Clamping Down

There have been so may long and thoughtful comments about my post about Facebook that I feel the need to write another long post in order to respond to them. But, this week, I’m pushing the limits of my homesteading competence by attempting to glue together a new maple breakfast nook tabletop in my tiny garage workshop (the photo above is just a rehearsal). I’m doing this while I should be dealing with far more important tasks. Thankfully, while it will take thousands of words to deal with Facebook, I can distill my tabletop experience down to three bullet points:

  • Working with wood is insanely complex and I’m an incompetent fool.
  • It’s a lot easier just to go to Ikea but to do so is to give up on life’s pleasures and pains.
  • One can never have enough clamps.

Now if only we could put Facebook in a tight set of clamps and cauls . . . wait, maybe we can!

My Facebook Problem

Over the past few years I’ve become increasingly unhappy with social media, especially Facebook. The standard advice for bloggers and authors is to use Facebook to drive eyeballs to your blog and books. But, in practice, what Facebook really wants is for me to create content for free that Facebook will use to harvest data and ad revenue. Facebook wants me to shut down this blog and move to its walled garden.

If Facebook’s betrayal of the supposedly free and open promises of the 1990s era internet wasn’t bad enough there’s the increasingly creepy uses of the massive amounts of data it harvests. A memo authored by Australian Facebook executives and leaked to the press last year revealed Facebook’s ability to monitor, in real time, the mood of teens and serve them ad content based on “when young people feel “stressed”, “defeated”, “overwhelmed”, “anxious”, “nervous”, “stupid”, “silly”, “useless” and a “failure”.”

To blame social media itself is not entirely fair and would be what academics call “technological determinism,” the idea that technology drives ideology rather than the other way around. In fact Facebook exists only because our culture itself has narcissistic, exploitative, anti-community, anti-social tendencies that business people in Silicon Valley are able to take advantage of.

So the answer is delete your Facebook account, right? It’s not so easy. Facebook has done a good job of eliminating competition and embedding itself in the culture. I’m on the board of an organization that uses Facebook for communication. If we write another book we’ll also, likely, need to do a social media campaign. As much as I’d like to I can’t delete my account.

Frankly, I haven’t been using Facebook much. That’s become increasingly easy for me despite Facebook’s allegedly addictive qualities. I find my Facebook news feed depressing and uninteresting. It’s mostly a stream of ineffective political ranting and virtue signalling even after Facebook tweaked their opaque algorithm to favor more personal posting. Sadly, the other thing I see in my feed are posts from distant acquaintances who, I suspect, are lonely and depressed. Facebook has an insidious ability to hook lonely people and make them more isolated.

As we’re about the practical and positive here at Root Simple, I’ve been pondering several strategies for managing Facebook. I went through Facebook’s settings and disabled everything that Facebook lets you disable. I stopped posting links to Root Simple in Facebook in the hopes of training people who want to keep up with me to go to this blog rather than look at my Facebook posts. If and when I post in Facebook I use Federico Tobon’s rule, “Post positive things. Mostly yours. Not too much.”

One of the strategies I find most promising is a browser extension called AdNauseum, developed by artist/programmer Daniel C. Howe and privacy expert Helen Nissenbaum. AdNauseum simultaneously blocks ads while, in the background, clicking on every ad in an effort to obfuscate and pollute the data advertisers are attempting to extract from us. Howe and Nissenbaum also created an similar extension called TrackMeNot that periodically does random Google, Yahoo and Bing searches to create a trail of digital noise. Unsurprisingly, Google is not happy about either program and took the unusual step of flagging AdNauseum as malware. Thankfully you can still download and use it via the AdNauseum website. The more of us that download and use these programs the better the noise and obfuscation strategy will work.

And yet, I don’t think any of these Facebook hacks are completely satisfactory. Perhaps its time to confront the core issues of loneliness and separation in our culture directly and consider Facebook as just an unfortunate byproduct of these deeper problems.  Which is why I want to hear from you, our readers. How do you use Facebook? If you deleted your account why did you do so and what were the implications? Do you use other social media, such as Instagram, as an alternative to Facebook?

Saturday Tweets: Mostly Bikes

3 Mules Update

We’ve posted before about filmmaker John McDonald’s ongoing effort to tell the remarkable story of the “3 Mules” man. John called me last week to tell me that he’s found an editor for his film and that he’s fundraising to complete the project. Contributions are tax deductible and can be made through 3mulesmovie.com.

Here’s what John had to say in a recent newsletter:

On December 23, 2012, I meet a one-of-kind human being traveling with three animal companions and take this photo.

My first photo of “The Mules” taken a block from our home.

A neighbor friend calls and tells me to run out of the house, down to the corner and look east. He won’t tell me what to look for, but just says, “It’s right up your alley, John!” Like so many other people, my first reaction is “Wow! I’ve never seen this before!” And then I’m thinking who is he and what is he doing? Is he lost in the wrong century? Is he homeless? Is he on a mission?

I’m intrigued and want to learn more, so I chase him down. We exchange a few words, but he is in a hurry to move on. He asks me if he is heading in the right direction to intersect the Arroyo Seco (south of the Rose Bowl), and that is enough to give me a clue as to where he might be spending the night.

The next morning is Christmas Eve. My whole family is together for the holidays and I’m reluctant to go off on a wild goose (or mule) chase. But I’m a documentary filmmaker. I sense a good story. The dog needs a walk anyway, so I head for the Arroyo in search of the guy with the mules. No luck at first, but then I finally discover him, already packing up to start on the next leg of his trip to who knows where. He accepts a cup of coffee that I have brought with me. He talks a bit, very softly.

With some reluctance he allows me to retrieve the video camera from my car. Surprisingly, with the camera running, he talks more. I learn that this 65-year-old man calls himself Mule, considering himself “just another one of the mules.” They have traveled for nearly three decades, through sixteen states and into Mexico. For the last ten years, they have lived outdoors every single day.

Mule tells me that throughout his travels he has noticed an ever-increasing urban sprawl. Much of the open land that once allowed them to move freely and spend the night in secluded spots is disappearing. More and more cars are filling up the roadways, and the expanding urban infrastructure seems to serve only one purpose: accommodate more automobiles.

His words resonate with me, and I realize then and there that I am about to embark on a filmmaking journey like none I have ever experienced.

Now, five years later, my journey is far from over.  In 200 days of filming over a 27-month period, I shot 300 hours of footage. A ten-minute short film called MULE: Living on the Outside was edited and has screened at a number of film festivals and fundraising events as I work to raise the money to complete the full-length feature documentary.

If you would like to help, tax-deductible donations can be made on my website 3MulesMovie.com.  Your support is greatly appreciated, and I look forward to sharing the completed film.

I sent a donation this morning because I think this is an important story about public space, the problems of modernity and environmental degradation. John is a talented filmmaker and I’m looking forward to seeing the finished film.

May Morris: Embroidery as Art

Before the great uglification that was the 20th century there was a brief period of aesthetic hope led by the prophetic John Ruskin and his followers, most notably William Morris. A 2017 exhibition and catalog brings some much needed recognition to his daughter May Morris.

May was probably the best embroiderer the world has ever known. Her work is more like painting than stitching and she raised the craft to levels not seen since the late medieval period.

May was a gifted designer and artist and worked in many mediums including fashion and jewelry.

You can read her embroidery manual Decorative Needlework online.

Are Root Simple readers also avid embroiderers? Leave a comment!