Facebook and the Final Straw

Hello, all.

The impulse that makes me want to conversationally type at hundreds or thousands of people of varying degrees of closeness has to go somewhere. So here I am.

I’ve lost many friends in my life, and by lose, I mean,  I still know where they are, they just don’t want to talk to me anymore. (to paraphrase comedian ‘Bobcat’ Goldthwait.) But two recent losses stem from my Facebook posting and the October sixth attacks. This has focused my scattered attention on the reality of what social media does best. Create engagement by exploiting negative human emotions.

What you say, and what you don’t say, can become grounds for ending lifelong friendships.

I have made these same kinds of mistakes IRL, of course, so I’m not really blaming facebook for my current sadness. But my sadness now lets me see just how rotten the whole social media thing has become.

I really, really loved Facebook, for a long time. I had built audiences before, in support groups, in political groups, but Facebook grew my audience effortlessly. Slowly but surely, though, the tenor of my posts, of the conversations I engaged in my own comments on others posts, changed. While must take responsibility, for what one says, there’s something about FB that magnifies the worst in me. In many I think.

I’ve made my personal feed private, friends only, but should really just download my content and pull the plug on it. I will leave my author account, also confusingly named Jay O’Connell, up. God knows why really. But it might be necessary at some point. I’ll scrub it clean of anything offensive.

I’ve overshared on Facebook, and I can’t help but think that this is one reason it’s been hard for me to find work. Far from creating a network of people wanting to give or find me work, it’s a place that people check up on to see if I’m anyone they might want to work with. I’m sort of like a car accident. Something you slow down to look at, but don’t want to get too close to.

Politically, there’s the phenomenal where those the closest to you on the political spectrum become the people you fight with the nastiest. If you have half a brain you don’t bother to engage with people too far gone, ideologically, as you know they are lost completely. But the ways in which those on your side of things differ from you can be painful, because you know they are capable of rational thought… so why the hell do they think _this unforgivable thing?_.

Talking about social media, posting on social media about how rotten social media is, mostly expresses the fact that you’re probably still far too mired in it. You can promise people you’re going, really going, and they nod and say goodbye, knowing you’ll be back. So they don’t really have to make any effort to follow you on another platform.

So.. this post is stupid. Just another stupid waste of time. Like the thousands of hours I spent giving my content away for free to billionaires, to build a list of people that the billionaires won’t actually send my postings to in any significant numbers.

Your friend lists are for them—not for you.

I think it’s time to pull back, though, and think small. Think about small friend groups. Relationships that don’t fly apart when some current event drives us all crazy. Reciprocal relationships.

The dream of going viral with one’s cleverness, and then somehow monetizing that, is the modern day creative’s convenience store scratch ticket.

Not a good reason to create content for free. Not a good reason to overshare. Not a good reason to write contentious Op Ed.

That’s it for now. I’ll make a post about my writing projects next. Then maybe some post-mortem on AI image generation, one last word there.

Hope you are all doing well.

Please don’t attack me in the comments here, if possible.