#47: Sell Your Car & Delete Your Account
Six years ago, Facebook made a TV commercial that was essentially a 90-second meditation about how "chairs are like Facebook" (the answer: they're both things that people use). It seems completely absurd now, but the message was slightly easier to swallow in the heady air of 2012. At the time, I felt compelled to write a semi-serious blog post about what Facebook was saying, instead of just laughing it off, but I made a point then that I think has aged well: Roads, not chairs, are like Facebook. "A Facebook account is a car and Facebook itself is the massive system of roads where we drive that car. As more parts of life become dependent on this infrastructure, it becomes less of a diversion and more of a chore." 2012 Facebook was merely annoying, not threatening, and even the most critical of us couldn't imagine its imminent involvement in the downfall of western civilization. But here we are.
For Facebook, like cars, the devil is in the negative externalities. Most people simply find it easier to have a Facebook account than not, just like it's easier for most to get around by car than by using the next best option wherever they live (if there even is another option). Many users of both would love to do without either, but can't, and neither situation is an accident or a natural outcome, but the results of sustained efforts to orient society's infrastructure around these technologies (and we've usually been quite willing to cooperate, especially because we were overly optimistic about both cars and Facebook in their early stages). The personal experience of killing an hour on Facebook or driving to work every day isn't awful, just mildly unpleasant: You get stuck in traffic; someone cuts you off; a Facebook friend you barely even know shares an Upworthy meme and you actually have to see it. All the major problems, meanwhile, don't correspond to anything that happens directly to you, but arise from the literal or figurative exhaust of everyone's modest behavior, which accumulates to melt the polar ice caps, aggregate the necessary data for weaponized psychological profiling, or generally atomize society.
So, we're all going to quit Facebook this week, right? I might. But I'm lucky, because I don't really need it for much (in many places, by contrast, Facebook is the internet). I also don't own a car, but I live in one of the few places in the United States where that actually makes sense. The notion that most people can or will disconnect from Facebook tomorrow demonstrates how little we still understand its role in society, and is not much different than suggesting that hundreds of millions of Americans free themselves from the burden of car ownership by, I don't know, all moving to Brooklyn? Just because Facebook is digital doesn't mean we can turn it off. So if you have to, go ahead and keep driving, and stay on Facebook. We don't exactly have a choice. But if you haven't already, at least, start noticing the infrastructure that's keeping you from quitting.
Reads:
Sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson arguing that emptying half the Earth of humans is the only way to save the planet (in other words, EO Wilson's Half Earth concept). Not as impossible as it sounds, and already sort of happening anyway.
Bitcoin is Ridiculous. Blockchain is Dangerous by Paul Ford. "America understands new abstractions by financializing them."
Another sign of the end times: A combined record store and hedge fund called Outsider Records & Hedge Fund just opened in Maplewood, NJ. Amusingly, the record store will initially subsidize the hedge fund, not the other way around.
Until next time,
Drew