Virulence

I'm still on Facebook, although I will tell you by this point the reason why escapes even me. Somehow the convenience of passively keeping track of the children I've never met born of people I barely remember is strong enough to counterbalance complicity in creeping fascism or raging genocide. It should have been enough over the last two-plus years to know explicitly that it's the splintered hinges around the door-shaped hole through which foreign intelligence operatives and domestic terrorist groups pour into the American political arena, but apparently nah. If I give it up, I'd have to call my sisters, or at least text them. To know something without having to pay the price of actually listening in a introvert's opioids. Once it's in the veins, it's impossible to sift it out again.

There are alternatives like Instagram or WhatsApp (same company) or Twitter (no demonstrated standards for what constitutes decency) or Snapchat (I'm not going to lie, it just scares me), but it's 2018, a good 20 years now into the grand social media social re-engineering social experiment; I think we can say definitively now that any social media platform of any kind is going to end up being about 25% (by content, not necessarily by user-base numbers) young white men trying to find excuses to use the N-word.

Sure, it's gross, but free speech is gross sometimes. They've been around us all this time. Hey, at least we know who they are now and what they look like, so you could argue it's better! Besides, what's the worst that could happen? Oh right, complete societal and geopolitical collapse, didn't consider that one...

The main reason I'm still on Facebook (though I definitely do not post anything anymore really) is to maintain a few actual friendships, real ones that are dear to me, that primarily exist there. In those instances, it's not that I'm avoiding the taxing investment of time and attention to maintain contact like I have to with my dumb sisters, it's that these are real people who exist for me (and I for them) more as postings and pictures than flesh and human blood. In many ways its frustrating because, being who I am* and Facebook being the bumbling shit-heel that it is, the essentiality of it to those relationships is upsetting, to put it mildly. It's a charybdis penning us in the tepid, overfished waters of the slowly dying Mediterranean, just out of reach of the wide-open Atlantic and the promise of new worlds.

Without stupid Facebook I wouldn't have had a friend of mine we'll call Definitely Not Susan. Well, without Blogger really because that's where we met, but she, like most people with functioning self-awareness, migrated off of this and onto what became more conventional forms of social media before it was apparent long-form blogging had the same future as Crystal Pepsi. And though I lingered (and still linger) here, I could see the benefit of keeping in touch over less than eleven over-wrought paragraphs for every idea. You know, for other people's sake.

And without it I wouldn't have been able to watch her despair, lo these five days prior to Election Day, that the very social media venue she'd taken upon herself to voice her lament, it was one of a billion simultaneous shouts, each drowning each other out in disharmonious synchronicity, just as it had actively undermined the democratic verity of the last election cycle and is threatening to render irrelevant the results of this one. Words thoughtfully crafted and shared, ranging from a whisper to a howl in the course of a paragraph, all animated by the despair of a reality uncoupled from the guide-star of truth. She wants to know: with no accountability and seemingly no moral limits on ambition, what can we ever actually do? With everything we've tried, what can we do? Is this all broken, all of it? Where is there hope?

To that I can only say: probably also in social media. Partially in the persistence of efforts to resist (more hopeless situations than this, like for example the civil rights movement, crept forward at an excruciating pace, sometimes in the wrong direction, but ultimately began to achieve their goals at the highest level, all without the help of instant messaging). But partially, and this is where my real hope lies, the glimmerings of unborn sparks that will one day fall over the kindling, in the massive stupidity of the other side. I mean, look at these two donkey dicks. The last thing you ever want to give a frat bro is a little bit of actual confidence. Because you know it's only a matter of time before he manages to staple his scrotum to his own thigh. And the trick is to wait around long enough to be the one handing him the staple gun when the time comes.

I don't have predictions for Tuesday. I remember 2016. I know my stupid congressman is going to be the same GOP douche-nozzle it's always been. But not everyone's will. Look at the "help" they're getting. It's viral.

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*Sure I like to belong to stuff, but not if other people are going to be using it too.