Has the future already been drowned in the babbling of Facebook?

Years ago, I worked in a cramped office as a civil servant. My male and married boss was having an affair with a woman in my office, his wife worked at an office just up the hall. She knew about the affair, we all knew (its hard to hide things in cramped offices) and things were tense.

Every morning his wife would march theatrically into our cubbyhole and slam pictures she had cut out of a magazine on to his desk – “CAT PICTURES!” she would say waspishly and then stomp out. I have no idea why a grown man should be in need of daily doses of cat pictures, but with hindsight I can now see that his wife had created a manual forerunner of Facebook and was hitting him with it.

Facebook is now beyond a website, beyond a meme, beyond a revolution – it is the meme of all memes, the babbling sound of our hyper-connected global society descending into madness.

I have just concluded a disagreeable and all too typical encounter on Facebook, at the root of the problem was this banal anti-vaccination propaganda photo which has been bumbling around for months:

Emotive isn’t it? Manipulative, misleading and designed to scare people. I enquired of the poster why he felt the need to grace my Facebook feed with it. As always, a veneer of tolerance and discussion evaporated quickly to be replaced by insults and of course… more Facebook posts. A pattern was easily discerned, a circle of self-reporting badly written misinformation swiftly jammed my Facebook feed alongside breezy allegations that I was simultaneously a deluded oppressed automaton and an oppressing Orwellian storm trooper.

Facebook (like the internet) is allergic to the truth – self expression and identity politics are king. You may not know anything about a topic, but your right to gather some internet sand and hurl it into the eyes of everyone around you is sacred and inviolate.

What scares me about Facebook is its inbuilt capacity to delude its users into thinking their views have substance, mainstream support and represent in and of themselves social action and morality.

Facebook users see only what they want to see, befriend sameness and unfriend difference. Truth is no longer a scientific enquiry to be conducted by a society as a whole through its specialists, institutions, universities, laboratories and peer reviewed papers – but a hierarchy-free race to see who can copy and paste the most links on to Facebook.

We are rapidly becoming a copy and paste society where we are so overloaded with information that we just select what suits us and share it to shore up our cultural identity. I am quite certain that most of what people share on my Facebook page hasn’t even been read much less fact checked – they just like the look of the headline.

I am struggling to set up an intentional community – a place where I could develop a congruence between my values and my actions, a principled group to work towards a better world. I invited a woman to join us, she backed out as soon as the realized that she would have to change her lifestyle a bit saying “I want to shut my front door and not have to be bothered with people”.

The NEXT DAY she recycled a tear jerking Facebook meme bemoaning the state of the world cooing “will you help change the world? I am going to do my bit, are you?”. Thus  the classic allure of Facebook is illuminated, you can kid yourself and your cyber acquaintances that you care about the external world while staying safely behind your front door, free to imagine that you are a naturopath, an environmentalist, an activist, a scientist or anything you damn well please while people applaud politely with likes and shares.

The twin evils of ignorance and narcissism have not only been fostered by Facebook but are twin pillars of a new religion, where we stand alone resplendent in vanity publishing for self promotion and adoration.

Of course the internet is awash with this stuff, but there is something about the mini-lifestyle shop windows of Facebook that is uniquely corrosive to society and our souls.

It strikes me that it is now virtually impossible to have a sane conversation on any topic – any view advanced in the public sphere invokes its corresponding opposite in social media within seconds. Words and ideas tumble onto the internet and like a gigantic insane party game people swiftly indicate their “like” or other emotion by direction of their self imagined cultural orientation – whether any of it is TRUE or not doesn’t matter – we don’t inhabit the real world anymore, we log on to it via a screen.

Working towards social cohesion has been abandoned for the easier task of social connectivity, the medium has triumphed over the content. In a world where truth has been swamped by the stampede into solipsism, I see little hope of us dealing with climate change, social injustice or war.

Its so easy now for cynical politicians and the captured mass media to run circles around us – any of the moral outrage or scientific certainty we might have responded to has been consumed by Facebook and the internet. Its never been easier to do nothing, learn nothing and feel good about it – all at the click of a button.

I read of people who seriously think that social media is a useful tool for galvanising protest – in some cases it may be, but the end product often seems disturbingly circular. Protests are organised on Facebook, people takes pictures of the protest and put them on Facebook, people share the pictures on Facebook and bemoan that the protest is being ignored on Facebook. Nothing changes and we scroll down to the next cat picture.

Why are people so surprised when Facebook angst is ignored? Social media is demented, riven by the braying of different groups that their shrill and inversely opposed demands be met. Even if a government was minded to govern by Facebook meme (can you imagine it!) it would be impossible to do so. The opinions are so atomised, so lacking in detail, nuance and coherence – what on earth could anybody do with it?

While its true that individual careers can be ended with a misplaced quote on Twitter, nothing substantial changes. The modern requirement to tailor politics for a dumbed-down click friendly market place remains unchanged. The 24/7 rolling coverage of the internet leaves us excited and breathless – convinced that we are surfing great waves of change, participating in a mighty democratic whirlwind that will carry all before it. The sad truth is that Facebook leaves us as indolent bystanders clicking with pointless outrage as the entrenched structures of the powerful tighten their grip.

Facebook is a sort of collective masturbation – it absorbs a lot of energy, makes us feel nice and can be conducted privately.

I am starting to think that it is not ultimately climate change, nuclear war or social collapse that will be the undoing of humanity – but the internet.

If Facebook had existed during the civil rights movement in the U.S. or the set up of the NHS in the UK, or during the Easter Rising in Ireland – perhaps none of them would have happened.

Perhaps the internet is the single most catastrophic thing that humanity has ever created – its hyper connected babbling is dragging us all to our doom, unable to communicate above the lowest common denominator. Has the mass franchise of opinion robbed us of any ability to process reality?

I will remain on Facebook of course – I have a macabre fascination for the death spiral of my species, its compelling viewing.

Sodium Haze has a Facebook page of course – i’ll post the link on there.

Perhaps this could go viral on Facebook.