in the context of those around us - that creates a scale on which measurements start to make sense. 

The more "friends", "followers" and "connections" we have the more extensive and graduated the scale. Everyone needs to scored and somewhere there we find our own spot. If that is accurate, schadenfreude would be the way a person inches closer to the top - the larger the number of relatively unhappier people they know the better their own placement. Social media offers a way to adjust the scale in real-time and a person rises and falls in the happiness leader-board constantly - a game that is all but impossible to walk away from.

Venvy

Have never used Venmo but learned a new word reading this story. It seems like social media of all stripes have the default setting of "enable voyeurism" and this meets user expectations for the most part. 

There are hoops to jump through to gain some illusion of privacy. Real privacy is simply not possible in an environment where the likes of Facebook leave passwords in plaintext for years and think nothing about it. Clearly impact to users is not a priority - they need to better spend their resources learning how best to control the minds of those who spend time on their assets. The venvy situation is a very curious one. 

After Facebook and Instagram no surprise that the logical next step in the culture of over-sharing would be to show the world how and where you spend your money. Maybe we fundamentally crave the village mode of living where everyone was in everyone's business and there was no real notion of privacy. There was no way to feel alone as no one was truly individual. When these interactions happened in real-time with people you lived in physical proximity to, it did not appear bizarre. 

When you scale up to the point you can stalk Venmo payments of people who you know nothing about, likely never met and never will, the village style prying appears somewhat unhinged. But it maybe entirely normal - humans are behaving just as nature intended.

Feelings About Bots

I got a Roomba for Christmas this year and learned a great deal in the days to follow. A lot of research has been done on people getting emotionally attached to robots so theories abound. Some kids have made a business selling Roomba couture so it looks like a pet. It made sense how this could work. Very quickly, I realized that I "felt" something about the Roomba in a way I never felt about any household appliance. 

They all do their job and save me time and effort. Yet they are different in that they are stationary and need to be operated. The fact that this device could navigate my home and find its way back to its docking station un-assisted warranted this "feeling". It did not require help to help me clean the floor. The initial response to the device has since worn off and with it that feeling. I can imagine an interactive robot that learned and adapted to the needs, likes and dislikes of its owner may actually build upon that initial response into something akin to a low-grade relationship.

I needed to come into a Roomba to make sense of movies like Her that I found hard to watch or like in the past. I turned off the wi-fi function first thing to make sure the map of my house is not being sold to the likes of Amazon. Definitely not a fan of the smart and connected anything in my house or car. So far everything has been fairly dumb and I am glad for it. As more people get paranoid about being tagged, tracked, monitored and more and yet there is no way to opt out of the grid, I imagine there will be a booming business in securing the electronic perimeter of one's life. All of those who want to hold on to their data and privacy will pay for such a fence; making for even greater social isolation than has been the gift of social media.

The Facebooking of LinkedIn

The only social media I personally use is LinkedIn. Have been there since the earliest days - among the first ten thousand users. Since that time LinkedIn has served me very well professionally. It used to be a way to keep in touch with former clients, co-workers, business connections, vendors and such. Most people were deliberate about who they added to their network. When looking for a new opportunity it was common practice to request an introduction to the decision maker through someone in your network that was directly connected to them. More often than not such introductions produced great results. 

When you received an update via email from LinkedIn, it was usually actionable - a connection had moved to a new job, they had messaged you, you received an invite or someone had accepted yours. Each notification could result in some follow-up and so you actually cared about them. Since Microsoft got in the driver's seat, LinkedIn looks more like Facebook and less like itself and that is such a tragedy. The updates from my network and all those that they follow and like is an inundation of information I don't need. It is no longer enough to be a passive actor on LinkedIn. There is an expectation of constant contribution to stay relevant. The quality of content declining in inverse proportion to the volume which grows exponentially.

To that end, people are posting self-congratulatory pictures and videos of themselves in action in their professional lives, recognizing peers and bosses for their accomplishments. Whereas in the past, there was value to catching up with your connection for coffee there is none anymore. You likely caught up to the last hour on what they have been up to. If you are not actively creating content for others to feed on, you don't exist. By not staying top of mind and above the fold so to speak, you become irrelevant to your network. 

The lines between professional and personal blur over time with no real benefits to either part of your life. In addition to staying relevant and connected to your thousand some friends on Facebook, you now have to repeat that whole process for your connections on LinkedIn. Employers expect you to be their brand ambassador and spread the word they want to spread via LinkedIn. Instead of shilling your favorite cosmetic brand on Facebook, you now extoll the virtues of your employer on LinkedIn, make sure you give your boss a shout out for being so awesome and tell your intern that they are a rockstar. This is not the venue for the jaded and disaffected and not being active on LinkedIn seems to connote both.

Bring your daughter or pet to work day merits two treatments now instead of one. A new job could entail a move and so the story needs to be told two different ways. Facebook has managed to socially isolate people and LinkedIn at the going rate will cease to be relevant as a professional network. It will increase the level of anxiety around professional standing and relative accomplishments but fail to give people what it once did - useful mentors, interesting opportunities, professional advice, ability to find connections in places where you did not have direct access.

At Blocked

The best cure for writers block is writing. This piece of wisdom came from an acquaintance who once wrote. Following a transformational life experience, it is hard to speak from the heart which was the point of this blog. The heart is not where or what is used to be. I seem to have a stranger living inside my head. The two of us don't speak the same language or think the same thoughts. They make me reconsider all opinions, beliefs, loves and hates of the past in new light. In that sense, the years are decades that shaped me are now invalidated. So there silence, alien ideas that are hard to grasp though they come from within and a crippling incapacity to write. All this time, I have missed the therapeutic value of writing.

As an exercise to come in alignment with the stranger in my head who I am beginning to learn about, here are some mutually agreeable thoughts about Facebook.

There has been much talk about the recent elections in America having been heavily influenced by fake news promoted by Facebook. People have their worldviews reinforced by seeing more of what they want to see or believe. So we grow more entrenched in our positions, vindicated by fake news as it turns out. But the success and even existence of Facebook is predicated on our need for pretense and deception. Fundamentally, Facebook is less technology company and more grand experiment in human psychology and manipulating it for financial gain.

My childhood friend A is in a dead marriage for fifteen years now. He calls me sometimes to talk about the suffocation, about pretending to be Facebook Happy like everyone else he knows. He talks about doing time as long as he is able, about doing the right thing by his two children. His family pictures are snapshots of perfection they are meant to be. There is large contingent of Friends congratulating him on his wonderful kids and beautiful wife. He politely thanks them all. He lives a lie every time he posts one of these vignettes of his life, gets innundated with Likes and cheering comments. He chooses to broadcast the fiction not because he cannot separate it from fact.

He is hardly alone in doing so. A is using Facebook exactly as it is meant be used. Just like the fake news feeds that caused so much uproar, each person is feeding a constant stream of their deseiratum - unfolding a false narrative of themselves to their Facebook Friends. Collectively we curate an alternative reality of our society whose bounds depend on how much influence we possess.

Those fake news feeds belong squarely in this universe and should not be singled out for censure. Indeed, there is no place for truth or real news on Facebook. It would be at fundamental odds with the point of its existense. If we can no longer create our alternate realities on Facebook complete with "news stories" that affirm them, we might as well not be there.