THINGS I HATE - SOCIAL NETWORKING

Sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly distraught, I fantasize about quitting my job and organizing a group of individuals who will assist me in destroying all social-networking entities. And I’m not talking about 4chan-like pranks or some other nerd hacking shit. I want to physically and simultaneously storm the offices and data centers of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and whatever other online garbage people like to waste their lives on and bolt the doors shut before igniting chemical fires around their buildings’ perimeters. It will be tough, but through rigorous coordination and preparation my comrades will be certain to torch every last backup and redundancy so all user data will be lost forever.

I admit that I am really into schadenfreude, especially when it involves stupid people, but that’s not the only reason for my destructive daydreaming. I posit that networking sites only exist for two purposes: blatant self-promotion (which makes sense for those who are already famous and is completely understandable, no matter how nauseating it may be) and ego-stroking. When I overhear people’s conversations about their recent Facebook et. al, activities it makes me want to punch myself in the neck because there’s nothing I can do or say about it that will make sense to them (except destroying the source of the problem). Ever since Friendster in the early 00s I’ve watched many friends succumb to the evil world of thinking the outside world cares about them. If you frequent any of these types of sites, ask yourself how many hours a day you waste on them and then think about all the productive stuff you could be doing during that time.

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A common excuse given for spending hours a day on these things is that they make it easy to keep up with and contact a person’s so-called friends (most people only have a maximum three to four real, enjoyable friends at any given time and the rest are bags of flesh to call out of boredom) in one convenient array and makes planning Friday “gal pal” nights easier, but that’s just flawed logic. The modern cell phone is a much more convenient and quicker short-term planning tool and it doesn’t provide the type of protection against real rejection that social-networking offers. It’s much easier to not respond to someone’s message than to tell someone “I don’t really like you,” in your own voice. And that right there is the main problem: Social networking is turning people into gutless liars who are afraid of having their feewings huwt :(. Grow up you fucking babies. You need to learn how to deal with people who don’t like you in person because there are a lot of them.

Those who use these sites do so because they want to pretend that what they say and who they are matters. This desire to be more than just another piece of walking meat with a name isn’t a new one, however, pretending to be able to do something about it is. No one really cares about your new sunglasses or why your house smells like fish or what flavor Pop-Tart you ate for breakfast, even if they engage you about such things. They only pretend to care because it’s a distraction from their job or professor or depression. In the olden times you just accepted the fact that no one cared and got back to plowing the cornfield and scooping up cow dung. Social networking has offered people the promise that anyone can be a celebrity, but because most people are either ugly, boring, and borderline retarded (usually all three), this is simply an impossibility.

Anyway, back to my fantasy: I can just picture everyone on the East Coast waking up before work (the plan would be to attack the offices of these sites in the wee hours of the morning). They’ll make some coffee, turn on the TV, and sit down at the computer for their morning personal-message fix. “Oh no!” they’ll scream. “Why doesn’t my account exist anymore?” BECAUSE IT’S GONE. FOREVER! Meanwhile, I’ll be skipping throughout the streets all day long, pointing to people who are obviously frowning because their digital selves were murdered and laughing in their faces while saying stuff like, “Hey, loser, are you really depressed because you can’t talk to your fake friends on the internet anymore? READ A BOOK, ASSHOLE!”

I’d find one of those 17-year-old girls who posts photos of herself with that eating-vagina finger pose, cackle like a witch, and shout: “HOW DOES IT FEEL TO HAVE TO THINK ABOUT HOW FUCKING RETARDED YOU ARE ALL DAY INSTEAD OF TRYING TO FIGHT THE INEVITABLE ON THE INTERNET? I HOPE YOU GET HERPES AND GONORRHEA AND ANAL WARTS ALL AT THE SAME TIME AND DIE!”