Take Some Responsibility For Yourself
I got off Facebook about 8 years ago. I’d hoped it would be completely irrelevant by now, and market forces would simply MySpace it to death. The only conscionable reason to be on Facebook is to maintain sexual activity in college. College students aren’t even on Facebook anymore. Demographics aside, the UX is a nightmare. A sea of whitespace and blue text, but without the purposeful Craigslist-esque minimalism. Now the government wants to break it up because it is a “monopoly”. Great idea! We know our government has performed miracles in regulating telecoms, which has allowed us to sail past our competitors in the telecom space all the way to #1(0)!!!!
There are countless non-arguments to be made against Facebook. “They take our data!” would be good, except that you give it to them carte-blanche. “Fake news!!!” would be another, except that you readily spread that news without taking a second to fact check. “Terrorism!!!” wow, what are you doing on Facebook? The reason Facebook still exists, is because you want it to. You want someone to digest all the news in the world and feed it to you while you sit on the toilet every morning. Except that, it’s not news, and the algorithms feeding your insatiable appetite know how to keep you mindlessly scrolling and arguing with strangers. The cybernetic, tiny-handed mannequin controlling the whole thing really wants you to believe they are trying.
People are still on Facebook because it has replaced the AOL welcome screen. We don’t need old-school ISP’s to aggregate news and chat and email for us, but it turns out some people really want a stupid dashboard to guide them through the internet, even if it guides them directly into hell. It’s just an easy place to share baby pictures. Have you tried sending them to your family directly? MMS is practically free.
A large facet of Instagram’s early success (before being Zucked up), was that it was a way to keep tabs on your friends without having to ingest their terrible, idealistic, internet politics. The gram since has morphed into the dystopian future of consumer product marketing. This is still better than what Facebook itself has become, though admittedly it makes users miserable. It’s not a new problem, as it is the same complaint people have made previously against using unattainably beautiful models in ad campaigns.
Instead of breaking up Zuckerberg’s personal pages for college nerds, and giving the federal government even more control over our lives, just quit. The massive user base is the only thing that makes this chili-bowl-haircut of a business profitable. If the users leave, Facebook will be done and we can all go back to the satisfying bliss of ignoring one another online. At least on AOL we had enough sense to go by an alias. The worst thing we ever did as a species was be ourselves online.
