The facebook horror movie

I have one really good reason to be grateful for facebook, yet I still hate it. Why? Broadly, because it kills friendship.

Let’s expose a more minor annoyance first. People can’t bear to admit this: Fb is mostly pretty snooze-worthy. Even interesting lives are rendered dull by a succession of tedious updates. And I’m not just talking about your fb status, arse-numbingly leaden as it is. The situation is worse than that – I mean that my updates are just as bad. So we’re actually boring each other, sweeties.

But we can’t stop. Fb’s combination of voyeurism and exhibitionism is surprisingly addictive, even when you’re only letting me know about your clever cat or vile tax return. And now we’re getting mobile updates as well, so it’s only a matter of time before hand-held devices give way to wall-posts beamed directly into the brain. This is social-networking as smack, crack or crystal. It will destroy your soul.

I exaggerate? Well, let us go then, you and I, bfb -before facebook. It wasn’t that long ago, really. It only feels ages because your soul has been sucked. We’re going to a little country church. It’s a lovely Sunday in early spring. There are probably daffodils and primroses and dead bodies in the churchyard. Indoors, a small girl is restive. At last she breaks free from the attempts to make her sit still, pulls her coat right over her head, stumps off down the aisle mid-service, and shouts “I’m in disguise! I’m in disguise!”

I suppose she was briefly disguised. But they still knew who she was. And that is how things tend to work, even when we are not dealing with a child. One can see through people’s disguises, usually, quite soon – when they are with us, in the room, even on the ‘phone. Truly successful social con-artists are pretty rare.

Yet fb makes life very easy for those who want to pretend to be someone else and gain your trust, and for the dysfunctional weirdos who badly need to disguise what they really are. Now I’m not proposing some normals-only regime. I know you’re not normal, and I even have doubts about myself. But the whole fb apparatus of ‘friends’, ‘friends’ of ‘friends’, ‘friend’ inflation, and cosy mock-intimacy simply invites (ha! – the ‘friend’ invitation) fakery.

Obviously, amongst your 356 fb friends, there probably is at least one evil clown masquerading Blairishly as a regular kind of guy, worming your home address out of you, and appearing one night, very soon, at your bedside, with a huge knife. But he’s only part of a much wider fb fakery.

Fb encourages everyone to be a mini-celebrity via the ‘news’-feed. All is vanity, though however hard most people desperately polish their image on fb, it doesn’t shine, cos they ain’t that interesting. Few of us are. Meanwhile, younger online social-networkers think fb helps them define their identity. In fact it turns them into zombies.

And no amount of clicking on a ‘like’ button is going to change the world in some trendy cause. I mean, I like bumblebees, but…

Worse, Fb even manages to disguise who your real friends are, by creating a mashed-up soup of cannibalized acquaintances. Yuk. Now that really is a nasty image.

So to cheer yourself up, you’re wondering what happened to the small girl in the pre-fb idyll? Did spring turn to summer, and those bees buzz about, and all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire sing and sing, and the grass rise higher and higher in the churchyard until some wanker with a mower arrived?

Yes, all of that happened. And the girl grew up, and is now sixteen and too independently-minded and grand to have a facebook account. How proud of her I am, and how I wish I had my daughter’s strength of character.

Thus we reach the apparent happy ending of the fb horror film. The serial killer is slain, and the virtuous, sole-surviving teenager staggers away from the carnage and into a sunny future.

Then the camera pulls back to reveal a final, bloody fb twist. The worst is left to last.

You have the Miliband brothers’ late father to thank for this scary insight. It’s no good whining that Ralph Miliband died ten years before the birth of fb. A dictionary of Marxism which he edited saw it coming. Maybe Marx himself saw it.
Capitalism turns our labour into a commodity, and fb helps the process to a logical extension, where social life is a competitive hell in which we consume each other; and, by collaborating with such blind enthusiasm, consume ourselves too.

Forget Area 51. Marx said the workers were alienated, and now you can be alienated in your free-time too. As an addicted, sleep-walking, self-deluded, flaky, faked-up, undead husk of a fb user, you might as well be your very own alien, because you certainly don’t know who you really are.

Still gagging for a happier final frame? Well, I did say fb had given me one good gift. If it hadn’t been for social-networking, I would never have met my girlfriend.

Reader, I stalked her.

Nick Bradbury
nebradbury@googlemail.com