I’m gonna keep this short, because you don’t need me to tell you that Facebook is evil and that you should have deleted your account long ago. Nor am I gonna crow (too late!) over the fact that I deleted my own account a while back, mostly because I don’t use Facebook and prefer Twitter, its social dystopian counterpart. Quitting Facebook was easy for me, and therefore not terribly admirable. A lot of people use Facebook for a lot of reasons, and Lord knows that company has a sinister way of attaching a suction-cup-laden tentacle to every other account you possess online. Divorcing yourself from Facebook will be painful and, at least spiritually, expensive.
But, as the old maxim goes, it’ll also be worth it.
Unlike many of the unkillable, monopolistic, highly subsidized industries here in America (banks, oil companies, utilities, etc.), Facebook and Twitter are both highly vulnerable in the event of user revolt. Facebook stock is down over 16 percent since the beginning of February, and user discontent has played no small role in that. Both Twitter and Facebook are not only in constant need of new users, but they need those users to be active, and to provide each site with even more detailed information so that they can turn around and sell that information to the highest bidder. The only difference between the two companies is that one is good at making money and the other sucks at it.
In a perfect world, both these companies would die. We’d be better off without them. I’d be better off without them. You’d be better off without them. And you know what? It can happen if we all band together and agree to kill them off.
I assure you that whatever pleasure you take from Facebook at the moment (awwww, Dave got a new cat!) will be dwarfed by the pleasure you derive from watching that company burn in hell. My colleagues at The Onion have it right: I would like to watch Mark Zuckerberg squirm. [Bernie Birnbaum voice] I wanna see him sweat a little. No, a lot. He created this monster and all he does now is make limp defenses to keep it running and then chopper around middle America acting like a potential elder statesman. His Twitter colleagues are no better. Every attempt by Facebook to improve Facebook has only enhanced its capacity for evildoing. Every alert telling you that their privacy policy has changed means you will have to take 27 different steps to re-ensure that Russian krokodil dealers can’t track down your blood type. Facebook will never get better. It’ll only get shittier and lamer, and it’ll only do more horrible shit that makes you worry about how your personal information is being used by complete strangers. Its sole goal is to reduce your life down to the small spaces in between checking your phone.
So let’s kill it. The power to undo Facebook is right there, in your adorable hands. Elon Musk, of all people, just exercised it. You’ll still be able to contact friends. You’ll still be able to get into unwinnable political arguments online with acquaintances who are nine degrees removed from your actual friends and family. You can Snapchat. LinkedIn will still be around if you need to contact people for exploratory job interviews that go nowhere. You’ll even be able to check out incoherent conservative memes cooked up by nursing-home residents. You won’t miss out on any of that good stuff if you don’t want to. The only difference is that Mark Zuckerberg will be ruined, and that’s a vast improvement over how things are right now. Facebook wants to sell you out. It’ll be worth it to see how they react when the tables are turned.
