So I gave up Facebook. It’s been just over a month, so my account is gone for good. Whatever “gone for good” means in Zuck’s warped worldview we all have to live in. I’ve got no illusions I’m not being tracked a million ways from Sunday. I mostly don’t give a shit. I don’t make any secret that I think most things are crap, so I’m not sure what great insight anyone plans to glean from my online behavior other than I think everything sucks. Let’s face it: chances are I dislike you. If you wonder if I dislike you, the ambiguity means I probably don’t. I’m not really all that subtle. Very, very, few people ever look at this blog, so if you’re reading this the odds are in your favor that I don’t dislike you. But there’s still a chance.

There was really nothing special about the argument that made me say “fuck it.” Of course it was an argument. What the hell else happens on Facebook? On the Book of Faces it’s either look at pictures of cute kids, cute pets, cute kids with cute pets, ugly kids with cute pets, or it’s a hellscape of looking into the empty souls of people you either never want to see again or regret having ever met. The two groups are largely made of up of different sets of people, thank God, which is the only thing that kept it even marginally tolerable. Carla still shows me the cute kid/pet pictures, so I’m good on that. And the kids are all legitimately cute, by the way. I think I’d un-followed the one person with the ugly kid a while back.

I’m still on Twitter. It’s a hellscape, too, but somehow it doesn’t bother me as much. Makes no sense, but there it is. I’ve started looking at Reddit a bit more than I used to. I don’t see me ever becoming a heavy user, but I’ve been fairly narrow in the subs I follow and none of them seem to have devolved into what Neal Stephenson has dubbed “the Miasma” in his latest doorstop … er … book Fall, or Dodge in Hell.¹ If they do, I’ll stop going there, too. It occurred to me the other day that I’ve been watching — and participating in — online arguments for more than 30 years. The biggest difference I can see between then and now in terms of online discourse is that back then people were dicks to each other for free. Now it’s pretty much built into everyone’s business model. And, as we all know, if the right people can make money off it, it’s OK.

U-S-A! U-S-A!

So I’m dusting off the old blog again. I’m not making any promises to anyone that this is going to be a regular thing, but every once in a while I just want to write. The odds of anyone seeing this are fairly low, but are non-zero, and that’s enough. Sometimes 280 characters isn’t enough to get people pissed off at me. Sometimes I need a bit more elbow room.

Can’t say I’m all that enamored with the new WordPress user interface. But that’s a post for another day.

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¹ About halfway through, thanks for asking. It’s OK. It’s no Anathem or Snow Crash, but it’s not Seveneves either, thank God. It kind of wraps up (I’d assume) some things that have been cooking since Cryptonomicon, and it’s a sequel to Reamde inasmuch as it’s set in that world. Enoch Root shows up. That’s kind of cool. Maybe it’s his hobby of fighting with period-accurate swords, but somewhere along the line editors have apparently just quit suggesting to Stephenson that he should tighten up his plots.