(satire) Facebook creates a safe space for Facebook users harmed by Facebook
It makes so much sense that I want to stick my head in a microwave. Studies are popping up showing how unchecked social media consumption is devastating for the psyche. We are becoming a more polarized, dehumanizing, and argumentative country on social media. Social media is being used to take away the jobs and livelihoods of those who got recorded having a bad human moment. There’s more good than evil in the real world but there’s more evil than good in the social media world so let’s all sink further into it, shall we? Maybe we can take a five minute break from telling others to work on their own character while doing exactly nothing to better ourselves.
Would you patronize a daycare run by pedophiles? Participate in a beauty pageant overseen by sex traffickers? Go to a rehab facility funded by Columbian cartels? Buy tablets addressing gastrointestinal distress from a Thai restaurateur? Attend a women’s or gay rights protest organized by Shiites? Start a neighborhood watch with the Bloods and Crips? Buy a book on aging gracefully written by an L.A. plastic surgeon? Learn to write with subtlety from…basically anyone in Hollywood (Coen Brothers notwithstanding)? Donate to a racial equality campaign coordinated by Neo-Nazis? Take a class on memory techniques, basic cognition, and conversation skills taught by Paris Hilton? Attempt to kickstart any enterprise in conjunction with the federal government in which honesty, trustworthiness, reliability, timeliness, and fiscal responsibility are guiding values? Might as well take up these and other Sisyphean tasks as hobbies if you sign up for Meta; uber-nerd Mark Zuckerberg’s thinly-veiled attempt to lure you into a world where he’s the handsomest, most athletic, and most charming kid in your high school homeroom.
I mean, he’s basically Tony Stark in 2015’s Captain America: Civil War at this point—minus the charisma and success with the ladies—using his technology to rewrite the uncomfortable Indian burn-infested parts of his childhood memories with a sappier ending. He’s basically Anthony Hopkins in Freejack, using a virtual world to house his consciousness until he can steal a more beautiful body from the likes of…Emilio Estevez? I mean…okay I’ll roll with it, being only moderately handsome myself.
Is he like Leo and going to incept some cockamamie scheme into our minds, like collectively realigning objective standards of rugged attractiveness to fit his cool youth pastor features or putting in to buy him a bling-encrusted spaceship so he and the other billionaire nerds can hash out there differences over Stratego while watching the earth rotate on its axis before their mom really cheeses them off by calling and telling them the streetlamps are on and they’ve exactly twenty minutes to reenter the atmosphere and brush their teeth? I don’t even know where that sentence began and should have ended. Do you? Possibly should have never been put to print, but here we are. You’ve only yourself to blame. You’re four paragraphs in at this point. Time to commit. Somewhere Faulkner is blushing and gushing with parental pride.
Is his objective like Pierce Brosnan’s in Lawnmower Man? Is he going to take mentally retarded men to a virtual realm where they can have their chromosomes realigned through hyperactive optical therapy and make them smart and evil (he could start with Matt Damon) so they can do his bidding by getting back at his bullies from high school and bloggers who constantly mine the lowest common denominator while making fun of him? Excuse me and talk amongst yourselves while I sweep my home for hidden assassins who’ve only just recently acquired an awkward and off-putting genius level intellect.
Feel free to contrive and email me your own joke based on other crappy movies in the subgenre of man’s relationship to complex machines and artificial consciousness. Best entry gets a shoutout on my podcast (I don’t have a podcast). Options include Transcendence, Tron, any of the Terminator sequels after Judgment Day (the first two movies are classic and off-limits), Eagle Eye, or Scanners. I’d drop the Transformers franchise into the mix but it’s an ethical dilemma for me to label two-hour, plotless toy commercials as “movies”.
This could also be a ruse to mine even more data on each person for some other comically evil plan The Simpsons’ staff of writers would be much better than I at creating and lampooning. I want to name the next child I father Lamar Geoffrey and if I wait long enough and Mark has his way he’ll beat out the warlike advancements of Google, Pepsi, Huntington Bank, Amazon, and Oprah and I’ll have to name him Facebook/Meta Presents Lamar Geoffrey Roberts; a subsidiary of Capitalists Taking Things Too Far, LLC.
I heard Meta’s virtual world is restroom-free so weak, sickly men can avoid virtual swirlies. I heard real-life jocks’ avatars will default to bearing a physical handicap and ugly combover because that’ll show ‘em! I heard those with social anxiety who have absolutely no business being on the societal suffering amplifier that is social media can interact with others who have social anxiety, reach new heights and create new forms of social anxiety, and the aggregated total of social anxiety (and attached sick day call-ins) can grow exponentially because who needs a productive, robust economy when there’s mental phantoms to chase and shadows to flee?
I heard men who can’t take a hint when they constantly DM attractive women on Facebook and get left on “read” will have free reign to sexually pester virtual hotties because Zuck knows one side of his bread is buttered by greasy incels and dudes with just-north-of-heroin-junkie physiques who make a habit of asking a woman for sex before they’ve asked for her name.
I heard Meta is a place where unskilled millennials who’ve stupidly adopted communist ideals can go and whine to other avatars about the rich not paying their taxes while also passing the time not learning marketable skills. I heard Mark is using the money he makes from this to launch a movie studio because he feels he missed his calling (with a last name like Zuckerberg) financing and producing farcical comedies.
I heard your children STILL won’t need a valid state ID signifying they’re of legal adult age to access this and other Facebook brand properties and you can rest easy knowing you’re giving those who own windowless vans and would kidnap and diddle your children a sporting chance.
I heard you’ll be able to mine and trade virtual cryptocurrency which can then be traded for cryptocurrency which—as we all know because we have buddies we didn’t really hang with in high school incessantly telling us—can be traded for digital currency, which has a brief but significant history of being used as a viable stand-in for physical currency, which used to be backed by actual solid bars of gold and then we can collectively ignore those nagging doubts in the backs of our minds as regards our reliance on tech and score bonuses with Big Pharma by quashing said nagging doubts in pill form. I heard Luddites are going to cross the line out of pure frustration from niche movement to all-out suicide cult and pass dee special ingredient-ed Kool-Aid on dee left hand side.
I heard the Meta goggles come with a pointy needle option that jacks directly into the feeling center of your brain so you can utilize all five senses to experience what’s actually happening as Aldous Huxley rolls over in his grave and you can escape your dull, insufferable life even farther and be totally distracted while some emotionless goon jabs you with the COVID vaccine while Joe Biden sniffs your hair while the vaccine changes your DNA to form your body into a more aesthetically pleasing object of Joe’s creepy ogling and other ridiculous right-wing conspiracies come to fruition and we completely lose sight of where we were and where we are headed and our children are the ones who suffer.
But hey, that’s just what I heard.
Hey there, beloved reader! Don’t stop reading yet. I enjoy writing and creating content for you. Recently, I took on the Herculean task of fixing America and wrote a book on the subject; the very literal-titled “I’ll Fix America Tonight”. There is a a link where you can conveniently add the book to your Amazon cart (if you’re flush with about $20 in cash right now) or your wish list (if around $20 in cash is a little too much right now, but hypothetically not too much in the near future). Buy it, and help end poverty (namely my poverty). Thanks for reading!
Image taken from:
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/10/28/facebook-name-change-meta/
