On Leaving Facebook

A few weeks ago, after years of being one of its ever-growing number of participants, I resigned from Facebook.

There are a lot of reasons to be a Facebook subscriber — good and bad, positive and negative — depending on your point of view.

I had excellent reasons to be part of The Social Network. There are all these siblings, cousins, friends; not to mention the sons and daughters of those people, and Facebook let them tell me — and most of humanity — what was happening at some human level, once removed.

One of the reasons to subscribe was that a few people saw this blog posted there.

There are also plenty of reasons to quit.

Like most subscribers — or so I think — I’d weeded out (“unfriended”) the irritating people who inherently opposed whatever it is I believe to be so. Some of them — as I thought more than once — would never have wanted their sainted mothers back in Iowa to see the horrific things they posted there. But their mothers are either gone to their eternal reward or don’t subscribe to Facebook.

As a result, I occupied my own bubble of siblings, nieces and nephews, friends and former colleagues who are more or less of one world view as I. With — I must say — really cute photos.

Still, it wasn’t enough for Facebook.

Yeah, yeah, okay, I did sign up to belong to a few groups with interests in things like old neon signs and pictures of iridescently colored birds that live in tropical climates.

Why, then, did that subject me to an incessant barrage of promotional messages from companies that wanted to sell me water filtration systems or ways to improve my quality of life by ingesting drugs not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration?

That, in the end, was what did it.

No, we cannot be responsible for every act or lobbying effort by every company included in our IRAs or 401Ks, try as we might. But, really, Facebook, does every other message that shows up have to try to sell me something I neither want, need nor care about?

I wearied of clicking “not relevant,” because there was always some other pitch Facebook’s algorithm thought might be “more relevant.”

So I quit.

I miss seeing the photos of kids who are now 65 years younger than I am, and will only see a limited number of times again. Send ’em to me in an email.

It’s unfair, of course, to invoke people who lived in another era, long before the concept of “social media” existed as avatars.

Still, somehow, Tolstoy wrote compellingly about Napoleon’s march on Moscow, and wrote a book about it, years after it happened.

Had there been Facebook, Tolstoy followers would’ve inundated his author page, second-guessing his description of how it was that Napoleon, whose troops burnt down a considerable portion of Moscow, had to retreat, and — in the course of things — lost a third of a million humans to frostbite and starvation.

Dante imagined hell, and had there been social media in Florence in the 14th century, well ….

Even earlier, once Beowulf had knocked off Grendel, one can only imagine what Grendel’s mother’s followers (and, I point out, no author in the history of the language has ever written “Grendel’s mother’s followers”) would’ve warned her about Beowulf’s superhuman ability to hold his breath under water while wielding a mighty sword.

Still, one can imagine ol’ Beowulf, hunched down there in Heorot, once he’d dispatched Grendel and his mother, paging through endless dross on his laptop, clicking “Not relevant” to endless appeals for the latest: “We Make Your Viking Funeral a Snap,” or “Call us if you need dragon-slaying gear.”

If only he had known.

And even earlier, one can only imagine Agamemnon’s followers, after ten years, camped there outside the besieged city of Troy:

“Ag, baby. Forgive Achilles and let him go out there and face Hector. And sign up for our no-risk one-year warranty on all armor at a special introductory rate!”

And, at the end of the string of western literature — after Agamemnon, Beowulf, Dante and Tolstoy — we have Jake and Brett in that cab, rolling through the streets of Madrid. Brett is paging through her iPad and shows it to Jake.

“Look at this,” she says. “One of your followers. She says you should forget all this nonsense and live with me.”

“Ah,” Jake says. “Yes. Wouldn’t it be be pretty to think so?”

And so I (and Jake and Agamemnon, Dante, Leopold and Beowulf) left Facebook.

Copyright Brad Nixon, 2021