So I stopped. The honest truth isn’t that I couldn’t take the weight of what was going on in the world, nor is it the fact that I found honest employment with a company that for some reason has put up with me for several months. No, the honest truth is I have turned my back on facebook. Well, not just facebook, but social media in general.
Today I spent the day dealing with identity theft, which I watched in real time as emails popped up all last night about service changes and two-factor authentication requests over the last day or so. And while I was out and about in the pouring rain after just visiting the second retailer to prove my identity it struck me... I hate what the internet has done to us and I helped build that.
Which brings me back to this "not updating your useless blog that no one reads" subject of this post. On my journey of securing my digital identity was to clean up and change password to facebook, a site I have not logged into for several months, and I absolutely hated the experience, with red alerts to all the "added to their story" stuff I would never have read to begin with and messages private messages telling me I spent money or some place has a discount. With an endless scroll of bad information and pictures of somebody’s tiny pet or a family standing awkwardly with masks on. With Trump and COVID and Trump and sparkles and Trump and emojis and Trump and... Who the hell cares?
It’s the same on twitter and tiktok and instagram and the rest... Who the hell cares?
So if I’ve given up on all of it (for the most part) then what’s the point of writing this stuff. If you can’t post it to soc-media then you’re just fartin’ in the wind.
And that explains the silence.
I guess it could have made a decent diary from the pandemic those historians had been talking about, but this society of ours has made so much noise that anthropologists will find ample opportunity for tenure without need of my little noise maker of a blog (if I can keep up with the hosting fees long enough). No, I can’t think of a catchy upbeat “"it will get all better" kind of summing up paragraph, because I don’t have a crystal ball and because, well... Who the hell cares?
So who the hell knows? Maybe we will all start to turn our backs on social media, we will stop treating Instagram as news, and journalism will not be paywalled while agitprop pays the bills as facebook. But I doubt it.
Who the hell cares?