cancer of the mind, y'all

If you were in my brain, amid the veritable minefield of thoughts about various and sundry first-world white girl problems, about once a week you would stumble across this gem, verbatim:

Facebook. You dirty little bitch.

I'm hip to your games, Zuckerberg. I know what you're up to. All you want to do is suck me into the vacuum. You want me to click on 17 different profiles and waste half my morning stalking people I haven't seen since elementary school and click through every single photo in some random college friend's album from a trip to Hawaii where at least 70 percent of the pictures are virtually indistinguishable from one another. You want me in your web. Because as long as I'm in your web, I'm looking at your ads. And as long as I'm doing that, you're cashing checks.

I get it.

Sometimes we rage over changes to Facebook's format, and sometimes we swoon. (Typically far more raging than swooning, to be fair.) We loved it when you eliminated the 60-photo limit for individual albums. Now I don't even have to be selective about which photos I upload and write pithy captions for! We thought. But it also turns out that when there are 350 photos in an album I'm probably going to click through all of them, and why would you want me to look at just 60 pages of ads when I could look at eleventy billion?

Every move is calculated. And while some of them can be pitched to us as alterations to make our user experience more satisfying, they're all really about one thing: the Benjamins. Or whatever president is on a zillion dollar bill.

And as Tupac said, I ain't mad at ya, Zuckerberg. You gotta pay the bills. You gotta keep your swimming pool full of dollar bills fresh and clean and ready for your backstroke. But do you have any idea, any tiny inkling in your imagination, of what all that ad revenue is doing to our collective emotional EFFED THE EFF UP levels?

Because for you, Zuck, the changes you just made to the messaging system simply took the vacuum to the next level. By showing me my entire message history with someone when I click to send them a new message, you knew you were going to suck me right up and that I'd probably get stuck in the vacuum bag and maybe forget to eat or drink and just waste away to nothing clicking on old messages while you were busy eating caviar with gold flakes and trying on $50,000 sneakers. But for me? And for most every woman I know? I didn't look at a one of your damn ads because I just spent the last half hour reevaluating my entire existence because of a three-line Facebook message I sent TWO AND A HALF YEARS AGO.

Stefanie and I were discussing this last night over dinner, this incalculable impact that Facebook has had and will continue to have on our emotional IQs, on our interpersonal relationships, on our consciousness. And after I suggested that someone should do an academic study on what it really means for our EFFED THE EFF UP levels to click through pictures of your significant other's exes for hours on end or stalk your own exes' wedding photos or compare the size of your own ass to the size of an ex's fiancee's ass, I came up with what I feel is a very reasonable solution to this whole situation.

Why don't we just file a class action suit against Facebook for emotional damages? And frankly, I'm sure a large percentage of us could prove, if necessary, some type of physical bodily harm caused by Facebook, too. There are enough of us involved in this thing that we'll just do whatever it was that Erin Brockovich did with those people out in California. (They were being poisoned by chemicals in water, whereas we are being poisoned in our souls and our hearts and minds, as Stefanie so rightly pointed out.) I can't remember exactly what all the legal jargon was with all of that, but we'll just do an Erin Brockovich class action suit and gather everybody up at once and with all that potential emotional wreckage, proving that Facebook is cancerous to the mind and a dangerous vacuum of heinously old baggage should be a fairly open and shut case.

I will be collecting signatures for a petition effective immediately. Personally, I feel like we probably should get Erin Brockovich herself on this thing. Or at the very least, Julia Roberts.

So if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go prepare the document for everyone's John Hancock. I just need to spend about 30 minutes reading subliminal messages into status updates first.


cheers,
elizabeth