Cyber Menace

In shitty apartments all over the world, one thing is law: you get the internet and you let your friends use it( unless you are very suspicious of them; in which case, why are you hanging out with them?). You don't even need a public terminal (say, for instance, a hilarious, very poignant, and svelte circa 1998 laptop you bought from an IT guy for a bag of weed) because almost everyone carries with them an internet capable phone now. So there's no question at all that there's some kind of cyber menace... and, check this out: it has already claimed lives!

It just makes sense that in a society so ill that it sometimes creates psychiatric disorders at almost the same rate as it creates landmark celebrities, there would be a cyber element. The internet is everywhere and still spreading. Some people can't look away from it or live without it. Being without it is missing out, but being part of it is not always what you want. Some, the wild or wise, might even call the contemporary situation one involving significant levels of Cyber Menace.

"This ain't your granddad's Neuromancer, kid."

Sure, it's easy to pish posh the point away by citing the unreal possibilities of the incipient cyber-era, which is so different from even what Nostradamus saw it was (due to relativistic drift and/or other variables) that contempory people are still trying to say what the hell is going on with no recognizable degree of accuracy. It's all... you know... dust in the wind kind of shit. Typos of the blogosphere business.

The internet business: the potential is awesome but the reality is also very convincing in another direction than what is classically termed hopeful. I don't really need to cite anything, I feel. Pretty much everybody has or has heard a fantastically gut-wrenching and uncomfortable internet story by this point. Facebook is turning some people into wrecks and offering hilarious insights into human nature to others. It's a fact of life, even: you play with the internet and you get burned. You get played. Or you get an okay laugh or chuckle while you shake your head. #SMGDH with a side of #LOL, please, and don't overdo it.

People's day-to-day living and actual worlds are all affected by the digital world. Well, not mine, but then again I'm a blogger and nobody cares, so I can actually sit down and look and see people get affected by the internet media they consume. It's a weird era, and unfortunately it's not always fun YouTube videos weird. I find it all very strange and I can feel its draw as much as the next human. Still, everybody should have to admit: a reality check is in order.

Beyond the hype, the laughter, the outrage, the trolling, the well animated distractions, and the jargon lie actual problems. Let's see what the impossible potential of the Cyber Menace can do about that, before we consider it a friendly necessity.

How Long Till Facebook Is Irrelevant: The Answer May Surprise You

Facebook's story is pretty fun to tell. Before 2006 (or somewhere around there) you couldn't sign up for Facebook without a university email address. That ended. Then the media caught on, a while later the floodgates opened, and anyone was let in at a cost to exclusivity which might have kept the social media service relevant into 2010. However, things happened as they did, because the Kings of Facebook or whatever needed a way to turn a relatively hyped, useless, hackneyed service into a dividend-paying money-printing machine. That's why your little brother, your dad, and your aunt are all Facebook Friends with you.

Anyways, people used to freely put up pictures of themselves doing drugs, copulating, as well as excreting on and variously vandalizing private property, because nobody on the service was square enough to be A) an uncool employer or B) a rat fink. Nudity was the only thing out of bounds, but nobody needed the internet for that. It was the wild west, populated by stupid university students. That phase didn't last long, but it was truly a hopeful one. It's hard to understand at this point in time because nobody does it anymore. Even Facebook's dumbest, least-University-educated users manage to post mostly PG-Employment level material. It was generally the exhibitionists and show-offs who couldn't keep their borderline activities in private memory, which is fine, because they're the same people for whom nothing is ever good enough.

Then, with the advent of a growing user base, employers took full advantage of lax privacy settings to investigate their employees and, if the optics were wrong, fire them. Facebook made some noises about privacy settings (which advertisers, PRISM et al. overrule anyway) and most people realized that, with privacy settings set properly, and a non-compromising profile picture, they wouldn't be able to get bagged. Even more people realized that, as always, nobody cares and nobody needs to know anything, and why they were on Facebook is anyone's guess. Many are still there. With employers and other nosy squares using Facebook to essentially spy on people the end had begun, and the important phase had ended.

With children, parents, nosy bosses, moralists, the uneducated, and all manner of riff-raff inhabiting Facebook, the popularity exploded and it became the thing everyone knew about (including worthless 'social media experts' on TV). It was like Twitter, briefly, but maybe even hotter. By now, nearly every Western person between the ages of 20 and 35 has a majority of friends and contacts on Facebook, with 'friends' numbering far in excess of 150. Of course, the great upsurge in popularity also meant increased scrutiny. Many people thought it was incredibly low of employers to spy on and then fire or punish employees because they were pictured drinking a beer. I agree completely. If you want to spy on an employee, check their Linked In account, because Linked In is designed for squares with no concept of the separation of life and work.

Most of the best criticism of Facebook revolved around its user base and effect on users. If you have an account, you already know. People broadcast their dimwitted political stances, their gullibility, pictures of food, and way too much information. Users also tend to only upload content that reflects positively on them and their lifestyle, making Facebook an echo chamber and also a bizarre cycle of envy and envy-prompting. Certain people, putting too much stock in their internet friendship machine, can see the smiling photographs, the tans, the significant others and the happiness of others and become incredibly lonely, sad, isolated, and even more deluded. So it can be said that the service caters first and foremost not to narcissists, but to the self-centered and potentially to the sociopath as well. In essence it can be claimed that Facebook is unhealthy, perhaps moreso than the internet.

Hell, I have not even made mention of the inherent privacy problems which provided privacy options do not solve. In essence, by ever existing on Facebook you are already compromised and every detail you edit or add thereafter goes into the vortex. The police can see everything you've ever said without your knowledge. So can any government, entity, or corporation with the stature or power to make Facebook cooperate. Not to mention anyone with a certain level of know-how can probably have that stuff you willingly shared about yourself. The craziest part is how the service has tapped into the (unconscious) human desire to share and self-promote... the disburdening is done willingly so it's not even entrapment. It's just exploitation. The old crusty man in my mind wants to say it's the fault of the user for being appallingly stupid, but the angry young man wants to blame Facebook, Inc. for just about every misery and betrayal they have wrought.

'Facebook isn't an echo chamber, and echo chamber is a nebulous term used by out-of-date critics to describe viral and meme-based behaviour', you say. I disagree, and urge you to shut up and stop being an apologist: Facebook often functions as an echo chamber devoid of consciousness or critical thought. For every stupid food picture, statement of outrage, birthday wish, and TMI infodump, there are a dozen re-shared memes, propaganda, or internet links. It's an echo chamber that shows you just what your acquaintances are wasting their time with, and invites you to also read top tens, read unsourced and biased articles, look for cute pics, and post shallow, heart-on-sleeve political and social rhetoric. Yeah, that shit's pretty awful, and in this writer's humble opinion, far worse than the self-promotion and the mindless sharing of private moments with no real purpose.

Facebook is already irrelevant: savvy people know this, hip people know this, even tweens know this. I suspect that its last year of relevance was 2010. At this point users see it as either 'Facebook!' or 'depressing friend directory', and increasingly, not even the gullible youth are excited about Facebook anymore. Some even use Twitter to engage in such discussions as #noneofmyfriendsonfacebook and to broadcast that they're getting out of the Facebook game. With the userbase growing older, lamer, and reposting more and more shitty content from the internet, and generally doing nothing important, it is no surprise that hardly anyone considers an account a meaningful or exciting thing, except for people who are promoting themselves, their business, or their art. In the end Facebook will only be useful for them, but its complete irrelevance means that there will be no further scandal because the user base is complacent and the service fulfills its duty quite well.

With a stable share of users and corporate status, it is unlikely that Facebook will disappear in less than five years. Ff a better service steals its users it may dwindle, but in Web 2.0 and beyond, computer/internet-literate users are too insignificant a group. The odds of a better service emerging are also low, since Facebook is part of the establishment and can likely take infringing parties to court and bankrupt them even with frivolous litigation. Facebook itself isn't novel enough anymore to create 'addicts' in the 2006-era sense: remaining power users are generally students, stay-at-home-parents, or retirees. With every baby picture, family portrait, and unnecessary political diatribe, the service makes itself less remarkable and more profitable... with every deleted user account, Facebook continues to hold private data in digital escrow, as if preparing for a blackmail war... with every day, as it fades into irrelevance far away from the beating heart of the internet, Facebook becomes more of a fact of the internet, here to stay and inflict social suffering on untold thousands.

Notes on 'The Facebook Revolution'

Momentous undertakings continue to occur all around the Mediterranean coast and beyond, and for once it is the morally bankrupt, not the fiscally bankrupt (though the two are often simultaneously at fault - especially among autocratic regimes) that are being protested. Sure, Greece is still serious, but the real action is on the north coast of Africa.

There's lots of perspectives, and the media, as usual, is ignoring all of them in favor of 'reporting' and 'geopolitical daydreaming' and other nonsense. The fact that the Egyptian revolution was singled out and named the 'Facebook Revolution' is a particularly distasteful piece of sloganeering. Let us, this once, be honest: autocracies were toppled before Facebook. Facebook did not produce this revolution, Egyptians did. We do not need to make a mountain out of the fact that these people employed Facebook for the first few days of protests and we have to admit that they would have organized themselves without it, as they did after their internet was killed. Mark Zuckerberg has paid for enough product placements, and his property is neither particularly novel nor all-powerful - the media and every other out-of-touch organization are just romancing social media because it is the new, somewhat powerful, young, hot, and above all confused apparatchik on Journalism Blvd. Plus, Facebook is a western thing that western viewers are comfortable with, so that helps make this uprising half a world away more personable.

Oh you've no doubt seen my fallacy by now: the media sloganeers more than it reports these days. On some levels this is true, but attacking the media for sensationalism is an old approach that never really made an impact. However, that said, the media failed to report the Egyptian revolution properly, and continues to fail with other revolutions. From erroneous remarks that Egypt is part of the Middle East (it is part of North Africa, and people are displaying less geographical consciousness now that Libya is taking off) or even the Fox News map which swapped Egypt into its own geographical narrative, to lazy statements that these uprisings are an Arab thing (ever done ethnographic research into north Africa, or the history of Araby?).

Amid all this exciting happenstance, I am in North America and every day there is just news that uprisings are happening, that regimes are in danger, and what this might mean for America or the rest of the world. These kinds of stories do not help me understand what is happening, why it is happening, or who it is happening to. I already knew about Mohammar Ghaddafi and the million ways his name can be spelled. I have heard enough of Hosni Mubarak, and I realize from his constant about-face maneuvering that he is reluctant to give up the throne. What about the relatives of a dead protester? What are they saying? Why the panicky and slightly hostile talk about the Muslim Brotherhood?

But the death knell of informative, non-sensationalistic reporting came when Anderson Cooper got assaulted. I don't even know the details of this story, but he got attacked or beat up. Not to be outdone, another story surfaced about Lara Logan being sexually harrassed and beaten, and then the circus opened its dumb mouth and the focus shifted from 50/50 (uprising reporting/western news) to all the way western perspective. In a country where women and girls are harrassed, beaten and probably raped at a rate of at least one a month in every town, an invasive species of news reporter is groped, pushed, pulled, slapped into the spotlight. That's not exceptionalism, is it? Now, wait, I have to be outraged? About sexism? Again? In Egypt? Egypt? Aren't there other Egyptian things to learn about? to be outraged about?

People are dying, revolting, and rising up – in the same country, one individual faces the sort of sexism/oppression that happens in elevators and street corners in New York City (aka The Capitol of the West) every other day, and suddenly there is no other story but to shame a repressed society that is trying to undo at least one kind of repression. Bloated reactionary media response – and you can compare the 'mid-east reporting' with reports about, say, the New Zealand earthquake. There are some notable differences.

Thanks a million for the lack of information... I guess I'll have to see what RussiaToday or Al-Jezeera English have to say on the matter, while the media circus strokes its perspective, for all to see, on the television. For all I know, these uprisings are about the price of halal beef.