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?

I have a love/hate relationship with computers and the internet. On the one hand I’m thankful for the platform of this blog and podcast as well as instant access to a whole world of useful how-to information and videos. But, the other day while doing an image search for William Blake’s Urizen, I landed on a hateful anti-Semitic website. Grossed out, I retreated to the computer-free early twentieth century technology of my garage workshop where the Butlerian Jihad backstory of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune remains in effect.

Jihad, Butlerian: (see also Great Revolt) — the crusade against computers, thinking machines, and conscious robots begun in 201 B.G. and concluded in 108 B.G. Its chief commandment remains in the O.C. Bible as “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

Alas, I often cheat with my liberal use of Sketchup.

Along the lines of “we need to rethink this internet thing,” artist Jenny Odell has written a fascinating piece about a phenomenon wherein poorly made objects incarnate via Instagram and other social media platforms. Her essay,  There’s No Such Thing as a Free Watch (pdf) traces the origin of watches pimped by social media “influencers.” These watches begin not as a practical way to tell time but, rather, as a physical manifestation of social media interactions.

Amidst the shifting winds of Alibaba sites, dropshipping networks, Shopify templates, Instagram accounts and someone somewhere concocting the details of “Our Story,” a watch was formed, like a sudden precipitate in an unstable cloud. And almost immediately after being produced, it is reviled, doomed to live out its stainless steel life, less a teller of time than an incarnation of petty deception. In that sense, it may be the best artifact of capitalism one could ask for.

You almost need to go back to Thomas Aquinas’ complex Aristotelian thoughtstylings about transubstantiation to wrap your head around the story Odell tells.

While we’re on the topic of transubstantiating things, the Church of England hopes to encourage folks to give up single use plastics for lent via a plastic-free lenten discipline (pdf). It’s a great list of suggestions to which we may need to add social media.

If you haven’t gotten around to reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick you should. I just finished reading it and, next to the Bible, no other book comes close to Moby Dick’s sprawling, hallucinatory weirdness. It reads like a long prose poem, a philosophical horror novel, a meditation on our relationship with the natural world and, well, who knows what else.

I’m haunted by one chapter in particular, “The Money Rope.” In this chapter Melville describes the narrator, Ishmael, tied by a line to Queequeg, who is assigned to the dangerous task of cutting up a whale over the side of the ship. Melville, as he does often in this book, moves from the gruesome particulars of whaling to a metaphor about the human condition.

So strongly and metaphysically did I conceive of my situation then, that while earnestly watching his motions, I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death. Therefore, I saw that here was a sort of interregnum in Providence; for its even-handed equity never could have sanctioned so gross an injustice. And yet still further pondering–while I jerked him now and then from between the whale and the ship, which would threaten to jam him–still further pondering, I say, I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you nap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would I only had the management of it.

In our highly individualized, deracinated age we all can benefit from a reminder of the inescapable ties that bind us.

You can read Moby Dick online via Project Gutenberg and you can also listen to a free version read by an eclectic bunch of actors and artists and accompanied by a work of art for each chapter.