Facebook: A Seneca Collapse Ahead?
Why I'm Gradually Quitting the Beast
An image of Mark Zuckerberg’s swimming pool
When it is too much, it is too much. There is a moment when you reach this conclusion, and I reached it. Facebook is a monster.
Not just a piece of clunky, clumsy, and kludgy software; no, positively evil. It was created to harass, enrage, bother, disturb, and mistreat you, continuously controlled and harassed by a band of incompetent idiots called “fact checkers” and by an AI system that controls what you post, and that’s like an elderly nanny affected by a late-stage Alzheimer’s disease. And let me say nothing about their “Metaverse” idea. People who can botch ideas so grandly are truly capable of anything.
The straw that broke the brontosaur’s back was the story of the male/female Algerian boxer at the Paris Olympics. You must have heard about him/her unless you have been living in a cave with the other Neanderthals; yes, the one who punched down a female boxer and was accused of being a male in disguise. I found this story especially uninteresting, but what drove me over the edge about it was how many people felt it was a good use of their time (and mine) to express their opinions on the matter in lengthy posts that they posted on FB. And I don’t mean just trolls or unknown people. Several of those posts came from people I knew and whom I esteemed. People to whom you might look for advice when speaking as experts in their field.
There is a big problem, here. You know that it is easy to train a dog to fetch balls. It is an activity that dogs seem to enjoy, and that may come naturally to them. The problem is that it is rare to see a dog throwing the ball and a human fetching it.
Facebook and other evil social platforms play with you as if you were a dog. They throw balls at you all the time, expecting you to run after them—and most of us do. It is the phenomenon Tessa Lena calls “Triggeroo.” Do visit her substack site; it explains certain things very clearly. It is done all the time with the specific purpose of distracting you. It works.
In many respects, it is not bad to be a dog; petted, fed, sheltered, and taken care of. But not all animals fetch balls. Maybe some of us feel better as alligators, aardvarks, or armadillos; I don’t know.
But I took a decision: I am quitting.
To be sure, I am not abruptly quitting. Let’s say that I am gradually disengaging. I still have a few things I like to do on FB (*), but I did the following:
I removed the FB app from my cell phone. I can still access it via browser, but it takes some time and I will do that only from my desktop PC. I saw that it makes a big difference.
I will be using the “StayFocused” extension on Chrome that limits the time one can access a specific site. I still have to figure out how exactly it works, but it seems to do its job.
I removed some groups that I created/followed on FB, which were mostly a waste of time.
I erased my Instagram account. It is totally useless, and anyway, it is evil “meta” stuff.
I am going to keep following other platforms that are not as blatantly intrusive as Facebook, such as Telegram and LinkedIn. In any case, the best way to extract reliable information from the Web is to use a feed reader. It's too bad so few people use that.
Of course, I am sure that Mr. Zuckerberg will not lose his sleep because I quit his platform, but if many people do the same, then there may be effects. Did you know that Facebook had a predecessor? Yes, it was called “Friendster,” very similar. But Friendster collapsed in 2009-2010, as you can see here, a figure from my book “The Seneca Effect”
Friendster collapsed because users were unsatisfied with how the platform was run. Something similar could happen to Facebook, and it would be very well deserved. It will happen if many people do what I am doing. And it may well be happening: look at these data:
Facebook is exactly where Friendster was in 2009; at the cusp that precedes the Seneca cliff. And ruin may be rapid afterward. Maybe, one day, we could learn how not to be so easily manipulated by the MSM.
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(*) I may still use FB this fall to restart promoting my book “The Future of Transportation,” even though, so far, the results have been dismaying. My impression is that Facebook users are unable to read texts longer than a few sentences containing no insults. But, who knows?
Gradually quitting while planning to reuse does not seem like a good road to recovery from an addiction, if an addiction is what it is. I always thought the bulk of Facebook users shared family photos with grandma, auntie and uncle and random pedophiles. What will those users do, if the empire collapses? I might still have an account. Every so often you might get an extra chance at winning a motherboard or CPU cooler or something for liking a manufacturer of such things on Facebook. Best of luck as you wean yourself from the Beast.
I think Facebook is stupid. I was on it briefly but canceled my account and never missed it. Now that there is Substack there is no need for Facebook anyway. I think Facebook is trump people. I agree with the comment that going off and on is not a solution for you. You are a substantive writer and philosopher and thinker and professor. I recommend that you trust your gut and get the hell off!!
My 2 millennial sons and 2 Gen z granddaughters (ages 13 and 15) have taught me instagram which we are all on because we are activists against the Gaza genocide. I do like instagram. I follow Bisan in Gaza and watch Al Jazeera to know what’s going on.