Peak Facebook
Nostalgia for the good old days
My Facebook circle is about at 40% of what it used to be. I think the heyday for me was around 2013 when SCOTUS overturned DOMA. Seas of HRC red faces feeling very joyful and self satisfied by their clictivism.
There was a time when I knew of two very specific people who weren’t on Facebook. I wanted them to be. I wanted to catch up on their lives. But that was it, just Angie Spears and Bridgette Whearty.
It’s possible that I’m a bad friend. Or that my radical leftist views have driven away more moderate or reasonable members of my social circles. But one way or another my community has evaporated.
I have 197 “friends” left today. I’ve wavered on my IRL policy with friending people over the years, so maybe 2/3 of those are folks I have a personal connection with. I still have over 1,000 “followers,” mostly due to my witty, far left writing on Medium, before it went paywall and jumped the shark. But it’s a quiet, empty room compared to what it once was.
I loved the digital utopia Facebook promised. I was going to have a digital connection to everyone I loved and cared about. Access to photos of their vacations, children growing up, latest craft projects and homemade dinners. I wouldn’t need phone numbers, email addresses, any sort of key or data address. Just one dashboard for everyone. Just click on their face to reach out to them by text, audio, or video.
I’ve never particularly suffered the social media malaise where I just feel dispirited and left behind when I see my friend’s manicured lives. Perhaps because I’m winning at life and I’m the one causing such malaise, or perhaps because I’m so full of Christ-like compersion and fondness for everyone. I just felt secure knowing I had some sort of access to all of these people who mattered to me.
I get that capitalism and Russian Trump bots and Mark Zuckerberg patenting all of our mother’s maiden blood types ruined it all. I get why everyone left.
I even had my own DTR with Facebook soon after Trump was elected. I needed to disengage from the 24 hour news cycle that was consuming my energy. I shifted to Pinterest and Instagram for more personal, less Trump-centric content. But I still kept my Facebook account. I was still on a few times a month.
But lately I miss this thin, ephemeral, brief glimpse of one another we once had.
I fantasize about a Wiki-Face-Pedia-Book where free, open source technology gently holds all of our photos of pets in halloween costumes and videos of our kids playing roller derby can live in safety and peace. Where you can check and uncheck the “politics” filter, the “food photos” filter, the “cute pets” filter. Where endless scrolling numbness and ads for camouflaged ammo aren’t the theme. Where our dopamine addiction and social media jealousy are somehow mitigated.
Where we can all sit on our digital front porches and wave hello to one another as we go on our evening walks.
