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Quitting Facebook Properties

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This Friday I will shut down my personal Blue App and Instagram accounts forever. I’m transitioning to a newsletter for low-volume updates. I hope you’ll subscribe: https://stevengharms.com/newsletter. The first newsletter will go out on Friday.

My motivations are simple: Facebook has failed to steward their platform well, they have cheapened the notion of friendship, and they feed the worst of our voyeuristic tendencies. If you’re interested in my reasoning, please see my blog post on the matter.

Donald Knuth, the Stanford computer scientist involved in most of the major research innovations on that campus — including email, wrote:

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.1

Of Facebook properties this same can be said: it has been plenty for one lifetime.

If you’re reading this, I suppose this post is largely therapy for me.

Disinformation and Irresponsibility

Facebook has been a pawn, if not a cynical, opportunistic, and willing participant in the following disinformation campaigns:

  1. “Plandemic:” designed to undermine the leadership of Dr. A. Fauci in his efforts to fight Coronavirus
  2. The unfounded “Stop the Steal” campaign designed to subvert the free and fair election of Joseph R. Biden and usher in the authoritarian regime of strongman Donald Trump
  3. Anti-vaccination campaigns that have put public lives at risk
  4. Anti-mask campaigns that have put public lives at risk
  5. Hostage taking and mayhem campaigns that have put elected officials’ lives at risk

It further appears the vandals and murderers involved in the January 6, 2021 mayhem and riots at the US Capitol were addled by said disinformation, and did some of their organization on the Facebook platform.

Facebook shows no capacity or willingness to police itself. Their engagement algorithms clearly thrive on propelling users to frothing-mouth polar opposition.

Friendship Isn’t Free

Of all the cherished relationships in our lifetimes, “friendship” is one of the dearest. And like all relationships that deliver enormous joy, it requires work. It’s almost funny when you think about it. Can you imagine:

I have a great marriage! I don’t actively ask my wife about her life. I don’t communicate a desire to spend time with her. I ensure that most of the acts of relationship building are also performative!

Facebook peddles a chintzy, watered-down version of friendship, calls it friendship, and promises to make it less work. In exchange, you fork over your web browsing habits and subject yourself to Facebook’s polarizing and purchase-inducing algorithms.

Part of what has made Facebook powerful is this: we should feel guilty for being so selfish and self-involved that we don’t do the work to earn real friendships. We live in fraught, hectic times, but instead of the slow frittering away of minutes on social media, we could pack 30 of them together and write a personal email (or a newsletter :)).

Also, we’ve become so conflict averse that we can’t say: “this low bar for a relationship isn’t enough for me.” I realize quitting Facebook is tantamount to saying that en masse, but I leave open hope that a newsletter will be an open door to someone “coming over.”

To be clear, I’m not above these faults either. I’m indicting myself as well.

Voyeurism

While I’m saying the uncomfortable truths about Facebook, here’s one that I need to explode: we’re a species of voyeurs. We want to have that godlike ability to peek over the divider at the urinal, not get caught, not get shamed, but have that little extra insight.

This can certainly come from a good place (“How is my friend with the toothache doing”), but I think it generally does not. Did my ex-girlfriend stay cute and brilliant? Was that toolbag from high-school still a toolbag? Will my still-cute and still-brilliant ex-girlfriend drop me a line to flatter my ego in some way?

I don’t judge these emotions, they’re part and parcel of the human species. But we have to realize that they are a powerful string that Facebook pulls to keep us part of their stable of eyeballs and clicks that they, in turn, sell to advertisers.

Conclusion

So the take-away I want is that if anyone works to follow me to my list, great. Everyone else, it was an interesting experiment for 12 years. Goodbye and I hope you’ll abandon Facebook, Instagram, the whole thing, soon.