About these feelings we can't control... [002]

Stuck in my head: "Renaissance Affair"
Hooverphonic
The Magnificent Tree

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"facebook is a war zone - tread carefully"
-T3

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A football entry is coming. If you're reading this because you know me, well... are you surprised?

If for some reason you've found this by accident, I promise I won't bore you with stats and figures and Xs-and-Os. My intent is to discuss the greater way I relate to my surroundings as a result of the local football club, the Seattle Seahawks.

This is not that entry, however. Though they are fresh on my mind after an excruciating loss to the pitberg stillers - whose name I will forever desecrate - I think it's best to discuss what's led me back to blogging.

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Was it OpenDiary? I know it wasn't LiveJournal. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was OD. So I believe it all began on OpenDiary, though I couldn't tell you who got me into it in the first place. Was it Dave? My old roommate, Cockroach? What I do know is that I had just moved to Washington, and was discovering "the Seattle Freeze", and that I was seeking a way to connect with someone.

Anyone.

I'd moved away. Keeping in contact with old friends was a function of emails and long-distance telephone calls, of which I'm sure many people of a certain generation will have no memory. Everyone had moved on from the academia stage of life and into the throes of daily activity, so who's got the time when you're trying to find yourself and your direction at twenty-three?

I had been active in various "chat" forums over those years, finding myself talking to absolute strangers because... well... who the hell else is on those things? Eventually, I found my way to the various circle of diary/journal sites because I'd always been verbose (maybe you haven't noticed), and they just seemed to fit my flow moreso that the thought snippets allowed anywhere else.

Many who might read this have been stuck with me since those early days. You were a part of my near-daily check-in, a time where I needed the connection the most.

OpenDiary died and we all moved to Journal Community; JC died and Dave built one such site, himself, In the Wire; ITW started becoming difficult for Dave to maintain, and OD came back around, only to have it die again, and then... and then I don't recall the order of things.

MySpace? facebook? Is that where we're stuck, now?

Many of us then had real names. I didn't know, for example, Delphinium Blue's real name until I realized I didn't want to lose [them] and we had to out ourselves as actual human beings instead of the personae we cultivated online.

Maybe we still cultivate those personae. Maybe that's who we really are and maybe the day-to-day is the disguise we adorn in order to protect that which is vulnerable inside each of us.

Who's more real - Bruce, or the Bat?

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When the pandemic hit and we were all sent into lockdown, I felt really proud of how people were staying connected online, and trying to cope with our new reality. The support was immense, and in an odd way, we were almost united. That feeling of unity carried beyond the borders of our neighborhoods or our states, but seemed to move freely beyond nations, faster than the spread of any virus. Could somethng as wretched and evil as facebook actually be useful?!

Then... George Floyd was killed.

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"This time around, the outage coincided with controversy surrounding the ethics of the company’s business practices.

"Francis Haugen, a former Facebook product manager, handed over tens of thousands of internal documents she had amassed while working at the social network to The Wall Street Journal, which began publishing the findings last month.

"The leak revealed many disturbing revelations about the company’s internal conduct, including that Facebook deliberately ignored misinformation and hate speech to boost ad revenue, as well as that company executives were aware that Instagram’s algorithm worsens body image issues among teenagers."

-- "Facebook’s outage reveals its dangerous power over everyone"
The Ticker, the student newspaper of Baruch College.

I think we all tend to ignore the sins of corporations, chalking them up to minor inconveniences, so long as the services we receive satiate whatever fleeting needs we concoct for ourselves.

We've all known that facebook is - for lack of a better term - "evil". People who subscribe to right-leaning ideologies feel "censored", and those more left of center tend to feel like right-wing ideologues aren't punished enough for some of the shit that gets said online.

What they both have in common, is that they're both angry, and that's good for business.

"Haugen stated that some of Facebook's own research found that 'angry content' is more likely to receive engagement, something that content producers and political parties are aware of."

The timing of facebook's outage is suspicious, or as Bailey Sarian would day, "suspish".

"Twitter users skeptical of Facebook suggested the timing, coming one day after a whistleblower appeared on 60 Minutes to discuss her decision to publicly reveal deceptive statements and practices by the social media giant, was suspicious."

-- "Facebook and Instagram are down, so here’s the best of what people are saying about it on Twitter"
The Boston Globe

We are so connected via facebook products that such outages can be devastating, or as Forbes editor, José Caparroso, tweeted, "Latin America lives on whatsapp. I am surprised by so many people underestimating how catastrophic this downfall has been." (link)


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This brings me back to the current day, and my unironic turn to Blogger, itself owned by google, also somewhat evil.

I still love you, and I still want to keep connected with you because you fucking mean something to me. Maybe you mean more to me than I do to you, but if you're reading this, it's because I either sent you the link directly, or I managed to post about this publicly, and maybe you think enough of me to take a look and wade through this shit to get to this point. I know we don't all have the time for texting or returning emails or doing half the things we say we'll do but never get around to finishing because life enacts it's day-to-day; this place provides you with a reminder of how fond I am of you, and allows me the ability to put pen to paper (so to speak) and bend the written word in an environment largely free of memetics mistakenly utilized as intelligence. Entries take time and thought and care like relationships should, like our relationship does and should. Sure, maybe it's impersonal, but that doesn't mean I love you any less...

... it just means we're not beholden to mark zuckerberg for a god. damn. thing.

sigh.

This whole affair has taken a lot out of me, so I'm going to lay it down for now. I promise you something lighter in the coming entries before I get back to being heavy and dark and brooding.

I love you.

-CST.