The rumor was that Dislike was en route to Facebook, but I don't think that was ever an authentic option and would corrode the service. It was eventually determined that Liking Things wasn't sufficiently granular, and so there are a raft of New Likings being rolled out. Except they're missing a few key inflections that apply to ninety-nine point four percent of posts.

I have conversations with people all the time about whether or not they're going to quit Facebook or they're going to quit Facebook for real now, and I can't think of a single time anything like that has happened. Well, one time. A friend of Brenna's determined that this device was essentially a kind of comparison engine, endlessly assessing her vis a vis other people - all of whom were engaging in a rigorously performative perma-joy - and that being exposed to these rays was not a net gain.

I feel like the assumption of Facebook is more or less a preview of our cyberpunk future, where people who refuse or can't afford the cortical implant will become pitiful creatures of exile. We offload a lot of our processing and memory to others, and to machines, and it's simply a fact that appearing to know when someone's birthday is grants social power. Foregoing it would be hard. This is why being presumed an asshole is so liberating. If I remember something, people are all like holy shit.

Sometimes there is a game I want to try on Facebook, and only there, so I use it then - like a platform. I don't put it into the vein of my arm, ever to drip, because that's not how I use technology. In the end that's the distinction. I would have been considered, and indeed was considered, an anomalous sort of weirdo person for the level of integration technology had in my life as a youth; my mother was forever worried about its effect on my "spirit." I'm willing to entertain the idea that I enjoyed playing videogames then, even enjoyed them a lot. It's a policy I've maintained, even going to far as to invent two young people to play them with, which can only be called "dedication." But the level of integration and offload you see with Facebook is deeper than anything I ever experienced with Warlords II, and I played a fuck ton of Warlords II. Because it ostensibly has to do with interest in others, it doesn't get tagged as pathological, even if using it means you ignore actual people.

(CW)TB out.