Last year I deleted my account. My real friends were not on there anyway, and if they were we did not communicate with that thing. It is a truly horrible system: People have the illusion to be among their peers. They think ‘everybody’ has seen what they post. Which is not the case. It amplifies stupid human traits. Extensive posters will suck the air out of the room. The most insane conspiracy theories run amok. Arguments do not happen. Trolling is a past time for many that have nothing better to do. And while you have an account you go back to that junk. Again, and again and again. Listening to Mark Z about how it builds community is gut wrenching. FB has enough money to engineer a system that would support the better angels of our nature. It could have made a positive impact in the world. It did clearly not. Which interesting concept emerged on the platform? There is nothing. Billions of people spend aeons on the system, without having any gains from it. Before the Internet it often had been said that “TV makes you stupid”. FB is much much worse. It amplifies the voices of those who would have yelled at the TV in the olden days. It amplification system for messages is plain broken. It stinks. It is the worst. Whoever designed it should be ashamed of himself. Turn facebook off today and you do the world a service. People will find ways to communicate. In better ways. No, twitter ist not it. Talking to people in reality or with a phone is a good way to connect. It makes a huge difference. Of course we can not go back. People didn’t smoke en mass until around 120 years ago. It was a real bad idea, and did more harm than good. FB is like that. It is addictive for its users, but it provides no benefit. Leaving FB was a really good thing. Not having to endure the nonsense that people utter there about Covid is a real relief. I very much doubt that it magically became sensible in the last eight months. People might be under the impression that it is just their friends that are so stupid. That others have enlightened, witty, wonderful conversation on that platform. No, that is not true. It is an outlet for things nobody wants to read. And people return to it for the same reason they rubber neck when they pass an accident on the highway. Human suffering interests us. Out of pity, schadenfreude or actual compassion: our attention steers towards it. And with FB we sit alongside a constant stream of the horrible lives that our ‘peers’ seem to lead. We see their failed attempts in self promotion pass by in a stream of other crap and ads, and it is not the live that we ever wanted to have. But FB communicates that this would be the only way of human existence that is around us. Of course it is not. We are much better than this crap. Just hard to see when you turn for human interaction to Mr Zuckerbergs contraption.
