After spending more than half my life on Zuckerbook, I’m free, for I have said “farewell” to Facebook. It’s been one cool week without it. Facebook first entered my life in 2005 when I was a freshman in college. That was twenty years ago. After getting my brand new UMass e-mail address, somehow Facebook found me. The timing was great, as MySpace was on the way out. It seemed like a fun way to stay in touch. Fast forward to 2010 or so, my music career is beginning to bud with Tidwell’s Treasure, and one of the best ways to get friends out to our shows was by inviting them to Facebook events. We’d post our event on our band and personal pages. Our friends would see these posts. They’d come to the shows. Everyone had fun and we made a bit of money. And behold, Tidwell’s saw that it was very good. It was an amazing time. A lot of us believed that the days of posters and flyering were over. “The future is now!” — at least, the future seemed to be then. Come 2012, I was a New York City boy. By that time, in that environment, you basically couldn’t get a show if you didn’t agree to make a Facebook event. But we all noticed that the posts and events, and even the invitations, weren’t getting noticed — lost in the busy shuffle of “the feed”. We’d ask our friends — the ones who would be honest — and they’d say “yea, I never saw it.” All of us musicians knew that in agreeing to spend the time to make the Facebook event, we’d still have to invest time in other means of communication that Facebook had temporarily replaced during its heyday — back to posters, flyers, e-mail and text blasts. “Have no fear — Instagram is here!” Instagram was cool. It was like the simpler version of Facebook that we all got in the early 2000’s in college, but more about pictures. But we all saw how it could be leveraged to further our careers (we all, at the same time, claiming to be pledged anti-captalist anarcho-commies at the same time — lol those were the days). We all started posting our show posters, selfies with pithy captions, enigmatic blurry photos taken from our midnight adventures through the city. A little professional, a little personal. It was, once again, a fun way to stay in touch. And behold, the hipsters saw that is was very good. It’s the 2020’s. Instagram is owned by the parent company of Facebook, Meta. These are all very different apps from their baby days. The internet is a very different internet because of it. Zuckerberg is a different Zuckerberg after testimonies before Congress, and the world has literally been changed by the algorithms of these apps, with plenty of clandestine activities and motivations only coming to light in real-time. The subsequent contention and doubts over the veracity of these revelations, naturally, are amplified and perpetuated by these very algorithms. Funny how that works. And behold, everyone is starting to notice that this is not, in fact, very good. I long ago noticed that no one saw my posts about the show last week; or about my new single or record. I learned not to waste my energy writing articles or epistles, let alone little notes and invitations, that would go out into the void and never return. They call it an echo chamber, but echoes are actually quite rare unless you’re paying the big bucks for a campaign. This was all getting too complicated, and I’m a simple man. So, last week, I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Now, it’s only been a week, but here’s what I noticed the most: peace of mind. Ah, it’s been sweet to not check in on those apps, search the notifications for meaningful signs of communicative lifeforms, and inevitably return to myself rather disappointed. It was noisy, distracting, and near impossible to hold a meaningful conversation. Don’t get me wrong — I had thousands of “followers” and peaks of meaningful interaction and inspiration amid the valleys of dry bones on these apps. But my primary impression is that it was overwhelmingly impersonal. I don’t care for “likes”. I like having conversations. But if you’re not being heard — and really, who is being truly heard on these platforms? — you can’t have much of a convo. There was, I’ve realized, a subtle underlying anxiety in my day-to-day simply due to “saying things” online and then awaiting signs of being heard — let alone meaningful response. Maybe it stabbed at my inner child, he being the middle one in a big, loud Irish family. But after awhile, I simply came to suspect, and recognize the feeling, that I was being disobedient to Our Lord’s wise prescription: “Don’t cast your pearls before swine.” The swine, in this case, are not the users, because the users are also casting their precious pearls. No, the swine are “the platform,” in all its legion, algorithmic insidiousness. By another analogy: the rigged slot machine in a sketchy casino. Yes, I’m just another fun dude saying it’s all a scam. Lol. Hey, full disclosure, I was underwhelmed with my results on these platforms, and I own them — I basically flunked Facebook. But that’s fine by me. I’m a simple man. I don’t believe in investments with little return; isn’t the repetition of such poorly rewarded behavior often epigrammed as “insanity”? If Facebook isn’t faithful for a little return on a little investment, why should I trust them for big returns on the big investments they’ve tried to corner their users into with their increasingly crappy “organic reach”? I can spend infinitely less on a coffee, or even a night out on a bar crawl, and make more meaningful friendships with strangers — let alone maintain friendships I already have — than I can for hundreds of dollars if not thousands of dollars on “social” media. On the other hand, the best online conversations I’ve had, bar none, have always been over e-mail. People respond to my Substack mailings, we get into deep back and forths. They reach out to me through the e-mail form on my website to ask me questions about the Bible studies on my YouTube channel, or to request songs for my livestreams, or to book me for an event. I’m not technically a pastor anymore, but folks reach out to me for pastoral care, which I can, believe it or not, minister through e-mail. Epistles are powerful. The single most influential publication in the history of the world is the New Testament, and 21 of its 27 books are epistles — letters. The power of epistles is not in the medium itself, as the New Testament’s power transcends papyri, codex, vellum, paper, and digital media. The power is in the meaning. No matter what claims the social media giants make about the power of their algorithms, aesthetics, avatars, and — ugh — ads, it’s all about the content and character being communicated. There are plenty of folks who have leveraged the power of the Metaverse to this end. Good on them. It’s just not for me. So, farewell Facebook. And Instagram. Also, WhatsApp — that’s owned by Meta too. Bye. I’m still on other forms of social media. I’m posting and livestreaming on YouTube. I’m dabbling in an X experiment. I’m trying out Discord chat rooms. I’m on a search for the “new internet”, particularly where it looks the most like the “old internet” — when you could find what you searched for, and not what the search engine wants you to find (or those who paid for you to find it); when you could stumble into a chat room or a newsgroup (remember those!) and jump in on a conversation in real-time, rather than having it shuffled in front of you via priority algorithm; when the majority of content was written and therefore long-form. I’m a slow talker, I call myself “thick-tongued,” and people who know me well know when I’m “winding up” to spinning as many tangential yarns as a Tarantino film, and that they’ll have to stand by patiently as I weave them together ‘til I finally get to my climactic “which is all to say…” — — this bite-sized shorts, posts, tweets, tiktoks etc social environment is as chaotic and undesirable to me as the most obnoxious of television commercials. It’s an onslaught and a terrible social trainer. I get that for many it’s akin to walking into a bustling bar — if that’s how your processor works, all the power to you. But when I walk into a bar, I get a much different feeling. I choose one place to sit or stand, and and usually end up in a crazy conversation by the end of the night and walk away feeling like I really got to know at least one person, if not several. That’s what a bar is like for most of us, right? Most of us don’t walk up to a stranger, exchange hyperactive quips and rants (let alone advertisements), and then move on to the next on a conveyor belt. At best, that’s speed-dating. At worst, it’s frankly hustling — disingenous and even sociopathic. Lol. You can see where I’m coming from here. I can’t wait to hear from folks who disagree. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I hope you’ll be a part of my story. God bless, Seán You're currently a free subscriber to Seán McMahon. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Thursday, February 20, 2025
Farewell Facebook
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