Word of the Day
Vertiginous (adj., vurr-TIDJE-ih-nuss)
Something that causes vertigo, especially by being high in altitude, steep, turning, or counting to four[teen] improperly in Spanish.
Gif of the Day
DogsShiba InuChipmunk cheeksThat's it, I'm gonna kill himSmile for the camera非常に忍耐強い?
Link of the Day
Zadie Smith - Generation Why
So Facebook has been...feeding our news for the last week or so. It's nothing new; Zuckerberg has been apologizing for Facebook being kinda creepily terrible for fourteen years now. (It has also been alive for fourteen years, in case you're keeping score at home.) Facebook has defined—and changed—a generation, and it merits our observation and critique.
One of the more interesting critiques is David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's film The Social Network, which uses an ecstatic truth version of the Facebook founding story to examine the culture and generation that made it from the eyes of an elite boomer scribe and director. It's a magnificent film, one of the true classics of modern cinema. The Social Network wants you to think about what Facebook is doing to the world and if that's a good thing (spoilers: it's not, at least the movie doesn't think so).
Zadie Smith, brilliant writer that she is, does one better and examines both Facebook and The Social Network, making the latter's criticism explicit but aiming at the heart of the matter and not the stomach:
When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned.
With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.
Is it possible that we have begun to think of ourselves that way? It seemed significant to me that on the way to the movie theater, while doing a small mental calculation (how old I was when at Harvard; how old I am now), I had a Person 1.0 panic attack. Soon I will be forty, then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan. Can you have that feeling, on Facebook? I’ve noticed—and been ashamed of noticing—that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX
When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?
Let's first take a moment to realize how freaking good Zadie Smith is as a writer.
Also, she's righter than we thought in 2010, when this essay was published, and maybe even than we realize now, when Facebook has what it thinks are our lives. Anyway. Go take fifteen and read this brilliance, then take another fifteen to discuss it with an actual human being. And then go buy something else by Zadie Smith.
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