Facebook And The Banality of Anger

Someone back-channeled (is that still a thing?) and asked if I was coming back to FaceBook.

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: I'm sick of shouting from my echo chamber to theirs. There are people I love, here and in real life, who are so, so, so fucking different from me. And I'm tired of them making me angry, me making them angry. It's one thing when we, two or three of us, are talking about a thing, sometimes arguing. Even showing strong passion, a flash of anger. But there's always an underlying respect, somewhere down under all that shit, a recognition that I hold this person or that in high esteem. In spite their antithetical views, in spite of basic conflicts we'll never resolve even well enough to begin to suit all of us is the recognition that this is a person I value, I like, and would protect.

It's all part of that ol' white knight bullshit that's plagued me throughout my life, I suspect.

You know how an old-style laser works? Essentially, you take a chamber or cylinder that's mirrored on both ends, fill it with a gas, and shoot a pure color into it. The beam of color energizes the gas's electrons in their atomic orbits, and as the atoms absorb the energy, the the electrons rise and fall through their quantum-specific orbits, spitting out more of that same pure color going exactly the same direction as the original incoming bit of light. The ones going off at an angle escape out of the non-mirrored sides of they cylinder and are lost — but the ones traveling at right-angles to the mirrors are reflected back, to collide with more atoms, with more of the pure color being pumped in. This results in a pure light, all the same wavelength, all going the same direction, rushing back and forth collecting more bits the same color going the same direction. "Collimated," they call it. Back and forth the beam of color rushes, more and more energy being pumped into the system by the pure source and organized by the atoms, and soon the collimated light, now all marching in the perfect symmetry of a single beam, contains so much energy it cannot be contained; it bursts through the mirrored surface instead of being reflected, a pure burst of single-focus, directed, high-energy light.

Just so FaceBook. Any opinion is amplified and given energy by reflecting back and forth, echoed and given more power by like-thinking, like-colored bits, until the result is a highly-focused, highly energized, uncontrolled and dangerous weapon.

I have more than once on FaceBook found myself at the cutting edge of that weapon, with my full weight bearing down behind the knife at the throat of someone I love — and sometimes, I've found myself on the wrong side of that blade as they came for me. There's no respect. There's no desire to understand. There's no love. There's certainly no room for just sitting shoulder-to-shoulder and watching the moonrise for a bit.

It's a wasteland of chuckling, deaf jackals parroting their bumper-sticker narratives and clever memes. I'm sick of it, and don't expect to go back to it soon.

Ever.

In Our Next Episode:Some other Jack Handy bullshit, since I'm apparently about to invade his "Deep Thoughts" territory.