Let's Talk About Him Because He's Not Here

Over the three years since last posting this blog, I’ve undergone transformations exceeding that of this totally rad new font. What hasn’t changed is my technophobia, which has become so crippling as to inhibit my ability to find my very own blog page on Facebook (I have to enter it into the search tab).

Speaking of Facebook, I want to begin my comeback with a campaign. A dear chum and mentor of mine, David Hollander, recently conscripted himself to the ranks of us who masquerade behind the digital happy-mask that is Facebook’s domain. Alas, he’s left Kubrick’s internet party, having witnessed and participated in the philandering no one would be allowed to in like, reality.

David, we get it. Facebook is interpersonal masturbation. We fling gross misrepresentations of our lives against our profile walls like a monkey does shit. These feculent walls are full of unbridled self-promotion, political opinions that only incite further antagonism, incredibly anthropocentric ‘musings’, singularly pleasant pictures, nothing resembling the reality of the human condition, really the list could extend, ad infinitum. Oh, and memes. Memes that can be funny, but 99% of the time evince the unfortunate median of mobocratic intelligence.

Let’s backtrack. Facebook starts with Mark Zuckerberg et al, who are all, clearly, in my worthless opinion, closet sadists. Within the dark haunts of their minds, they’re a cabal of clever kids with a penchant for skinning squirrels, replace the knife with a keyboard, and serial-killing motives with binary-coded schadenfreude.

Hey David? Stop watching the Rangers blow another playoff series for one second and look at me. Sure David, like any for-profit institution, the Facebook financiers are in it for the ROI. But the Napoleons, the Goebbelses, the Jokers – the Zuckerbergs, et al – these demiurges are in it to manipulate the human menagerie. And what Zuckerberg et al have done is create a digital cage for our human zoo, where we’re all forced to sublimate our chimeric hopes and ambitions and ideals in such close quarters as to be driven utterly mad. Cue infinite regress.

So you’re right, David. There’s quite a downside to being on Facebook. But let’s look at it from another angle – say, outside the acute slice of your sectionable paranoia (important to note here that this is actually just a projection of my own paranoia, and I need to back up my self-diagnosis of DSM-V-level conspiracy theories with comments like this; i.e. for the record David Hollander evidences no signs of paranoia or otherwise psychosis).

Facebook allows us to connect, network, keep in touch, spread information, all that banal socioeconomic speak that will send me into a critical tailspin if I keep thinking about it. But on a more personal level, here’s what’s true. Practically, if I want to send David a song I like, yet I can’t send him the YouTube link via text because he still uses a flip-phone that was produced when I was still suffering nocturnal emissions, I could just hop on the ’Book and shoot it through the ether – magic, he has it. Practicality 2.0: if I wanted to post some esoteric inside joke that infers my 97^th percentile-intelligence (I mean, SAT scores don’t lie let’s be honest (income brackets are for capitalist pigs)) and tag David on it, I could hit up Facebook, and we could look simultaneously up at the moon and giggle crookedly before our coruscated screens at the sad sense of superiority we share and which is at center of our complexly layered motivation to commiserate on such esoterica (again this could just be me).

And speaking of veneers. Practicality, Episode III: in the end, David Hollander, I know, believes in the human condition – its twin loci of existential fate and desiring love above all. I know he believes that unrequited love is the evil behind most all the malevolence that precipitates in our cruel reality, and which should allow all of us to empathize with even the most wicked acts, even if we deplore them. Yes, Facebook is mired in arrant bullshit. Yes, if I spend more than fifteen minutes within its amorphous yet highly palpable confines, I’ll begin considering methods to my gaining madness. Yet at its center, despite the less savory manifestations of its malefic creators (which malfeasance is almost 100% conjecture), it does connect us, and connection is the necessary first step to love. So David? Get back on Facebook, because I love you man.

Postscript: It is important to note that David Hollander is the intended audience of this blog post, and yet he will never read this, because he’s not on Facebook anymore, and yet I’m posting this on Facebook, the medium my audience is being convinced to get on, but which convincing will fall on no audience, so he won’t get on it, etc. Cue regress.

Postscript 2.0: David Hollander does not approve of this message. Sue me.