Facebook – One Thousand And One Parsecs

Lessons from living without social media

In 2014, after being active on Facebook for eight years–the majority of my young adult life–I bit the bullet and deleted my account. I did it over the original Edward Snowden revelations, because I was genuinely disturbed with the connections between Facebook and the US intelligence community, and did not want to trust Zuckerberg or his company with any of my private data.

Very quickly, I learned just how difficult it was to function in today’s society outside of Facebook. Not only was I effectively cut off from all of my friends who were no longer living in close proximity to me, but I was also cut off from many of the social events among my current set of friends, because all of their activities were organized through Facebook. This made it almost impossible to meet new people, even through my existing social circles, so after a couple of years I bit the bullet again and made a new Facebook account.

To make a long story short, I got so disgusted with Facebook that I deleted my account again, then moved across the country where I was even more socially isolated and made a new account. With each iteration, I experienced with different rules, such as not friending anyone but family, not liking anything, turning off chat, etc. In 2018, I met my wife through an online dating app, married her in 2019, and promptly deleted both my dating profile and my third Facebook account.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have since created a fourth Facebook account, but only to access various writer groups like 20 Books to 50k and Wide for the Win. In the old days, we would organize on message board sites like KBoards, but now it’s all on Facebook, and if you’re not on Facebook, you’re basically cut off from the rest of the indie publishing world. I don’t like it, but that’s the way it is. So the way I use Facebook now, I only log in via an incognito browser, and I don’t post anything on my profile except the bare minimum of what Facebook requires. No friends. No likes. No news feed. I have, in fact, had my posts flagged for coming from a scam account, which I find almost as hilarious as the people the Facebook algorithm recommends to me as “friends.” Most of them don’t appear to speak English.

With Twitter, it was a totally different story. I created my account in 2009, got addicted to it for a while, then realized in 2016 that it was getting pretty toxic and deleted my account a couple of months before Trump was elected president. One of the top 10 best decisions of my life. I haven’t looked back since.

Right now, the only social media that I use consistently is my blog–and I’m not even super consistent with that. I do follow an eclectic mix of YouTube channels, but not via YouTube itself: instead, I plug in all the RSS feeds into a web-based aggregator. Helps me to avoid the YouTube recommendation algorithm, which can be super addictive. I used to be active on Goodreads, but I’m not anymore, just because I don’t want a bad review or a comment on somebody else’s book/review to spiral into something that could hurt my career. But even if writing wasn’t my career, I still wouldn’t use it to follow anyone except for a handful of close and trusted friends.

Living without social media for the last few years has given me an interesting, and perhaps somewhat unique, perspective on culture and society. In a lot of ways, it makes me feel like I’m on the outside looking in, which helps to write stories that are counter-cultural or otherwise serve as tales of warning. It’s also helped me to avoid a lot of the depression, anxiety, dysphoria, and outrage that characterize so much of today’s society.

On the other hand, it’s also been a real handicap when it comes to marketing my books. So in the next few months, I plan to expand my internet presence and experiment a bit with social media, joining some new communities and hopefully putting myself (and my books) in front of new people. But I don’t want to get dragged into all of the toxicity that’s out there, or to become addicted again.

So in the interest of avoiding all that, I thought it would be a good idea to take some time and write down some of the lessons I’ve learned from living without social media, specifically with what we (and by we, I mean I) can take from those lessons to use social media in a more healthy way.

Disable or block all mobile notifications, especially push notifications.

This was perhaps the biggest thing I noticed immediately after I deleted my Facebook and Twitter: the silence. No more buzzing phone. No more compulsion to pick up a device, or sit down at the computer and log back in. No more sense that I was tethered to my online persona, which I had to constantly maintain.

It was so incredibly liberating.

The closest thing I’d experienced before this was living in the Republic of Georgia, where the only way to get internet access was to walk to the village center, wait half an hour for an old VW bus to come through, ride that bus for another half hour to the nearest city, then walk to McDonalds and buy a cheeseburger or an ice cream so I could sit by the window and use the internet for a couple of hours. Honestly, I think that experience did a lot to prepare me to cut the cord, but it was still always there in the back of my mind, even when I was back in the village, helping out around the farm with chores.

With push notifications, though, that tether is right there in your pocket, and never very far from your mind. It’s like you exist in a quantum state, never fully present in the real world, and never fully disconnected from the online world either. It’s very addicting.

And honestly, why do you need any mobile notifications at all? Why can’t you leave everything on MyFaceTwit alone until the next time you’re ready to move on? Do you answer every phone call? Respond to every text in real time as you receive it? Why not take charge of your own social media usage and use it at your own leisure?

The first step to taking charge is to disable all push notifications, especially the ones on your phone. The only reason those exist is to make social media more addictive, and ensure that you’re never truly logged off. Don’t let them screw with you like that. Don’t let them turn you into a mere product to sell to advertisers. If you’re going to use social media, be mindful about it and use it on your own terms, not theirs. Disable all pubsh notifications.

Disable or block all likes and upvotes.

The other way that social media companies addict you to their platform is by means of the “like” or “upvote” button. This is especially true for content that you produce. An entire generation of young women (and also young men, to a lesser extent) is now being shredded by this, because they’ve been raised to believe that their personal worth and value as a human being is connected to how many likes and upvotes they get. It’s insidious.

This is also, I believe, a large part of why freedom of speech is in such danger. It’s much easier to convince the rising generation that speech is violence and violence is speech, because whenever they get a downvote or a nasty comment, they feel like their worth as a person is under attack.

When it comes to comment sections, I’m a little more torn on this, because upvotes and downvotes can be a valid contribution to the discussion at hand. However, it can also become addicting, and I admit that on some occasions I’ve fallen into the mob mentality and said things that, taken out of context, probably look pretty bad. So even when it comes to comments sections, it’s probably best to avoid getting caught up in the upvote game, and to be a lot more sparing in giving out upvotes–or just not contribute that way at all.

Do not consume via “news feeds” or endlessly scrolling content.

This one is huge, especially for me. It’s a major reason why I don’t generally go onto YouTube anymore: because I don’t want to get caught up in clicking through the recommended videos. That way leads to hours of lost sleep and groggy mornings filled with regret.

Instead, I try to find an RSS feed and plug it into an aggregator. That way, no matter the social media site, I only see the things that are posted by the creators I follow. I also have a lot more control over the content that I assume, because a lot of these sites will actually bury content that they think you might not want to watch (or that they think you shouldn’t want to watch). With an aggregator, I see everything that gets posted, and can shoose which content I want to consume and which content I want to skip.

This does mean that from time to time, I need to cut some of my RSS feeds from my aggregator. Otherwise, the firehose of content can be overwhelming. Also, you have to give yourself permission to skip stuff, even if it’s stuff that you genuinely want to see. This happens all of the time with podcasts for me: I feel like I’m constantly “behind” on the things I want to listen to.

But in order to make time for better things, you sometimes have to cut out the merely good. Just be mindful about it, and don’t let some news feed or algorithm do it for you.

Do not try to connect with everyone.

Before I deleted my first Facebook account, I went through a period where I was very disatisfied with my experience there. It seemed like a small handful of “friends” dominated every post and discussion. Invariably, these were “friends” with whom I shared only the most tenuous connection, for example that we’d been in a freshman college class together, or our moms had used to hang out all the time when we were five. These weren’t the people I wanted to stay in touch with 24/7, but they dominated all the feeds just because they posted so much more content than everyone else.

In 2012, I decided to experiment with deleting all but my closest friends, until I was down to the Dunbar number. What is the Dunbar number? It is the theoritical maximum size of a human society where everyone personally knows everyone else, and everyone knows how everyone else relates, individually, to everyone. It’s about 150-200.

As soon as I had my “friends” list down to about 200, I started to notice some changes. Instead of feeling like I had to ask “who is this person again?” with half of the things that got posted, I saw a lot more content from the people I genuinely cared about, and my Facebook experience improved dramatically. It was like I had taken the Marie Kondo approach to social media, which was difficult at the time, but actually made me feel much more meaningfully connected in the long run.

You can’t please everyone. You can’t write a book that everyone is going to like. Why should you try to get everyone to like you on social media? Cut out all of those connections that don’t actively bring you joy, and you’ll have a much more positive experience.

Avoid all outrage like the plague.

This is probably the biggest one of all. The reason social media is so toxic right now is because nothing is more addictive–and therefore, more likely to keep you engaging with someone else’s content or platform–than outrage. It doesn’t even matter if the outrage is righteous or not. If you are addicted to outrage, you are under someone else’s control, and are probably being exploited in order to sell advertising, or to push someone else’s agenda.

Ultimately, outrage leads to mass formation psychosis. Instead of feeling connected on a personal level with other people, you are connected to some sort of movement or leader, and possessed by an ideology. The end state of this is the tragic severing of even the most personal bonds, with brother taking up arm against brother, and father against son.

Outrage is poison, even when outrage is justified. Even Christ, when he overthrew the tables of the money changers, didn’t send his disciples to hunt them down, or go after their families. He chased them out of the temple, but He didn’t track them back to their homes. He gave them a sharp rebuke and let them go. Later, in His visit to the Americas, He taught that all contention is of the devil, and that His teaching was that such should be done away.

“Blessed are the peacemakers.” What a radical message. Be a peacemaker. Don’t succumb to outrage.

This is why Meta is going to fail

So while Mrs. Vasicek and I were in the theater for the first time since the pandemic, watching the trailers before Dune, we saw this commercial for Facebook’s new Meta rebrand:

Since the theater was almost completely empty, we were already having fun by making snarky commentary. And when this commercial came on, it was a gold mine. So creepy. So disturbing. So “I really don’t want whatever the hell this is trying to sell me.”

But right before the end, Mrs. Vasicek nailed it and said: “it’s probably for Meta!” And then, bam! Meta’s new logo came on, and we both had a good laugh.

Seriously, though, ever since Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be rebranding as Meta, I’ve been fascinated with it—not because I’m looking forward to it, but because it is so. So. Cringe. It’s like watching a train wreck in real time. History may prove me wrong about this, as plenty of things that were laughable when they started out proved to change the world, but I really do think that Meta is going to fail. Spectacularly.

I have so many thoughts about this. So many thoughts. But if I had to break it all down to one core idea, it would be this:

At some point in our lives, all of us will reach a point where something about ourselves comes into conflict with reality. At that point, we can make one of three choices: we can try to change reality, we can decide to ignore the conflict, or we can work on changing ourselves.

Part of becoming an adult is realizing that there are aspects of reality that you simply cannot change. We can choose our actions, but we cannot choose the consequences of our actions. To paraphrase Jordan Peterson, we realize that we should clean our rooms before we try to change the world.

Right now, the world is ruled by people who reject the notion that their actions have consequences, and believe that reality can be whatever they want. That is the main reason why everything is falling apart. But instead of recognizing this and changing course, our leaders are doubling down and demanding that we all bend the knee and fall into line with their false reality.

It’s not going to work.

Zuckerberg is one of those people. Facebook didn’t succeed because it invented social media, or did it better than anyone else: it succeeded because Zuckerberg realized that his end users were actually his product, and his consumers were the corporations and governments that wanted all their data. So he optimized Facebook to be as addictive as possible and got more than a billion people hooked on it.

At that point, Facebook was so ubiquitous that it was difficult to function in the real world without it. Those of us who tried to quit soon learned that Zuckerberg was holding our social connections hostage, and that we could expect to be cut off from our friends and family if we tried to leave.

But then the Trump years happened. Social media became toxic, and Facebook in particular became embroiled in scandal. Zuckerberg tried to thread the needle between the partisan divide, and all he managed to do was split the baby. Team blue hated Facebook for selling their data to companies like Cambridge Analytica, and team red hated Facebook for “fact checking” and shadowbanning them. Meanwhile, team “don’t talk to me about politics” became exhausted by the whole thing, and started to unplug in increasing numbers.

I think Zuckerberg needs Meta to be a success much, much more than any of us need or want Meta. This is pure speculation on my part as I don’t have any figures to back it up, but I suspect that Facebook peaked sometime in the last five years and has been declining at an ever sharper rate ever since. It’s probably not just Facebook, either, but all social media. They’re all toxic now.

But after all the goodwill that he’s burned, is Zuckerberg really the technological Moses who’s going to lead us all to the new promised land? And is the promised land really just a cheesy-looking version of Second Life with VR headsets?

The three things that Zoomers and Millennials crave more than anything are meaning, authenticity, and redemption. Those are also the three biggest things that Big Tech has been depriving us of. That’s not going to change until we get away from Silicon Valley culture.

Anyone who has started a family will tell you that the best way to find meaning, authenticity, and redemption in your life is to raise children. And yet, when Google designed their campus to have all the amenities necessary for their employees to live, work, and play there indefinitely, they somehow forgot to build any sort of playplace or daycare for children. That’s Silicon Valley culture: sexy and sterile, inclusive and censorious, flashy and vapid.

Second life failed because the people at the top tried to milk it too hard, and the users revolted. Facebook’s users are revolting for similar reasons, because manipulating us to have the right behavior is now Facebook’s product, and they’re milking us for all we’re worth. Is Meta going to be any different? Because it looks an awful lot to me like a farcically transparent attempt to build the Matrix. Can somebody please tell Zuckerberg that the Matrix was supposed to be a dystopia, and not an instruction manual?

Ultimately, though, I don’t think it’s going to matter much, because Meta is going to fail. Spectacularly. The deeper I look into it, the more it seems that the writing is on the wall. Of course, I could be wrong about Meta—spectacularly wrong, even—but I’m not betting on it. Because if I had to choose between plugging into Zuckerberg’s new Matrix and vacationing in Iceland, the choice would not be difficult:

Why I deleted my Facebook account (again)

Please watch this video in its entirety (before YouTube takes it down). Whatever you think of James O’Keefe, this is serious stuff that he’s exposing, and it affects all of us.

The first time I deleted my Facebook, it was out of privacy concerns. I came back because there were social groups, such as my local church congregation, that organized all of their activities on Facebook and by being off the platform, I was cutting myself out of the loop. So I got back on, rationalizing that I could be careful about what I shared and it wouldn’t be an issue.

The second time I deleted my Facebook, it was because of the negative effect it was having on my life. I was disturbed about the way that social media was programming people, and I could feel it beginning to happen to me. It was around this time that I deleted my Twitter as well.

I came back because I worried that I was becoming too much of an “internet hermit.” There were also some social groups that it was more convenient to interact with over Facebook, but much less so than before. Mainly, I knew that there were people who wanted to reach out to me, and cutting out Facebook entirely seemed a little too extreme.

This time, however, it isn’t just about privacy issues, or even about social programming and the negative effects of social media in our lives. It’s about power, and conscience.

Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other big tech Silicon Valley companies have a massive political and cultural influence on our lives, and I don’t like what they’re doing with it. They’ve become too powerful, and now they’re abusing that power to shape our lives and our communities in ways that I don’t agree with. But the truth is, the only reason they have any power at all is because of us. We give them their power, and we can take it away.

I’m getting off of Facebook permanently this time because I don’t want to give that company any more power than they already have. I’m also deleting my Twitter. If I do come back to social media, it’s going to be through alternative platforms like Minds and Gab.

The next big step is to de-Google my life, and I’m not sure how I’m going to accomplish that. However, with the direction things are going, I believe it’s more important now than ever to do so. As for Amazon, it’s going to be much more difficult since such a large chunk of my income comes from them. What I will probably have to do is limit my dependence on these companies without cutting either of them out of my life completely.

Experimenting with social media again

So, it’s come to my attention that I’m something of an “internet hermit.” (thanks J.R.) Which is actually unintentional. I quit Facebook in 2014 and Twitter back in 2016, and while I’m still active on Goodreads, I mostly just use it to post book reviews and keep track of my TBR pile. After I moved back to Utah, the blog went mostly dark, which combined with everything else means that my online presence has practically gone to nothing.

I quit social media for a variety of reasons, mostly having to do with privacy concerns. In the last couple of years, though, my reasons have changed. There’s a fascinating talk on YouTube by Chamath Palihapatiya, one of the founders of Facebook, where he speaks about the negative long-term effects of social media on individuals and societies. His observations are sobering. If you have the time, it’s worth it to watch his talk in detail, but this video does an excellent job of discussing the relevant points:

So with all that said, why am I experimenting with social media again?

Because it’s come to my attention that the people who are looking for me don’t really have a way to find me, and that’s a problem. There’s this blog, of course, but this isn’t the 00’s anymore, unfortunately; people don’t typically go searching for blogs anymore. They search Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or Одноклассники, or whatever social media they happen to use the most. For better or worse, if you don’t have a presence on these platforms, you’re effectively invisible to a whole lot of people.

When I quit social media, I was more concerned about my personal usage of these platforms than my own visibility. Not a lot of people were looking for me back then. There might not be a lot of people looking for me now, either, but I do want to set things up so that as my readership expands and my writing career grows, people have a way to find me.

So here’s what I plan to do: set up social media accounts, link them to my blog feed, and post content primarily through my blog. If people want to interact with me on social media, I’ll log in and interact with them, but my primary home on the internet is going to be this blog.

We’ll see how it turns out. In case you’re interested, I have a Facebook page here and a Twitter account here. If there’s any other social media you think I should have a presence on, please let me know.

Why I quit Facebook (Blast from the Past: July 2014)

This post is an excerpt from the original, but I think it gets to the point much better. Three years on and I don’t regret the decision at all.

I joined Facebook in 2006 when I was 21. I was just getting ready to head out to college, and at that point only college kids were on the site. It was a cool new thing and seemed like a great way to make and keep in touch with friends. Since I was moving away from home and starting a new phase of life, that was important to me.

My first year, I searched out and friended all of the people in my freshman ward at BYU and posted tons of pictures and other updates. It made me feel like I was very close to them! But the next year, I moved and made a new group of friends, and stayed in touch with only one of them. All those other friends just gradually drifted off into other things.

I posted a few more pictures, but mostly just profile pictures because anything else didn’t seem like it was worth the work. Facebook added groups, and I joined a bunch of silly ones just for laughs, but not any serious ones. Friends kept inviting me out to events, and my default answer was “maybe” because it didn’t make me look like as much of a jerk when I just didn’t want to go.

Then I got into a huge political debate with an old friend from high school, and it got insanely ugly. It was weird, because we always seemed to get along so well in person, but online we were just slugging it out at each other. It was very strange. I tried to get him to agree to disagree, but by this point his friends were posting to his wall and goading him on, so he refused. Then he attacked my religion, and the only way I could end the debate was to block him. I haven’t seen or talked with him since.

Facebook changed a lot over the next few years. The biggest change was probably the newsfeed, which replaced the wall. At first, I thought it was a great idea, because I could get all the updates on my friends in one place. Then the feed got swamped with updates from all the friends I’d added over the years. Most of them were people I’d drifted away from–people I’d seen a lot for a semester or two, but hadn’t bothered to keep the friendship up after we’d moved on.

Facebook became a fire-hose, and it started to eat up a disturbing amount of my time. I stayed away from all the obvious distractions, like Farmville and those other games, but it wasn’t enough. The information was just too dense, and though it gave me the illusion that I was staying close to my friends, in reality my interactions weren’t that meaningful.

Facebook developed algorithms to filter the newsfeed, but all that really did was make me use the site more. It didn’t help me to keep in touch with the people who mattered the most to me, since those weren’t the people who were posting the most. Instead, it resurrected a bunch of friendships that had long since faded in the real world and turned them into these weird zombified online relationships where we shared stupid memes, argued politics, and discussed random articles–all without ever seeing each other in person.

By the time I went overseas to teach English, Facebook had become a huge timesuck, and I wanted to break free of it. The first semester, I lived in a large town where I had constant internet access. The center of social life for us expats was a Facebook group called “Georgian Wanderers.” It felt good in some ways to be part of a community where people actually spoke English, but there was a lot of drama and ugliness in that group too. In my second semester, I lived in a tiny village where internet access was spotty, and I didn’t miss much while I was out there.

In fact, living without regular internet access was exactly what I needed. It gave me the chance to step back from my life and see how it had become cluttered. Before going back to the States, I decided to clean things up so as to keep myself from falling into the same rut. A major part of that online decluttering was to go through my 700+ friends list and delete all the people I didn’t want to stay in face-to-face contact with.

I cannot tell you how refreshing that was. At first, it felt like cutting off an arm or something, since I’d been “friends” with these people for so long and how was I going to keep in touch with them? But then, I realized that I didn’t really want to keep in touch with most of them, and besides, dropping them from my friends list wasn’t like disowning them in real life. We could still get in touch with each other in real life and strike up those friendships again.

My newsfeed was decluttered and those zombie friendships had (mostly) been neutralized, but even after all that, it didn’t seem like enough. I just wasn’t getting what I wanted out of Facebook. Every once and a while, I’d have a genuine exchange with someone, but most of the time it was just memes and random articles. I found myself slipping back into useless distractions and frustrating political debates, punctuated only occasionally by major life events from people I cared about.

Over the next year (2013), I found myself using Facebook less and less. Then the Snowden revelations came out, and Facebook seemed creepier and creepier. I’d learned from Douglas Rushkoff that Facebook’s business depended on milking its users for data, and the fact that the government was so intent on the mass collection of data profoundly disturbed me. From then, I suppose it was only a matter of time before Facebook crossed a line where I wasn’t willing to go.

Here’s the thing about Facebook: when you’re using it, it doesn’t feel like a network or a service. It feels like it’s an integral component of your closest friendships. Phrases like “Facebook official” and “pics or it didn’t happen” evince this. We become so entrenched in Facebook that permanently quitting it feels like betraying our friends.

But Facebook’s business doesn’t depend on strengthening our friendships, it depends on monetizing them–on collecting and extracting data to sell to the highest bidder. And since there’s nothing that most of us wouldn’t do for our friends, we grin and bear whatever terms Facebook feels like offering us. We tolerate the most egregious violations of our privacy because we want to keep our friendships, even as the quality of our interactions gets worse and worse.

Not only does this give Facebook incredible license to take liberty with our personal data, it gives them the power to shape and mold our interactions with each other. Just after I deleted my Facebook account, news came out that sociologists had engaged in a massive experiment to see if they could manipulate the mood of its users. The experiment confirmed that yes, Facebook most certainly can manipulate the emotional state of its users. Does this also mean that they can manipulate friendships? That over time, they can make you draw closer to some people and further from others? I’d be willing to bet that they can.

Instead of merely reflecting our relationships, giving an online dimension to friendships that exist in real life, Facebook is increasingly manipulating and constructing them. This in turn makes us more dependent on Facebook as a medium of social exchange. And the tighter we latch on to the network, the more they milk us for everything they can get.

The fundamental problem with Facebook is a misalignment of incentives. In order to make money, Facebook either has to get really creepy about the data it collects and what it does about it, or it has to control what we see on the site in order to create an artificial scarcity. Because it’s a publicly traded company now, it has to do both, because Wall Street is pressuring them to make more money.

When I was a user of Facebook, I felt like I was constantly being used. But now that I’ve quit, it feels much better. I haven’t noticed any sort of deterioration in my friendships, and I’m keeping in touch with my more distant friends just fine. Because that’s the thing about a truly close friendship: it doesn’t matter how much time goes by or how much distance comes between you–when you finally meet up again, it’s like you were never apart at all.

I don’t need Facebook to help me maintain my friendships, and I certainly don’t need it to help me make new ones. It’s one way to keep in touch, sure, but at this point, the benefits just aren’t worth the costs. And so, after eight years of being on Facebook, I deleted my profile and left for good. I doubt I’ll regret it.

What has Facebook turned into?

A few years ago, I deleted my Facebook account. There were many reasons for this, which I detailed at the time. Basically, I had major issues with their privacy policy and completely lost trust with the company. I got out because I no longer wanted to be their product.

Unfortunately, the network effect that makes social media sites so much “better” as their user base grows also makes it that much harder to stay away from them once they get huge. I got a new Facebook account back in 2015 to stay in touch with a local group of friends who planned all their social events that way, and dabbled with the idea of coming back. In the end, I decided not to and deleted that account when it was no longer useful, right before the elections really started to heat up. Perfect timing.

Last week, I bit the bullet and went back onto Facebook, because again there’s a local group of friends who plan everything exclusively on Facebook, and I found myself missing out on things because I was out of the loop. This time, though, I’m friending absolutely no one and keeping my usage of the site to a minimum. If I were moving back to Utah tomorrow, I’d delete my account before I packed my stuff.

I’ve noticed some interesting things since getting back on Facebook.

First, the site is a mess. It’s like a weird cross between Goodreads and MySpace. I know there’s a lot of people who love Goodreads, but sorry, that site is almost impossible to navigate. Way too much clutter, with the option you’re looking for hidden in some tiny link that doesn’t actually look like a link. Unless you’re a frequent user, you constantly feel like you’re lost. That’s Facebook now. It’s very unfriendly for new users, which I know is like me and ten people living in Yurts in Mongolia, but still. In terms of user-friendliness, it’s going the way of MySpace.

Second, Facebook has become really slutty. Again, first impressions here. It’s really interesting when Facebook has nothing to base their algos off of. I assume from what I’m seeing that the recommendations default to its power users, which at a cursory glance are mostly chicks and dude bros. Also, some of the group recommendations I’m seeing are insanely over the top in terms of sheer raunchiness. Since when did Facebook turn into Potterville?

Third… why are there multiracial emojis now?

Diversity is not a virtue in and of itself. It has to be paired with common values. Diversity without any common values is a state of war.

But Joe, what’s the harm in an emoji that reflects your skin tone? Two things. First, social media divides us far more than it unites us. It walls us off into tribes, helping us build our own custom echo chambers full of people who only agree with us. It’s an incubator for much of the divisiveness in society right now. Second, there is a very real effort in the country today to divide us all by race.

In society at large, we have very little in common anymore. If we can’t even agree on facts, how can we agree on values? A nation without common values is only a major crisis away from a civil war.

So call me paranoid, but these multiracial emojis are, in my humble opinion, a sign of a very disturbing trend. Either Facebook is simply giving the market what it wants, in which case society is much closer to the edge of the cliff than I’d realized, or Facebook has an agenda. Best case scenario, Facebook is simply responding to a small but vocal minority of their power users, and the rest of us don’t care. Not great, but not the end of the world (yet).

Fourth, and perhaps most disturbingly, people seem to be so plugged into Facebook that when they meet in real life, the conversation often defaults to whatever someone posted that they all saw. This is especially true of people ten years younger than me. I know it’s anecdotal, so I shouldn’t extrapolate it into a general trend. What I can say is that after moving to a new place and making a new group of friends, I’m seeing this a lot more than I used to.

The thing that makes this disturbing is that the people who do this tend to be a lot less open or curious about those outside their immediate social group. They also tend to crave validation so much that they go along to get along. When every social media interaction is subject to a gladatorial-style thumbs up vote from everyone you know, is it any wonder that no one wants to step out into the arena unless they know that someone has their back?

In short, Facebook is becoming more toxic. What’s the antidote? Probably to read more books. That’s what Jeff VanderMeer suggests in his book BookLife, and I tend to agree. One of the best ways to unplug from the Internet is to curl up with a good book.

Thoughts?

Why I quit Facebook

Last month, I made the decision to quit Facebook. Permanently. As in, the Facebook account that I created eight years ago as a college freshman no longer exists, unless Facebook continues to store and monetize data from its ex-users long after they’ve quit the service. Which wouldn’t surprise me at all, since Facebook is in the data business, which makes its users its product, not its consumer. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’ve thought about quitting Facebook for some time. Some of the reasons that have moved me in that direction have been that it’s a waste of time, that it’s the high fructose corn syrup of the internet, that it violates my privacy in creepy ways, that it cheapens my interactions with my friends … the list goes on. However, these reasons alone were never enough to convince me to quit. They got me to scale back my usage and cull my friends list, but never delete my profile outright.

Last month, though, Facebook revealed a new ad program where it downloads its users’ browser histories. With this program, Facebook now collects data straight from your browser–data from your internet activity outside of Facebook’s service–and sells that along with the personal data that you share on their site.

Facebook has always had major privacy issues, with the FTC stepping in in 2010 to force them to change their policies. However, until now, the argument was always that if you didn’t want your personal information to be shared, you shouldn’t put it on Facebook. Now, however, Facebook is collecting information that you don’t share with Facebook–information that they gather straight from your computer–without any reliable way to opt-out.

Facebook claims that this program is mainly for advertisers, but what’s to stop them from sharing this data with the NSA? With the Snowden revelations, we already know that there are entities within the US government that are working to create a surveillance state. Facebook is already practically in bed with these people, who have gathered personal information about Facebook users in the past. And since Facebook already has a dismal history of abusing privacy rights, changing its TOS without notice, and undermining its user privacy settings with unannounced updates, I fully expect them to gather that information and share it whether I want them to or not.

This may not be a huge change from the way Facebook used to do business, but it was a huge wake-up call for me. Since I’m not a huge fan of Facebook to begin with, this was the final straw that pushed me away.

Thoughts on Twitter

Oh man, I used to hate Twitter so much. It’s amusing (and a little bit embarrassing) to look back on some old threads on the Kindle Boards and see how snippy I would get with everyone who raved about it. I guess it’s just my contrarian nature.

Well, in the last month or so, my opinion of Twitter has done a 180. Most of that has to do with getting a smart phone and having quick and easy access to it. Back when I first signed up, I had lots of ideas for short, pithy tweets, but mostly when I was away from a computer. Because of that, Twitter became just another chore, like checking email or keeping up with Facebook updates. But now that I have easy, instant access, I can drop in whenever I want, without opening a browser and starting up another relentless cycle of timesucks.

About a year ago, I got involved in a huge discussion on the Kindle Boards with Nathan Lowell. It all started when he credited his success as a writer to Twitter. That hit me like a bombshell, since he’s following a very similar career path, and has had a tremendous amount of success at it. He shared a ton of helpful tips on that thread, all of which I carefully filed away for later. I didn’t really have much of an opportunity to try them out, since I was in Georgia and had limited internet access, but since getting back I’ve been slowly trying them out.

What I’ve found in the last few weeks is that Twitter is a great way to get into interesting online conversations that don’t require a high degree of time or commitment. The 140 character requirement makes it hard to say anything of any substance, but that’s actually a strength, because it makes it easier to follow what others have to say. Instead of channeling all your time and energy into a handful of comment / forum threads, you can start a dozen new conversations, or follow a dozen new people, or drop out for a while and do something else. Less substance means less commitment and more flexibility.

It makes me think of something Cory Doctorow mentioned on a panel at Worldcon 2011. He called Facebook the high fructose corn syrup of the internet–which is actually a very relevant comparison. Facebook is very information dense the same way that HFCS is very calorie dense. Both of them are fairly addictive (“compelling without being satisfying” is the way that Cory Doctorow put it). And just as HFCS is not very nutritive, Facebook is not a very good way to stay genuinely close to the most important people in your life, especially when you’re following hundreds of people whom you barely even know.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter is a great way to connect with people who aren’t much more than strangers or casual acquaintances. The value is not in what you’re able to share, but how many people you’re able to connect with. If I tried to make myself accessible to everyone via Facebook, I would quickly become overwhelmed. With Twitter, I am accessible simply by being there, and I can reach out to just about anyone and expect a response.

Some things I’ve found that have helped improve my Twitter experience:

Follow anyone who seems interesting, and unfollow them as soon as they stop being interesting. If you’re not getting much from Twitter, it’s probably because you’re following the wrong people and not following the right people. A follow isn’t a huge commitment, so no hard feelings if you break it off.
Reply to tweets that strike a chord with you. Don’t just consume–start a conversation. Add something, and you’ll get even more in return.
If you’re going to include a hashtag, try to offer something of value. Don’t just do it to get attention, or to draw people to some link or something. Do it because you want to contribute something meaningful.
Don’t approach it like a chore. If you want to bow out for a while, that’s fine–you don’t have to follow every tweet, or reply to everyone who tweets at you (at least, not right away). There isn’t any “right” or “wrong” way to use it–there’s just the way you use it.

So yeah, I plan to be much more active on Twitter in the future. I probably won’t go crazy fanatic with it like some people do, but I’ll be on there, so if you want a quick and easy way to keep in touch, that’s a great way to do it.

And as for Facebook, that’s pretty much only for my close friends now. When I got back from Georgia, I deleted more than half of my Facebook friends. With Facebook, Dunbar’s number (aka the 150 friend rule) is probably a good upper limit. With Twitter, I now agree with Nathan Lowell that it’s more of a lower limit than anything.