Off the Grid

'It's now very common to hear people say, "I'm rather offended by that", as if that gives them certain rights. It's no more than a whine. It has no meaning, it has no purpose, it has no reason to be respected as a phrase. "I'm offended by that." Well, so fucking what?' —Stephen Fry

At my school (in the mid-'90s) it was the same thing, but with whiteboards. You'd affix a cheap little whiteboard and non-permanent marker to your door, and people who came by would leave you messages. Then at day's end you'd come back, read the messages, and wipe the board clean for tomorrow.

It strikes me now how much those little whiteboards prefigured social media. Some people used them to leave status updates, like we do today on Facebook -- you'd write how you were doing today or where you were going to be later at the top of your board. And others (like me) used them like Twitter, as a place to leave little jokes for others to come by and read.

I feel I'm definetly older than most of you. I've had about three long term best friends, excluding romantic relationships. Ride, or die friends. One friend is on FB, but not there much.

The main reason I joined FB is I thought I was missing out on meeting new people.

I used my real identity on FB for a year. I still wore sunglasses, because I didn't think anyone had a right to see your entire face. Yes--I've got friend requests. I look up that person, and boom--they have 500 friends. Why do they want another one?

I even had the cutest Amish girl want to be friends of FB. She had 3000 friends. She was married. What's the point?

I don't think I had one person FB friend request that didn't seem to have a selfish agenda? To be fair, I really didn't reach out to people I once really liked. We seemed to go in just different directions.

I want to like FB, but I just find the site depressing. The most interesting people, I once knew well, are now just posing for pictures, crafting their comments to get their seemingly so fragile egos the "Likes", and seem to be using FB as some sort of way to control how society views them?

Most would be better off just telling the truth, but they can't. Why? Because the better part of the world will be able to see your vulnerabilities, and those bad days that make you human, will never be able to be erased. A few mistakes, and you are that person that will be judged by the rest? And the rest, makes snap judgements, and most will likely remember you by that one bad day.

So, it you have any sence of self preservation, you will just post those fishmouth pictures, and be nauseating optimistic.

Why--you can't want to be called out as a Troll, or Debbie Downer, or have a negative view on anything the sheep haven't given disscused in committee beforehand.

So, what do we have? We have FB. A site that forces people to be superficial, and fake.

Aging, if I was younger, I think my time on FB would have less nauseating? Maybe?

People promote these sites as the end all. How can you meet anyone if they never show the real person behind the keyboard?

I do like HN for obvious reasons. My only complaint is they should pay moderators. Why--it might weed out the moderators that use the site as a power trip?

you can of course use it as much as you want -- but I thing the broader point of the author holds: for a generation that is supposed to be rebellious, there is a surprising amount of conformism in accepting these tools as something that need to be used all the time.

"Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland. You can have the Pirate Ride or the Lincoln Simulacrum or Mr. Toad's Wild Ride—you can have all of them, but none is true." - PKD

edit: this is from http://deoxy.org/pkd_how2build.htm