Purging Distraction for the Good of Society
I stopped eating pizza (or anything else) from Domino's decades ago because I found out the company funded Operation Rescue, a notorious anti-abortion organization.
I wasn't ever a big Chick Filet customer but their open anti-homosexual stance keeps me away.
Hobby Lobby? Same shit, different day.
I'm not a big boycotter on any level beyond individual but when I see a company that openly does not align with my personal values, I pull out. Not looking for cheers and a parade. No pats on the back. No virtue to signal here.
Let's face it. Zuckerberg started Facebook as a skeevy fucker who wanted to punish women who wouldn't give him the time of day by providing other skeevy fuckers the opportunity to rate the women online. That's the foundation of this thing that has ballooned to three billion users and serves no pragmatic purpose but to sell shit to us.
In 1964, Marshall McLuhan famously wrote, "The medium is the message." His point was that the way in which we receive information is often just as influential, if not more, than the content of the information itself.
Around a third of Americans regularly get their news from Facebook, according to the latest study from Pew Research Center.
MIT Technology Review received an internal Facebook report from 2019 and learned that Eastern European troll farm "content was reaching 140 million US users per month—75 percent of whom had never followed any of the pages."
Facebook prematurely turned off safeguards designed to thwart misinformation and rabble rousing after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in last year’s elections in a moneymaking move that a company whistleblower alleges contributed to the deadly Jan. 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol.
The medium is the message. The message is that we are easily fooled by convenience and faux division. The message is that we are the product being sold.
Two years ago, I'd had it. I left the Literate Ape Facebook page and Instagram feed live but I nuked my own.
I came back six months ago, mostly to prove to myself that I could. Limited it to 100 'friends.' Kept it under control. Sort of like eating a Domino's pizza once a month and feeling fine about it.
This week, David and I decided in light of the latest round of reporting that this platform was not in line with our values (as if it ever had been). So no more Faceborg for Literate Ape. No more LiterateApestagram. I nuked mine again for good measure.
The only reason to post this quick hit is to encourage you to do the same.
