Every Man Is An Anachronism By Tomorrow's Standards

In her brilliant, insightful, terrifying, loathsome piece on the "Say Everything" generation, Emily Nussbaum explores the means and ends of the kids' penchant for internet self-exposure. She argues that my peers and I see LiveJournal, MySpace, etc, etc, as skin-thickeneing, interactive archives of our adolescence.

I bandied about vaguely similar arguments in my response to the Facebook Feed a few months ago (though, because I did so on a blog and as a registered facebook user, my invectives were gleefully hypocritical). Nussbaum shouldn't fret; she joins a long and distinguished list of scientists, philosophers, poets and critics who have blatantly plagiarized my work. Here is just a small sampling of the political and social trends and phenomena about which I was ahead of the curve:

-The Wire
-Scientology
-The fact that Dane Cook sucks
-Poker
-The fact that Dane Cook sucks at Poker
-Enthusiasm over Barack Obama
-Dissapointment over Barack Obama's
-The dire consequences of living the life designed for you by your handlers, sans even the most primitive self-awareness.
-To wit: Britney Spears
-Globalization
-Puggles
-Thai food
-Parker Lewis Can't Lose
-blogs
-lists
-the backlash against string theory
-the second, third, and eighth backlashes against Family Guy
-anal is the new vaginal
-Pixies reunion
-Colbert outdoing Stewart
-Meth
-the death of irony
-the death of work
-the death of privacy
-the death of Anna Nicole Smith
-the four-minute mile
-facebook girls who are obviously fine with you masturbating to their pictures
-bourbon is the new scotch
-the concept of a "Wiki"
-the concept of a "Wookiee"
-the concept of a Wookiee via the concept of a Wiki
-using the Snoop Dogg "izzle" patois in casual conversation
-this halloween costume (seriously)
-The coming apocalypse

Facebook's Folly

Warning: Among our small but sophisticated readership there will no doubt be some for whom this post is just so much nonsense. Perhaps these people have the best of it.

What has it been--all of 72 hours since Facebook.com introduced its new Orwell-meets-People Magazine "feed" format? And how long will it be before it's gone, or at least swept under some e-rug? I give it weeks, or less. In a delicious example of the twisted, ultra-reflexive physics of virtual space, the most prominent news(?) items on my facebook feed--and I supppose on many others'--are all about how much the feed sucks. Just a few examples of Facebook groups started or joined by "friends" of mine in the past 48 hours:

FACEBOOK FEED SUCKS
BRING THE OLD FACEBOOK BACK
FACEBOOK MASS EXODUS
STUDENTS AGAINST FACEBOOK NEWS FEED
THE NEW FACEBOOK LOOKS LIKE IT WAS DESIGNED BY A HYPERACTIVE FIVE-YEAR-OLD

I'm especially fond of this last one, created very early on by my buddy Neil and apropos of precisely nothing.

In any event, the lessons here are as many and varied as they are trivial and trite. For one thing, this display of hyperirony goes to the dubiousity and double-edgedness of the "democratizing of information" brought on by the internet and blogosphere revolutions. It used to be that things like laziness, lack of ambition, poverty, and death-squads kept the mouth-breathing masses from opining at the top of their lungs about whatever was grinding their gears on a given day. But the price of opening your mouth has gone down drastically in terms of dollars, elbow grease, and blood. And even this band of anonymous troglodytes that calls itself the American public can point and click.

Behold the era of the Blog Montaigne, the Message Board Martin Luther and the Forum Oscar Wilde. But 92% of it is still tripe, and there is no democracy of taste.

The other thing--and here I borrow again from Chuck Klosterman's stuff on Snakes on a Plane--is that people don't know what they've got til they've got way too fucking much of it. The secret demographic of Facebook, MySpace and their ilk has always been the Peeping Tom, the voyeur, the stalker in all of us. We worshipped the deus ex machina that told us where our exes had last logged-on; we relished in secret the infidelities implied by Joe's girlfriend's claim to be "single" and interested in "anything [she] can get", and we imposed ourselves upon the ever-abiding trust of 19-year old party girls as we scrolled through their photo albums. All of this under a greasy skin of anonymity, safe from reproach in our dormroom lairs.

Let's get down to brass tacks: Facebook and MySpace are gloryholes for the young bourgeoisie.

always have been, always will be. All the feed amounts to is a sign reading "PLACE GENITALS HERE". It reveals to you nothing that you wouldn't have found out yourself on a lonely enough night. But the danger of gonzo-marketing to people's basest desires is that you remind them just how base those desires are.

Mason Malmuth, a guy who was taking down Hold Em pots when your Friday night game was "Shit in the Diaper", is on to much the same thing when he talks about winning at tables full of terrible players. The worse thing you can do, Malmuth says, is put on too many plays. As long as it seems like you're all just having a little fun with your paycheck, your straightforward, correct play will be rewarded. But start getting cute, check-raising, over-punishing bluffs, pushing your position too hard, and you'll actually bully your "amiable gambler" opponents into playing correctly. You'll remind them that this is a poker game, and that your objective is to take their money, and the result will be that you get less of it. Mutatis Mutandis for the Facebook feed. All it has done is bully its perverted base into virtue.

Oh, and forget the fact that I write these words on these topics using the software of the biggest blogging host in the world--bask in the sheer postmodernity of it, be comforted by the fact that string theory does indeed predict this result, and rest assured that present company is excluded.


Feedback: What has been your favorite Facebook Feed so far? I would have to say that mine is "J.D. Removed Star Trek: TNG from his Favorite TV Shows" (name repressed to protect the innocent)

"And so we beat on, boats against the current, Facebooking back ceaselessly into the past..."

Last nite I was doing very little, sitting around College in a friend's room to be exact, when the conversation turned somehow to early crushes. Being a recovering Romantic, and still not quite impervious to the occasional bout of sentimentality, I got to thinking of Becky C. I told the aforementioned friend that she had been my first real crush - in those halcyon days between puberty and adolescence when none of us knew what the hell was going on. She was a dark-haired, clever girl of ten with a mouth full of surgical steel when I met her in Dr. Sanek's 5th grade logic class (you heard all that right).

Becky C. - I hadn't thought about her in years. Becky C. who kinda-sorta had the beginnings of a body; Becky C. who got better grades than me in gym; Becky C. who rode the short bus with me all the way home; Becky C. who no doubt didn't even remember me; Becky C. who set the standard for heartbreak for five-plus years. Oh she liked me well enough, but her heart was somewhere else; Josh was his name I think. And, but for a few false starts, I never stood a chance. Regardless, I moved away half way through that year; another school, another town, another state. But it's safe to say that Becky C. from Packanack Lake, New Jersey followed me all the way to Winter Haven, Florida, where she lived for a while under-developed subconscious, until she faded and was replaced by a dozen other silly, ultimately unrequited infatuations.

But my friend had got me thinking.

'Dan', he said. 'You know what you should do?'

'What's that?' I said.

'Facebook her.'

Facebook her. Facebook her. What a thing to say. What an idea. There was an illustrated catalogue of my youth, a virtual grade school reunion, a searchable database of my fucking past just a point and a click away. With just a tinge of (pathetic as it is) nervousness and excitement, I searched for her in the high school I figured she went to; nothing. I searched for her in the high school I didn't figure she went to; no dice. I tried a different spelling of her name, first in one, then in the other.

A single hit popped up, and in the split second it took the page to load I wondered what had happened to her in those years between 10 and 20 when we sweat and bleed out the last of our awkwadness. Then I saw the photo, of a black-haired clever girl of 21 who went to an East Coast Ivy.

Becky C.

"She's fucking hot!" quoth my friend.

"She is fucking hot." I said.

I don't know what I thought, really. Vindicated? That was stupid, wasn't it? Surprised, no doubt. But something else, like someone had punched me in the stomach. Not, as they say, "like I had seen a ghost"; more like I had seen a character I had written in a story, a picture I had drawn, an imaginary friend.

I had the Oracle at Facebook bring up the entire class of 2002 from my would-be high school.

And there was Holly. They told us we should get married in kindergarten, didn't they Holly? Didn't they tell us the two fat kids should get married?

And there was Tyler. Tyler you never quite played the same games as us, did you?

And there was Mike. Mike, we were best friends in third and fourth grade, but do you remember how we fought that day at recess, kicking and punching, hating each other, and how we cried after?

But there also was Holly at a state school, bleach-blonde and bare-belly. You lost so much weight Holly - I'm happy for you.

And there was Tyler at private school, telling me with his furrowed brow and million-mile gaze that he still doesn't quite play the same games we do.

And there was Mike at Rutgers, shirtless, backwards Scarlet Knights cap, taking a long pull off what looked to be a bottle of Southern Comfort.

It was...peculiar. But its not quite right to say, as people often do, that I expected them never to change. The idea of change hardly entered the equation - they were simply my friends - that is, in an important sense, they belonged to me. That they might change was inconceivable, because for me- and perhaps this is morbid - none of them survived my moving away except as memories.

In a cleaner, better world, maybe that's how it would always be. Forever separated by the contingencies of (in my case) a mother's paycheck, too silent and too distant for too long to seriously consider re-establishing contact, and buried from memory by the layers of intervening years - homerooms, fights, parties, handjobs, cafeteria tables, car accidents, whiffle ball games, not to mention diets and million-mile gazes and bottles of Southern Comfort. Maybe that's how it should be. That way I might have kept on remembering to forget Mike and Holly and Tyler and Becky C, instead of staring at an LCD screen, forgetting to remember them.

An Oxford acquaintance once remarked [on a Facebook wall, no less] that the English students, just like the Americans, would "become bored with Facebook in 5....4....3....2...."

But it's already too late, isn't it? You can't click "Home" again.