With Friends Like These . . .

ANTI-SOCIAL NETWORKING DISORDER

MARK ZUCKERBERG - Newest smartest guy on the planet . . .

Like many post-modern gazillionaires (are there any other kind?) Mark Zuckerberg followed the time-tested formula for amassing a large fortune. 

1. Steal a good idea from someone.

2. Get a trusted friend or associate to pay for the groundwork.

3. Betray the friend or associate and sue everybody involved.

4. Sell half the deal to a VC thereby at least assuring yourself of multi-millionaire status even if the thing flops.

5. Last (and certainly least) begin having your public relations machine describe you as a 'philanthropist' after you start giving away amounts which are, relatively speaking, roughly akin to what you and I drop into the Salvation Army bucket at Christmas.

5.5 (optional) Once the word is out that you're a raving, lunatic larcenist, adopt a self satisfied pose which prominently features your far above average IQ and the notion that others just don't understand what you're doing for the culture - for humanity.

(By far the biggest problem w/ step 5.5 is that there are at least 50,000 people with the same IQ, several of whom inevitably work for the San Jose Mercury News, and who will soon enough begin to publish expositive articles detailing just how big of a prick you really are...)

In short - a perfect business plan for the Second Guilded Age. As a post-Marxist, I view phenomena like Facebook and Linked-In roughly on the same par that your average Jehova's Witness views abortion.

I uniformly advise all children that literally everything they write on Facebook, as well as everything written about them will, in the fullness of time, be published on the front page of the New York Times.  Not the first time a grown up has, with honorable intent, invented a monster to scare a child.

I absolutely love the term 'social networking'.  A perky euphemism which the data marketing industry has coined and stuffed down the lexicon tube. May I offer that the state of the art be more accurately be described as 'skeezy advertising to idiots with valid, functioning credit card numbers'.

Not that there isn't some social good flowing from Facebook.  The time gang members spend on the site must surely take away from the time they are spending committing non-virtual crimes.

I noted during my year on Facebook that there were no virtually positive aspects to the activity. The most disturbing negative aspect was that people who hadn't been in touch for years could suddenly pop up out of nowhere.   Some deep knowledge dislodged when I would follow up on these long lost 'friends'.  Alas, there was usually a pretty good reason we were no longer in touch. Almost without exception, anyone I could possibly want to be in contact with is normally in the I-phone.

Do you really want Dabney Berkowitz from Sunny Side High School asking "What [you've] been up to lately??!!" if you didn't really share what you were up to with her when you were class-mates? 


Thought not. 

A fleeting tinge of self satisfaction was felt the day I shuttered my Facebook 'account' (wonderful slang for 'granting a large transnational corporation complete, unsupervised and unfettered access to information one probably wouldn't give the entirety of to his closest associates or family'). 

I did this the day the movie 'The Social Network' was released. Somehow, it seemed the right time.

To sum up I refer you to the promotional tag line of 'The Social Network':

"You don't make 500 million friends without making a few enemies" 

I'll say. 

Count me among them.

I hear they're growing like Kudzu over at 'Linked In' too. This site is (if such a thing is actually conceivable) an even more potentially horrid thing than Facebook. Take all of the wonderful attributes of Facebook, then cut out the innocent children and harmless, facile adults. You're left with a bunch of rabid, moist-fanged middle managers anxious to put a spike in their cube-mate to secure a nine thousand dollar raise.


Now THAT's cooking with gas, don't you think?