When The Lights Come On

Facebook is probably evil, sure. It's 2018, so I'm confident that's just a stipulated fact we all accept. I still have the app on my phone, but I think I've posted exactly one thing on it in the last 9-12 months. It wasn't even a personal event, either. I think it was a link to an article about baseball player Vladimir Guerrero choosing to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame wearing an LA Angels cap. Incredibly important stuff, to be sure,* and while it impacts me directly and personally AT THE LEVEL OF MY HUMAN SOUL, I can't really say it was anything too actionable from a surveillance or marketing aspect. The subsequent rain of "suggested posts" about reasonably priced mini-season-ticket packages for the upcoming season are likely coincidental.

So sure, Facebook, with all the subtlety and care of a Russian counterspy assassination squad, has transitioned from standard social media ruiner-of-marriages to dedicated equal-opportunity data-stalker of each and every one of its users. That's right, the tool whose killer app was secretly finding out which of your high school classmates got fat has, in just a couple of years, started stalking you right back. The only difference is, Facebook isn't going to judge you for your physique or your habits, no. It doesn't care if you gained a lot of weight. If anything, it's just going to take that information and sell it to Big Cake so they know where to spend their online advertising dollars.

Since I stopped posting to Facebook though** it has become a pure observation tool for me, not in the stalky-stalky type of way,*** more in the I've-already-invested-this-much-time-catching-up-with-these-people-I-barely-remember-God-please-don't-make-me-start-again-on-Snapchat-or-some-shit kinda way.

What I learned this week from facebook is that I should be more grateful about where I live. Don't get me wrong, I'm already grateful-to-the-point-of-smugness on a regular basis. I live in Southern California. The unfashionable inland part of it, yes, but still, the fringiest fringe of a climatological and temperamental human paradise is still preferable to whatever sticky ballsack of humidity and racism you (in all statistical likelihood) live in, no offense. I'm sure it's more affordable and way less crowded. Yes. There are good reasons for that.

I got a robocall from the kids' school this week (god bless you if you are free from the scourge of school and school-district robocall updates, the one and only reason I still have a landline so I can screen out the persistent torrent of useless information, which by the way x2 since I have two kids in the same school) saying how they planned to readjust the school's schedule to allow for students to gather and march for gun control and school safety. Meanwhile I know from facebook that in shitty other places, students had to make a choice between solidarity for the cause and administrative consequences, up to and including judicial violence. Really, students got "swatted." And no, not in the new fun meaning where you call a SWAT team and report an armed incident at the house of someone you are trying to pull a really funny prank on as the last thing they potentially experience. I mean in the old school Ben Affleck in Dazed and Confused way except with the swats doled out by an educational professional hired specifically to keep your child safe.

Like every week, I have no idea what the fuck is going on or what words mean or how the society I purportedly am part of operates in any kind of structured, repeatable or predictable fashion.

Living here in the biggest of the blue bubbles, this all makes me intensely aware and thankful that the schools' approaches out here are a reflection of the sanity and tolerance of the society we've constructed for ourselves among the coastal elites. For my friends in places like Alabama, I don't know how you do it, I really don't. Just remember that through all of it, California has got your back. We're going to save all the immigrants as an act of defiance until there are options for immigration reform that are less blatantly racist. And then just for self-saucing afters, we're going to give single-handedly saving net neutrality a shot. It's hard work and it's all a little tiny bit terrifying, but you're welcome. Even if you think we're all commies and homos out here... well, you're not far off, but you're still welcome.

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*I know sometimes I can be sarcastic or a little dry. Neither of those things are happening here.

**It's complicated. I've had to become a bit more thoughtful about what I post and where, including here on this mostly-anonymous blog.

***Yes, OK, eye of the beholder probably.