Facebook: It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes Not Much To Cry

A few weeks ago I purposely logged out of Twitter for the first time in close to two decades, and I’ve yet to log back in. If I’m honest, it was all getting a bit too much for me. The algorithm on there is actually almost too good, in the sense that most of the stuff it was showing me really was related to things that I cared quite a lot about. This put me in a troubling position where I was waking up at 6.45am for work, turning off my alarm, opening Twitter, and immediately reading the moronic opinions of Mid-Western teenagers, with the implication of an anonymous forum being that their thoughts and feelings should treated as equally as any one else’s. Scorsese is an overrated filmmaker. The goals in football should be made bigger so that they score more goals. Israel is a real country. Utter nonsense, beamed directly into my sleepy eyes and brain, first thing in the morning. On a long enough timeline, this sort of self-imposed mental torture is enough to drive anyone insane, and I was hitting my breaking point. Once you realise that you’re becoming a little too skilled in finding unbannable ways to suggest that strangers online kill themselves, it is apparent that you need a break.

So I’ve logged off. I haven’t deleted the app just yet, but that’s mainly because in the first week after signing out, I was consistently humbled by how many times I would open my phone and find my thumbs automatically navigating to that sign in screen. You can learn a lot about yourself by taking away the crutches of your entertainment, is what I’m saying. Unfortunately, one of the things I’ve learned about myself is that I Will Always Find Something. At first I was scratching the itch of utter bullshit consumption by watching what I would argue is a healthy alternative to reels: Walzr, a project made by a fella named Riley Walz. Basically it’s a website in which you’re served up random YouTube videos uploaded directly from people’s iPhone galleries between the years of 2009 and 2012. You’re provided them without context: snapshots of people’s lives, home videos, nights out, pets playing, people relaxing in parts of the world I’ll never visit, speaking languages I’ll never understand. I love it, and I would still recommend it to anyone interested from this description.

But I’m not always in a position to be able to watch videos, and it won’t always make sense for me to pull out that book that I’ve been kind of reading on and off for the past five months. Sometimes I need something quick to skim over. Pictures to look at. Bright colours and strong emotions. Something that can scratch the itch that grows inside of me whenever Shogun randomly cuts to ninety seconds of adverts. Something like Facebook.

I know what you’re thinking: “Why would you come away from Twitter because you’re tired of bad opinions, only to spend more time on Facebook?” And yes, I agree, it’s like selling a log cabin because it gets cold at night, only to move into a house built entirely out of asbestos. I get it. It’s stupid. But also, shut up? I’m not a perfect man and I regularly make imperfect decisions in the campaign to improve myself and my life. I made and ate carbonara four days in a row last week. I loved it every time. I will do it again next week. I will read Facebook posts from your parents about how corner shops aren’t what they used to be anymore whilst I wait for the cheese and egg to emulsify. I will be smiling.

Anyway, I’ve been on Facebook for a couple of weeks and it’s very difficult to overstate the trouble that we’re in. People are stupid on Twitter, yes. But at least I can pretend that everyone on there is below voting age. Facebook has convinced me that allowing anyone to vote is a mistake, and more to the point, I think I am now absolutely ready for the UN to put Zuckerberg on trial for what he’s done to the collective brains of our pension aged population. To demonstrate what I mean, I’d like to show you one random post that was served to me, at the top of my feed, by the Facebook algorithm.

This is the typical viral post on Facebook. The formula is this: “BLANK isn’t what it used to be! Remember when it used to be BLANK instead? Back in the day I mean. What if UNRELATED BLANK was like this too? Almost makes you want to do a mass REDACTED.”

Every generation is susceptible to nostalgia bait. I’ve seen the way people my age talk about the 90’s, and I would never try to argue that this sort of fumbling romanticisation of the past is completely unique to the Baby Boomer/Generation X age range of old folks. But we haven’t yet arrived at a millennial version of this cultural navel-gazing which so comfortably holds hands with burning hot, frothing anger. This specific sort of rage is a uniquely Old Person phenomenon, and one that, due to the easy-sharing nature of Facebook, is fantastically simple for bad actors to capitalise on. There are millions of posts like these. People complaining about things that don’t really matter. And on every post, there are hundreds of comments. Comments like this:

These people are sat at home in comfortable middle class houses, warm, safe, their loved ones nearby…and they’re fully erect imagining a near-future where the UK is Red Dawn’d by, I guess, people with beards? The implication is Muslims, and we’re all aware of that, but this is how they all talk. It’s all vague references to invaders and reverse colonisation. It’s all daydreams of tanks rolling down the M1. It’s all wetdreams of fighting off the barbarian hordes with tactical knowhow achieved through rewatching Black Hawk Down. They live a fantasy of an invisible war that is already ongoing, every sarcastic Facebook post a bullet fired in the battle for a freedom that they already enjoy. Anything to take away from the day to day mundanity of living an unextraordinary life.

The boomers’ anger at any perceived change to their environment is so confused that, at times, they simply short-circuit, spouting buzzwords and buzzphrases, the combinations of sounds and symbols that they’ve taught themselves to fear instinctively, like how a dog leaves the room when you say the word “Bath”, even if what you’re actually talking about is how there’s too many American tourists in Somerset these days.

This instinctual fear of any sort of change, alongside the parallel belief that things always magically happened to be better when they were children, is sometimes so funny as to almost be endearing.

First they came for our black and white school uniforms, no makeup no jewellery…

Now look at the world: You’ve got postmen wearing shorts. Barely any of them travel around with a little black and white cat either. That pisses me the fuck off. Close the borders.

Funnily enough, the postman thing came up twice in this one thread:

The posties don’t dress sexy anymore, bring the army in. And don’t get me started on the milkmen disappearing. I’ve had to start pleasuring my own wife like some kind of queer. I am absolutely certain that my kids are my own, and that fact alone makes me sick to my stomach.

Somehow, the complaints get stranger.

The guy who has to repeatedly tell me I’m not allowed to bring my replica bayonet on the plane isn’t wearing a tie. We used to be a real country. Let me on the plane. I can be trusted with a knife. I’ve never gotten upset about anything unreasonable before in my life. I will be normal about the gender neutral bathrooms on the flight. I will NOT unsheathe my blade.

Jokes aside, it has been quite noticeable in recent years that so much right-wing upset is based around the fact that not everything is purposely marketed as Something You’d Like To Fuck anymore. You see it in videogame culture where nerds cry that Lara Croft doesn’t have big pyramid tits anymore, you see it in film/TV culture where people complain that the main character in The Last of Us (canonically a child) isn’t pretty enough for them to make AI-generated porn of, and you see it in real life where, from my point of view, it seems that a lot of the anti-feminist, anti-trans rhetoric seems to largely come down to men being mad that women exist who they aren’t attracted to. You see it in the depictions of lefties in right-wing memes, where the punchline is always a blue-haired girl, on the larger side, with a sort of butch look going on. It’s not so much the opinions themselves that make the right-winger mad, it’s more that these are the sorts of women who they mainly believe to hold those opinions, and because the idea that they should respect or engage with anything said by someone who they wouldn’t fuck is frankly absurd to them, the opinions must be absurd too. It’s an entirely dick-guided mechanism for discovering your guiding principles, and because there are very few charismatic and conventionally attractive women who sincerely go in for conservatism at a mainstream political level, it largely leads to men following and worshipping the opinions of other men. Ironically, this is gay.

Anyway, I will admit that it is fun when a older lady lets her dick guide her opinions too. Like Vickie:

Nice to see women excelling in men-dominated areas etc. etc.

In all sincerity, I do worry about what the next stage after this is. We’re only really a decade or so into the Absolutely Everyone Is Online era, and the fabric of society has been torn apart so thoroughly in the past ten years that it’s hard to image any actual resolution which doesn’t involve some incredibly strict legislation that would obviously never arrive at the hands of the people in charge.

Read this next comment. Read it twice.

King Charles is a Muslim. Being a policeman is the same as being a soldier. I watched a war film and I expect reality to reflect what I saw in those two hours.

How does someone come back from the line of thinking that brought them to typing that out and posting it publicly with their name attached? I checked out that guys profile. He’s not some shut-in with tinfoil wrapped around the seams of his windows, he’s a seemingly normal bloke with a social life and a family that loves him. But he also believes that King Charles is a Muslim.

I don’t know. Maybe it’s unfixable and this is just something we have to live with now. Much like how Jim from Kettering daydreams of firing an assault rifle at boats of terrified migrants crossing the channel in search of a better life, I daydream of one day having the power to put Mark Zuckerberg in the Infinite Pain Machine.

It just feels like the sickness has gotten too deep. I talked at the start of this about how instinctual it was for me to open Twitter and engage for hours at a time before I logged out, and I mentioned how even after I realised it was doing bad things to me, I would still try to do it, my hands still holding the muscle memory of the mental-flagellation that I’d dined on for so many years. So what happens when you have an entire country of people doing that, day after day, the exact same problem, except no one is realising the harm it’s doing to them?

On a fundamental level, I’m not any better than most of these people. We all started at the same place, the same more or less blank slate. But when I started using the internet, the people I followed online - comedians, football accounts, film accounts - they all just happened to have a left-wing slant to them, and eventually that led me to where I am now. I’d like to think that there’s something more to it, of course, that I was always destined to be on the “morally correct” side of history. But I’m sure there’s a parallel universe where I became insanely racist instead. Where women didn’t like me and it caused me to get into Andrew Tate. A universe where I got a high-paying job and my hatred of the taxman led me to hating taxes (more than I currently hate taxes), and then hating Labour (from a different angle to how I currently hate Labour), and then hating anyone vaguely left-leaning (instead of just finding them tiring).

With how polarising an issue Israel/Palestine has been amongst seemingly normal people, it wouldn’t be difficult to see a more impressionable version of myself following a favourite Zionist celebrity into full Israeli defence mode, talking down their atrocities and supporting their claims. The irony would be completely lost on me as I posted on Facebook about an “invasion” here in the UK, not realising that if I’d experienced even five-percent of what the Palestinians have suffered in Gaza, I would be Hamas’ strongest super soldier. It’s not hard to imagine. I’m already a red-faced man. Imagine if I was bald too.

I’m thinking that the best solution to my problem is just deleting Facebook too. To just pretend none of it is there. It has been eye-opening to see how crazy things have gotten, sure, but it’s been eye-opening in the same way that having thumbs pushed directly into your eye-sockets is eye-opening.

That Facebook post had five hundred comments on it. I would say that four hundred were in the same vein of what I’ve shown you on here, but thankfully there were some level-headed individuals holding things together and pushing back against the narrative being promoted. I’m going to leave you with just one of them, some carefully chosen words that we should all remember, in every aspect of our lives:

Maybe I’ll get into crosswords.