I Have Something to Tell You
“I never thought I’d be writing a review on lube but here I am”, wrote a customer on Amazon, describing her experience with the title Feels so natural. The lubricant invites you to give it a go with the slogan have a splash on the bottle. Other users add to the hype with titles like top top top and slip slop slap. One of them was so pleased he said top slop gave him life, with an exclamation mark. Opinion pieces about the paraphernalia of sexual pleasure can be quite entertaining because there seem to be quite a few people willing to share their own two cents about trendy buttplugs. Since I don’t prefer anything in my back alley that mother nature didn’t put there herself already, I don’t have any cents of my own to add to this.
Clint Eastwood, in a lube-unrelated quip, compared opinions to assholes. Everyone’s got both. That’s what turned social media into the giant that it is today, in posession of your past and present memories, secrets and data. Yesterday, the world seemed to stand still because the grand cliffs of Dover crashed down. By which I mean Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Every other issue on our plate that day suddenly lost relevance because the beast we stuffed with so much food on a daily basis got hit by bad constipation. Like my previous romantic pursuits, it kept blocking me every time I tried to log back in. Try as I might, no password change worked and since it is neither an oracle nor an orifice, a lube would have been of no use too.
I joined Zuckerberg’s country club in 2007 and have maintained my membership since, primarily because you don’t need to pay for it and I’m too cheap to pay for anything online unless we’re talking about Medium. Over time, things piled up: you use it for networking, marketing, keeping up with family and friends or turning your life into a brand. I frequently use it to create an illusion that my life is more exciting than it actually is and take selfies with good sunglasses to hide eyebags none of which is a Birkin. The worst thing of all are those stories where everyone’s throwing their own version of the notorious live, love, laugh in your face.
Social media is a natural side-effect of liberal democracy. A digital extension of the classical Greek agora, the primordial public forum. Now you will often hear people talk about good old days when people were smarter, life was simpler and there wasn’t nearly so much junk everywhere, from your screens to your own plate. But that’s simply not true. What is true on the other hand, is that we didn’t have so much access to everyone else and their own thoughts on everything, from the Ukrainian War and Gaza to bubblewrap and Beyonce. There was no way to know this until recently and it’s the fuel in the engine of a profound digital detox. It seems to be the only way to avoid ads for chronic fungus infection treatment.
When it happened, websites like Downdetector were engulfed in a hurricane of alarms. Meta announced on X that they were working on fixing it. It didn’t take long for Elon Musk to bask in a bit of schadenfreude, like a kid gleaming with joy because his toy is still fine while your poor plushie is stained with mud. In panic, I managed to get a restraining order from my own account, asking me to stop upsetting other users. I’d appreciate an explanation about how exactly it upsets anyone but myself. And I was indeed, but for a completely different reason. It was the fact that it got me worked up at all. It’s not Pulitzer-worthy to say I’m surprised by just how much we’ve grown dependant on social media. But there, I said it.
We already have generations of people who use Polaroids as a fun gadget instead as a primary photographic tool. As for me, there’s a Polaroid photo of me and my brother as children together with a chimp in a pajama between us. Taken in a circus a long time ago, now it feels different. Instead of the cute little chimp, now I see an animal kept in captivity to entertain the masses while wearing something silly. While I’m not a vegetarian, I’d never endorse that. Even zoos now look cruel to me. It’s an exotic simulation for people living far from unspoilt nature where you can still find paths untrodden by human beings and their polluting presence.
Eventually I managed to recover access to my social media accounts. It was a relief, no doubt about it. But this short-term glitch makes you question your analog life and who you are when you’re not scrolling. Because just like sugar, Facebook can be an addiction. Without that, we wouldn’t have this thing called attention economy and it certainly wouldn’t be so profitable. Add to it Tiktok and you’ve got a whole ecosystem of resources where you can build a career and a fortune with a ring light. In the analog reality, people choose a mid-range stable income over the promise of fame, endorsments and money championed by stars that now live rent-free in your head because they invaded every algorithm on your Instagram.
The Covid epidemic has exacerbated the upsides of flexibility in terms of work, with many people opting for home offices which helped them to keep their cash flow while being on a safe distance from infection. Additionally, there’s an increasing presence of AI in various fields of work which makes humans redundant and shrinks the workforce simultaneously. Friends who work in education express their worries about students using ChatGPT and how difficult it’s becoming to tell the difference between artificial and authentic knowledge. Even on Amazon, reading an elaborate review about a lubricant reeks of that. There can’t possibly be so much to say about something that’s predominantly water.
So, to go back to the top, I do have something to tell you. The world is too big to fit on your screen though it makes distant corners of civilisation like Pitcairn Island in the Pacific closer to you through Google Earth. You know, the place where Marlon Brando’s 1962 film Mutiny on the Bounty takes place and where having sex with underage girls seems to be the norm. Or at least it was until 55 men were sentenced for for it, in spite of their mothers defending the crimes as a local tradition everyone’s fine with. But most people are unlikely to ever go there. Instead of a virtual tour of a Pacific beach, focus on your garden and living, breathing beauty you can touch.
Life won’t be reduced to ruins without Facebook. In fact, quite a few of my acquaintances and friends are either completely off it or use it sporadically. People are increasingly protective of their privacy. The big cookie jar that the internet has turned into wants access to your data in exchange for access. It could be a good idea to keep things for yourself instead of turning your life into the Truman Show. Maybe you don’t have anything worth hearing to say, but mommy forgot to tell you. We’ve got a saying you’d look smart if you kept your mouth shut. Let that sink in before you again click “post” on your social media. It doesn’t hurt and leaves no scars. I promise.
