Since U Been Gone

They say it takes 21 days to break a habit. I'm 72 hours in.....

and I feel like a toilet.

With all the shit coming my way over my departure from the book of faces, it's hard not to feel like a repository for poo-pooing. At first, I must admit, there was a drizzle of encouragement from supportive friends and allies. But then the clouds broke, and the face of Mark Zuckerberg appeared, and fire and brimstone rained down from the sky in a downpour of judgment, guilt, and fear that took me by social networking surprise.

And I’m not just talking about my friends. Facebook, you were the first to guilt me. Yes, you.

For those of you who have never deactivated your facebook account before, I’d like to let you in on a little secret. Before you can proceed with the deactivation process, you are confronted by a screen that desperately attempts to pull you back from the ledge you are about to jump off of.

“Are you sure you want to deactivate your facebook?” it says. (read: put the gun down).

Then, if that wasn’t enough to make you think twice, it says the most ridiculous statement you have ever read:

“Your 1,643 friends will no longer be able to keep in touch with you.” (read: you will soon have 0 friends).

Wait, so let me get this straight. With this deactivation, you’re saying that I will be friendless, phone-less, e-mail-less, and homeless? Well, in that case…..

Seriously though, that’s some crazy guilt right there. Like, bananas crazy. But it only gets better. There are…. pictures.

Yup, at the top of the deactivation screen there are pictures – pulled from your tagged photos no doubt – and above them, they say, “Michael will miss you. Claire will miss you. Jason will miss you, etc” using some of the names of your 1,643 “friends.”

Let’s see. I doubt Michael cares much about me since the last time I spoke to him was when we were in high school. As for Claire, well, she’s in rehab, so I don’t think I’m what she’s really missing right now. And as for Jason, well, I’ve never met Jason, so, he can miss me all he wants but, I could give a rat’s ass.

That right there is some grade A, high quality, award winning guilt. And if there’s anything I resent more than stone washed jeans and a matching jean jacket, it’s guilt. But what I really despise is the implication on this page that by proceeding to deactivate, you are somehow committing social suicide. This just in ladies and gents: without facebook your life is over.

This is, in large part, what I dislike about American culture. If you’re not doing what the rest of the kids are doing or if you don’t look like the rest of the kids or you don’t act like the rest of the kids, your life is somehow over. Why? Because of a little thing called the “tyranny of the majority.” Alexis de Tocqueville coined this term in his book called “Democracy in America” (1835). de Tocqueville views the “tyranny of the majority” as a menace to American democracy and society because it seeks to destroy dissent and wipe away individual freedoms, choices, and opinions, and any possibility of subversion. In other words, when a majority rule or majority race or majority culture dominates a given society, it tyrannizes it by dictating and enforcing the majority’s views, norms, and ethos upon it, thus creating a cultural and social paradigm that everyone must uphold. (We’ve seen this play out over the course of American history all too well, particularly when it comes to understanding race, gender, sexuality and immigration status).

In light of de Tocqueville’s shrewdness, I’d venture to say that the tyranny of facebook is upon us. I mean, everyone’s on facebook these days. Chances are your 87 year old grandmother in Topeka, Kansas has an account. So that leaves very little wiggle room for those of us (any of us) seeking to remove ourselves from it. And facebook doesn’t want you to. That’s where the tyranny comes in. The “majority” doesn’t want to be contradicted. It doesn’t believe in alternative ways of being, it believes in its own self-righteousness, its own mythology, its own power. And if you challenge it, god help you, you just might find your own peace of mind. Or that you’re covered in a lot of other people’s bull shit.