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| The slow regard for neurosis, thanks to social media |
Last night before I fell asleep, I was watching a YouTube video about how there seems to be a growing backlash against “social media” apps; against “smart” phones; against the very things that were once meant to foster inclusivity, connection, collaboration. But somewhere along the route, the “greater good”, the “noble mission”, got replaced with greed, malarkey, and all the hallmarks of capitalism. As Jack Conte pointed out in the video, the customers of Facebook are advertisers, and the product that they demand from Facebook is every last ounce of your attention. So what does Facebook do? It pilfers, peddles, and mainstreams anything that will keep you on their platform, even if it means it destroys your minds and results in social neuroses.
I can’t remember the last time I posted on Facebook, but it must’ve been years ago now. I keep hearing about how Facebook is now full of disgusting AI Slop targeted at the basest desires of its Boomer population, to keep them hooked onto the app. This is just another attempt, but the tide is overwhelming and the next generation is abandoning Facebook and it’s mind destroying antics like there’s no tomorrow.
It was a noble mission in the beginning — connecting people together, friends, family. It was also new, and we didn’t know what a privacy nightmare it was going to be. I still remember the early days of Facebook when friends and family would get together to “create” photo albums. It was a thing. After any event, a get together, a party, a hangout, there would always be someone saying “I’ll upload the pictures to Facebook.” And honestly, if that model had stayed, it would have worked. Facebook would still be our default. But the more Facebook has evolved, the more they’ve shown how truly evil and inhumane they really are.
A few months ago, I ended up reading the book “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Facebook employee and whistleblower. This is what I wrote after reading the book:
This is the story of how Facebook has destroyed countries, economies, politics, social norms. This is a story of how Facebook has lied, obfuscated and perjured itself. But because the chief evangelist of Facebook is richer than God himself, he has gotten away with it. Over and over and over again. This is a story about the disdain that people like Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Joel Kaplan, Elliot Schrage have for ordinary mortals, who do not have the same excess and naked wealth that they do.
If you think you know how Facebook operates — because they present sanitized versions of their corporate hierarchy to the outside world — let me assure you, you don’t. You don’t have a single fucking idea how deep rooted and inherent the malaise is in Facebook. You don’t even have to read the book; just look at the latest updates that they’ve pushed to WhatsApp — their most “privacy” focused product. They’ve shoved their privacy shattering, god-awful AI tool into your most intimate and private conversations, and as soon as you so much as touch it, it will send your “encrypted” chats to their servers, where they will read them, and use them to shove more privacy denying garbage down your throats. They expect you to not care about that; they expect you to think that even your AI interactions (and the subsequent data that they’re collecting — which includes your private, personal chats by the way) are encrypted and safe. But they’re not. None of it is. It’s icky and disgusting and it is why the Zoomers are leaving this dystopian hellscape in droves.
To be fair, WhatsApp was never, and has never been a privacy first product. They say it’s “end-to-end encrypted” only because they were forced to say it, not because that is what they wanted. Signal had come to eat their lunch after their privacy debacle in 2021, when they said they would share your chats with Meta/Facebook (especially your chats with businesses), before begging and pleading with everyone that they’re not breaking any encryption and privacy.
But the lack of privacy is only one side of the coin. The other side is the soul destroying neuroses that they peddle and mainstream. They allow — deliberately — hate, bullying, perversion on their platforms because that is what creates shock and awe. That is what keeps you hooked. That is what allows them to turn back to their advertisers and say how many minutes and hours and days you spend on their apps because you can’t look away. The system is designed to break you, so that the system can turn you into a mindless lemming who can’t figure out why it’s so stunted and anxious and broken all the time. All the while, there are algorithms programmatically capturing every single data point about you, from your age, your gender, your political beliefs, to the brand of ice cream you like, to your secret dating partners, to your deepest darkest secrets. And you know what they do with that data? They horde it, to sell you slop in the best case, and hand that data over to your governments so that those governments can completely and utterly destroy and ruin your lives (and the lives of your loved ones) in the worst case.
So tell me again, what exactly is the point of having social media apps owned by these narcissistic, perverted, elites who live in a bubble so far removed from reality, that they will never know, nor care, the damage that they have unleashed upon society in their quest for unimaginable wealth and power? What is the point when the meaning of “social” in social media has been corrupted? So I did what so many before me have done, and so many after me will continue to do: I deleted Facebook. In protest. And I know it is more symbolic than functional, because it won’t make a lick of difference in the end; because I’ll still be tracked and an algorithm will continue to build my profile, adding things that even I don’t notice about myself. But one day, when hopefully enough people have done the same, that’s when it will start making a difference. And that is the future we should all hope for.