Back from Facebook Freedom

I last reported that I’d flown the Facebook coop and planned on living happily ever after. That was in mid-January of 2020. I’d only put my account on pause at that point. I had every intention of walking away for good, but as a lifelong professional planner I knew better than to burn a bridge or cut a tie or murder the messenger too swiftly.

Let me be clear, it was quite interesting to have shut down that aspect of my online life. Yeah, it became obvious pretty quickly that most of my friends were likely not ever going to send me personal emails or even sign on with this blog to keep track of me, but it was such a joy to not be connected to that piece of virtual reality that has tunneled into our lives in a more obscene and insidious way than SARS-COV2 has. If you’d like to argue with me about that, first read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. If you are worried about tackling the full 700 page tome, you can check out a summary opinion piece by Zuboff in the New York Times from January 24 titled, “You are Now Remotely Controlled.”

I plan on posting something more on Zuboff’s work soon, however, what I mostly wanted to do here today was admit to returning to Facebook about a month ago. The reasons should be obvious. We’re all in lockdown. I’ve always understood the importance of social media, that it empowers us to stay connected with all sorts of people and allows each of us to set up our own networks of people who have an interest in us. I wanted to post stuff I thought my friends and family would be interested in. I wanted to get posts from all the people I know and love out there in the world. It’s hard to even stay in contact with all the people I’m close to in my neighborhood here in Philly. And it’s vital to be in touch with my brother John in Las Vegas, my birth families in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana (and Michigan…), my sister and her family in Australia, and all my friends from all the other lives I’ve lived in Missouri and Oregon, plus the whole baseball family I have from 25 years as a coach, travel team parent, and father of a 10+ year pro.

So, yes, you can find me again on Facebook. And I can find you. It was glorious to be escaped there for about two months. When this Covid-19 fades away, I’ll be signing off again. I will likely suspend my account again regardless of this fucking virus in October because I don’t want to be anywhere near Facebook during the heat of the 2020 election. You should think about that too. Facebook is not — I repeat, NOT — a simple little communication tool that you control. They own your subconscious in many weird and funky ways. And they live in your body and are part of your dreams every night. They’re getting richer than hell doing that. And the most despicable thing about them is that they really don’t have to work very hard to gain all that influence over you. Why is that? Because you let them and you don’t want them to have to work hard and you don’t really care if you’re getting something that’s high quality or not.

‘Nuff said. In other news, we were mildly sick here at our place at the beginning of April. It’s likely we got a touch of Covid-19 but we won’t know until we can get tested (sometime in 2021?). Best thing about all this Pause Time is NOT watching videos, it’s listening to music. There’s so much amazing indie work out there. This week I’m focused on GoGo Penguin, Mammal Hands, Kokoroko, Matthew Halsall, and our good friend Liz Fullerton’s latest incarnation, Loma Suyo. Listen to the album, “Oriana,” at Band Camp and think about buying it. You don’t hear such brilliance in very many places these days.