The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Joe Camel, oops, I mean, Joe Facebook, has announced recently that the app they were developing for Instagram for Kids, suddenly under fire by critics accusing them of child brainwashing, wasn’t really meant for kids, it was meant for teens. Teens, to Mark Zuckerberg, are apparently adults. Mark Zuckerberg is the Purdue Pharma of the social media world, the man whose company knowingly addicts its clients in order to monetize their dependency. Facebook is the digital Oxycontin, advertising as a benign entity but in reality a purveyor of hate, bigotry, violence, conspiracy theories, bullying and disinformation. He knows the nastier the feeds, the more the revenue. Simple as that. Give them more Oxy and they can’t help but come back for more. Sweet deal if you have no ethics.

They know what they’re doing, known it for a long time. Trouble is, they’re addicted too. To profits. At any cost. Are they evil people, the folks who run Facebook? Hell yes, they’re evil people. Were the tobacco folks evil people? Damn right they were, simple salesmen of death, fully knowledgeable about the cancer rates and they knew how to jack up the nicotine in more ways than one. Evil, definitely, or evil has no meaning. Was Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers evil? C’mon, they pushed the sales, they knew the addiction rates and the death count. Evil? What do you call it when hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed for their bottom line?

And what do we call it when profits trump ethics? Was Facebook the only one running Russian bots, jumping conspiracy theories to the top of their feeds, playing off hate and bigotry? No, they weren’t. And are the good people who feast on this clickbait, are they just poor innocent victims? No sir, they’re culpable too. Facebook understands Pavlovian conditioning. Our society is made up of bored folks with nothing better to do than check their feeds, see if their classmates think they’re fat or ugly, click on vitriol and disinformation, spend their lives pumping crap into their brains. They follow the blood, the venom, the gossip, the bigotry and all the rest while they’re connecting with their grandkids, just harmless diversions. Meanwhile, the politics turn toxic, the democracy teeters on failure and Zuckerberg is contemplating hooking the kids. Just the teens, not the real little tykes, not yet anyway. You tell me if this is evil….

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Here’s some breaking news for all you addicts out there. Facebook was designed, so say some of its founders, to dig deep into your brain and reward you with instant and constant gratification. Likes, dislikes, tweets and pinging. They want you to keep in touch, they say, with your ‘friends’ and relatives. Ho ho. Just trying to help you.

Can you say Ennabler? Can you say Pusher? They do want you to stay in touch, all right. They want you to chain yourself to your phone, your computer, your device and let the ads wash over you like a soothing shower. Just like the tobacco boyz, they’ve studied you and they’ve designed a delivery system you won’t be able to resist after a very short time. The cigarette pushers took some tobacco leaves, chopped them fine, then added everything from formaldehyde to the pancreas of endangered species, put them with 100 chemicals known to the state of California as carcinogenic, made a slurry, then dried the toxins into a compact little roll that resembles real tobacco. They made these neat little filters they perforated so that you had to pull very hard to get your dose and called those Menthol Lights, less tar, more flavor, that kind of ad rubbish.

Facebook, they took some behavioral research from B.F. Skinner’s monkey experiments and Pavlov’s dogs and applied them to you. We always knew social media was addictive, I guess, we just didn’t know the folks upstairs had manipulated us. Just like tobacco. Just like McDonalds. Just like Coca-Cola even after they took out the cocaine. When sugar was under investigation, the sugar daddies blamed heart attacks on fat. Facebook, we’ll have to wait and see who they blame. I’m betting the Russians. Parents who don’t do proper supervision. Video games. But the truth is a lot more sinister than those pesky Ruskies. I’m afraid I have to unfriend Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow gangsters. Your social media is a social destabilizer. Big thumbs down, Mark. But I hafta admit, you won. We lost.

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A study cited in the morning’s lying press showed statistics that kids were less likely to do drugs these days. The thesis these researchers had come up with was they were doping themselves on social media, a steady drip of dopamine pleasure, nearly constant in their waking, if somnambulistic, hours. Social media as narcotic….

You live down at the tail end of an island far from the tentacles of Facebook, you forget sometimes you’ve set yourself adrift from the continental shores of 21st century modernity, but as the riptides sweep you away and the land lines tear loose from the walls, those messages from the Mainland become fader and more indistinct, Morse code from telegraph poles rotting in the relentless rains.

For a confirmed xenophobe, this desire to stay in constant contact with strangers and family and friends is bemusing, like stuffing messages in bottles all day long and setting them loose on the tides. I had a buddy back in high school who was a ham radio operator tapping out code to other hamsters overseas and across the globe, who stayed up late in his room on the chance that meteorological conditions were ripe for some far away contact. “I talked to a guy in England,” he would tell me the following morning.

“Whadja talk about?” I’d ask. Invariably, nothing much, just name, serial numbers and rank. Where they lived. Age, maybe. I guess we just have this desire to make contact, to let someone know we’re out there, that we’re not alone. Same reason we send radio signals into space. Same reason we write blogs. Ironically, my buddy the ham radio operator slowly became afraid of human interaction of all kinds, what the shrinks call agoraphobic. I tried getting in touch with him some years after the last time I saw him, but he’d lost his job, moved away from his house in Missoula and now even Google can’t locate him. I imagine him holed up in some desolate place, tapping Morse code late into the comforting night, listening for an answer from folks he’ll never have to meet, all his bottles crashing onto lonesome beaches in places he’ll never see.

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