The Moral Equivalent of Licking a Stripper Pole
Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2025 2:47 am
John Birmingham has always been a decent read since he burst onto the scene with 'He Died With A Falafel In His Hand', a story of sharehousing in the 80s. Here he is mounting a question for those of us who still do Facebook...
https://aliensideboob.substack.com/p/th ... tent=share
I’m just a writer guy, standing in front of you, a reader person, my fist clenched and hovering over the big red delete button on my Facebook account, asking you to help me out here.
Should I punch that mofo?
Welcome to 2025, the worst of all possible timelines.
I don't remember why I set up a Facebook account, and I really don't know why I hang onto it, but a year after quitting the dumpster fire formally known as Twitter, I find myself deletion-curious about this Orwellian meat-grinder of a platform—part high school reunion, part pyramid scheme, part digital potato famine—where rabid algorithms feast on our tiny, primitive lizard brains.
Is staying on Facebook the moral equivalent of licking a stripper pole for emotional validation, or is it more like zip-tieing myself to a dying but still dangerous horror clown offering sadness balloons from his spidey hole away down in the storm drain of our fast collapsing culture?
You can see I have a few issues to work through.
There are so many reasons for nuking my account, and only two that I can think of for not doing so. Every eyeball twitch summons a digital goblin army wielding taser spears of targeted ads. Every ill-advised visit feels like stepping into a derelict carnival straight out of a Stephen King short, built atop the nest of a giant emotional parasite that lures us to our doom with a sticky secretion of curated irritations, and all for the low, low price of your eternal soul.
On the other hand, I have about a dozen friends and a couple of family members there who think of Facebook as the Internet. Zuck’s dark satanic engagement mill is the only place I can routinely engage with them all.
And yet…
And yet…
That's just bullshit, isn't it? What's stopping me from setting up a Slack channel or a simple chat on a message app? If I'm being honest, it's the fear that they simply wouldn't turn up. The initial promise of Facebook was connection. Actually, the initial promise of Facebook was rating the hotness of female students at Harvard, but it evolved—or maybe just disguised itself as this grand promise of connection. The town square of the digital age, where everyone would show up and exchange thinky discourse, cat videos, and really, truly care about your kid’s jujitsu trophy.
Now it’s more like a crumbling Russian strip mall where half the stores are boarded up, and the survivors are selling off-brand fleshlights and discount tattoo removal while I shuffle through the ruins, hoping to bump into someone who remembers my name.
The truth is—and this is tough to admit— I didn’t set up that Slack channel because I already knew they wouldn’t come. The parasite has them.
The other more compelling reason to hang onto the account is to lock it up and secure it from scammers. I have thousands of “friends” on Facebook, whereby “friends” I mean a handful of still-living classmates, a couple of exes to remind me that I was stupid once and young, an army of bots peddling crypto schemes, and 4000 semi-sentient barnacles I gathered to myself during a prolonged psychotic break in which I thought to fill the howling void in my soul with the pixelated fistbumps of complete randos posting cryptic statuses like, ‘Some people should just keep their mouths shut… you know who you are
.’
That’s on my personal account.
I do have a book page, visited by a couple of hundred quietly despairing readers (I almost never post there), and it’s that page that gives me pause.
As soon as I delete it, I lose control over… well, myself, really. Anybody could set up a new account in my name using any number of images of me freely available across the web? They could generate a bunch of AI slop, stick it into an e-book format and start selling it to people for whose readership and support I am genuinely grateful.
That would suck sweaty dog balls.
The idea of some grifting shithead pasting my face onto a fake profile and hawking robot-written e-books to people who’ve supported me through thick and thin makes my eyeballs bleed with impacted rage.
And yet, the biggest grifting shithead of all brings me to this.
You’ve probably seen Zuckerberg’s preemptive buckle to Tangerine Hitler this week, racing to turn Facebook into a vast seething chunderdome of lies, scams, and performative cruelty—a deranged libertarian flea market of ideas, teeming with deepfakes, rage farming, and the latest Russian agitprop being sold out of the trunk of a car with no license plates.
Wait, no, actually, that’s pretty much where we are already.
So, I dunno. Like that, but much, much worse.
The Zuck knows he’s gonna lose some skin over this.
https://aliensideboob.substack.com/p/th ... tent=share
I’m just a writer guy, standing in front of you, a reader person, my fist clenched and hovering over the big red delete button on my Facebook account, asking you to help me out here.
Should I punch that mofo?
Welcome to 2025, the worst of all possible timelines.
I don't remember why I set up a Facebook account, and I really don't know why I hang onto it, but a year after quitting the dumpster fire formally known as Twitter, I find myself deletion-curious about this Orwellian meat-grinder of a platform—part high school reunion, part pyramid scheme, part digital potato famine—where rabid algorithms feast on our tiny, primitive lizard brains.
Is staying on Facebook the moral equivalent of licking a stripper pole for emotional validation, or is it more like zip-tieing myself to a dying but still dangerous horror clown offering sadness balloons from his spidey hole away down in the storm drain of our fast collapsing culture?
You can see I have a few issues to work through.
There are so many reasons for nuking my account, and only two that I can think of for not doing so. Every eyeball twitch summons a digital goblin army wielding taser spears of targeted ads. Every ill-advised visit feels like stepping into a derelict carnival straight out of a Stephen King short, built atop the nest of a giant emotional parasite that lures us to our doom with a sticky secretion of curated irritations, and all for the low, low price of your eternal soul.
On the other hand, I have about a dozen friends and a couple of family members there who think of Facebook as the Internet. Zuck’s dark satanic engagement mill is the only place I can routinely engage with them all.
And yet…
And yet…
That's just bullshit, isn't it? What's stopping me from setting up a Slack channel or a simple chat on a message app? If I'm being honest, it's the fear that they simply wouldn't turn up. The initial promise of Facebook was connection. Actually, the initial promise of Facebook was rating the hotness of female students at Harvard, but it evolved—or maybe just disguised itself as this grand promise of connection. The town square of the digital age, where everyone would show up and exchange thinky discourse, cat videos, and really, truly care about your kid’s jujitsu trophy.
Now it’s more like a crumbling Russian strip mall where half the stores are boarded up, and the survivors are selling off-brand fleshlights and discount tattoo removal while I shuffle through the ruins, hoping to bump into someone who remembers my name.
The truth is—and this is tough to admit— I didn’t set up that Slack channel because I already knew they wouldn’t come. The parasite has them.
The other more compelling reason to hang onto the account is to lock it up and secure it from scammers. I have thousands of “friends” on Facebook, whereby “friends” I mean a handful of still-living classmates, a couple of exes to remind me that I was stupid once and young, an army of bots peddling crypto schemes, and 4000 semi-sentient barnacles I gathered to myself during a prolonged psychotic break in which I thought to fill the howling void in my soul with the pixelated fistbumps of complete randos posting cryptic statuses like, ‘Some people should just keep their mouths shut… you know who you are
.’That’s on my personal account.
I do have a book page, visited by a couple of hundred quietly despairing readers (I almost never post there), and it’s that page that gives me pause.
As soon as I delete it, I lose control over… well, myself, really. Anybody could set up a new account in my name using any number of images of me freely available across the web? They could generate a bunch of AI slop, stick it into an e-book format and start selling it to people for whose readership and support I am genuinely grateful.
That would suck sweaty dog balls.
The idea of some grifting shithead pasting my face onto a fake profile and hawking robot-written e-books to people who’ve supported me through thick and thin makes my eyeballs bleed with impacted rage.
And yet, the biggest grifting shithead of all brings me to this.
You’ve probably seen Zuckerberg’s preemptive buckle to Tangerine Hitler this week, racing to turn Facebook into a vast seething chunderdome of lies, scams, and performative cruelty—a deranged libertarian flea market of ideas, teeming with deepfakes, rage farming, and the latest Russian agitprop being sold out of the trunk of a car with no license plates.
Wait, no, actually, that’s pretty much where we are already.
So, I dunno. Like that, but much, much worse.
The Zuck knows he’s gonna lose some skin over this.