So another grandchild, born this week — maybe to me, maybe to somebody else. Who can say? I really shouldn’t be more specific than that.
Certainly no word of the news, if there is any news, breathed on Facebook. I … or, um, another person very much like myself … would sooner sell a child to the circus than post its photos, or any identifying details, on any sort of social media. As for what the potential harm of that could be, beyond strong and immediate rebuke, I’m afraid to ask. Maybe X snatches their images and does unspeakable things with them.
As it is my … well, somebody’s … adult children view Facebook the way I, when young, would look at my grandfather’s dentures falling into the soup: as an embarrassing lapse of age. Worse. It’s like yanking the dentures out of your own mouth and flinging them into the soup, with pride. Not an accident, an intention.
Facebook is no longer hip, or the bomb, or dope, or fire, or whatever the current term for coolness might be. “Slow death” is the phrase encountered online. The young might have an account, allowing Facebook to pretend it’s reaching the sweet spot demographic. But the 20-somethings I know never use it and mock those who do. The cracks are starting to show. On May 20, Meta, the parent of Facebook, is laying off 8,000 workers — 10% of its workforce. Last week, The New York Times, in an opinion piece, declared Meta “at the start of a long, slow decline.”
The plan is that artificial intelligence will do the jobs of the freshly fired, even thought AI is part of what’s wrecking Facebook, all those blocks of regurgitated history lite and random pop culture factoids. And that rash of ads. God forbid you buy shoes, as I have. Facebook will dangle the shoes you just bought under your nose for a month, hoping you’ll buy a second pair. And this is the super-intelligence that would rule us.
I have to admit, I’m kind of savoring the Facebook riffs, being myself lashed to an oar in the old world, pulp-based, legacy media. It’s like when Borders went bankrupt in 2011. I winked at the Book Bin and other independent bookstores which survived the era when giant bookstores roamed the earth, hardy voles, gazing out from their safe nooks, watching the dinosaurs bellow and die.
Society changes. In 2008, we were summoned to a conference room — God, remember those? We’d put on business suits and go Downtown to offices, to work in a place with people in conference rooms? Good times …
Sorry. Facebook, with its 100 million users, was the bee’s knees in 2008, and we were all to jump on and begin… well, interacting. I remember raising a languid finger and an objection: so we were to pause from stoking the engines of this major market daily newspaper, and wander over to the neat neighborhood of Facebook, and lean over the white picket fence and start chatting, one-on-one, with whoever musters the ingenuity to type our names?
Yes. And to be fair, at times Facebook seemed very real. The next year, I drove with the boys out West, and when I posted to Facebook that we were in Salt Lake City, wondering what to do after touring the Mormon Temple, a Facebook pal told us to go to Ruth’s Diner, so go we did. Red trout and eggs, chocolate malt pudding. That was real.
Forbes asked me to write an article on Barbie mutilation — it’s a thing — for the doll’s 50th anniversary, and I pondered how to report the story. Hang out at playgrounds, trying to talk with little girls about their dolls? That seemed a bad idea. So I typed what I was looking for into my Facebook profile, and women lined up to be interviewed. That was real.
Facebook was fun while it lasted. The Scrabble games, the photos of lunch. But greed ruins things, and Mark Zuckerberg bet that users wouldn’t notice the platform where they once poked their actual friends had become a water torture of AI slop. We did.
The urge to brag is great. But the desire to be safe is even greater. Having taught my children well, now I try to learn from them. In his novel “The Circle” Dave Eggers posited a world where every moment of our lives is shared online, where the idea of experiencing something and not live-streaming it is considered selfish, perhaps pathological. Turns out, like most dystopian fiction, that was plain wrong. People don’t want to fling photos of their children into the churning tempest of social media. Real life is winning over Facebook life. That’s good news, right?