Facebook: The Magic 8 Ball

It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a homo sapien to quit this junk.

You can sign out but you can never leave.

Facebook’s algorithm is like a magic 8 ball that on every refresh gives us a reflection of our interests and fortunes. Using the thousands of data points Facebook has on me there is someone in the world making computational predictions of what I enjoy. Someone cares. Someone knows me better than I do. With every log in a new side of me that I didn’t even realise comes to light. Being on Facebook with all of your friends visibly active on chat is much like watching the ashes on a Thursday and seeing thousands of people at the stadium and therefore being enabled to remove yourself from work.

Privacy has become unbuckled by instant communication and ever growing networks. Our secret lives are let loose on the world forever rendering our ability to keep things behind closed doors. Exit privacy stage right. Enter voyeurism stage left. We are our own panopticon. It is our right and duty to scale each others networks of communication and devour our friend’s hippocampus through which we are given access to through Facebook photos.

Love has become a disguise used to undress my desire. Dating App’s like Hinge, a Facebook API cum satellite state, allows borderless transactions of my social data from one application to another. The 8 ball algorithm is back. Addicted to flicking through women like playing a fruit machine. The real relationship being formed is between my datafied self and Facebook. They know the women he, the online self, likes and act provides the voyeur with faces and names to speculate on imaginary relationships. All the while he gives himself inch by inch to the machine.

Voyeurism is Facebook’s reward for submitting Privacy. My online googles build my imagination. Annoying statuses and images linger longer in the mind then the 27-minute rapport you build at the pub for it is the digital, over the physical, that asserts its dominance in the hierarchy of the mind’s eye.

Deviate from the norm and Facebook will share my horrors through the network in a flash of lightning. The thunder echoes through the gorge for years.

I don’t care; give me the 8 ball.

You are the key and lock.

Liberation and suppression.

Take my data; just hold my attention.