The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I’ve been hearing a lot of chatter on the airwaves lately about disconnecting from Facebook. Folks are starting to tune into the good people at their favorite social media platform who really aren’t so much interested in their privacy as they are the monetization of their information value. Ya think??? Mark Z and his munchkin minions talk a good line about an open society being a good society, but now that the Russians and the trollers have access to your personal life, people are noticing what havoc this is producing.

So … there’s a movement afoot to disengage. That should show those geeks what’s what! Yeah, good luck with that. It’s like saying you’re concerned about global warming so you won’t buy gas for your car. Or turn on the heat in your house. I don’t have a Facebook account and if you think Mark is worried, think again. He has billions of subscribers. And plenty of corporations he can sell their data to. He’s making money, just like Amazon, just like Exxon, just like Google. You think he cares if the world is worse off? C’mon, he’s just another greedy monopolist. Sure, he talks like an evangelical, bringing truth and light to a world too long in the dark with its sad secrecy, its puny privacy, its pathetic avoidance of public scrutiny. Wouldn’t we all be happier if we shared our innermost desires and dreams?

Well, my dream was to be left alone, Mark. My dream was a world where fake news was understood to be phony baloney, not some viral campaign waged on your platform, one where truth was spelled with a capital T, not disparaged as bullshit. My dream was a country that valued courtesy and what is now condemned as political correctness, not one that spewed venom and trolled anyone who disagreed with another point of view.

I don’t blame Mark totally. I blame him and the others for being blind to the effects of their greed. You want to delete Facebook, be my guest, but you’re spitting into a digital wind. This is a monopoly that needs to be regulated, broken up, curtailed, sat upon, called to account. Unfriend them, sure, but lobby for the government to stop this. They’ve already done irreparable harm. If you think they’ll regulate themselves, call me, I have some Exxon stocks to sell ya.

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