When I joined facebook, I did it because of the trend. I had a business and a freethinking group to run; networking was important. I also didn’t give much thought to the whole thing. It was an easy way to connect and keep in touch with people. With time though, things started smelling funny. Facebook was slowly invading my personal life.
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Surely, it was nice to see some food pictures shared, maybe a pet here and there, jokes, memes, the classic political debates and of course my group meetings. Facebook became my swiss knife — it had everything in one place.
I became solely absorbed in organising my page while in the background many of my group members were trying to feed children with likes, protest about important issues from the comfort of their couch, fall in love with fake online personas and pick up fights with people they wouldn’t dare to talk to on the street.
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What really got to me though was not the hypocrisy and the masks people were wearing. It really shocked me how much time people were spending doing absolutely nothing for themselves other than fattening Zuckerberg with shekels. Apart from the usual entrepreneurs and businesses, most people were becoming zombified in an endless circle of reassurance. They provided the material and the time, getting nothing in return other than an inflated ego. It was like watching a slave factory mining page views. An eternal internship for a massive corporation. I nicknamed them “The Networking Dead”.
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I slowly muted all of my friends’ newsfeeds. I started cleaning up my friend list and it wasn’t late until less than a dozen made it. I used to have thousands of people as friends and followers and I could have used them to ...monetise, but the whole thing did not feel right. They were not even real people to me. I could hardly associate with any of them — in my personal life or the group.
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They were slaving sheep, strolling left and right for attention, aimlessly looking for confirmation about the new selfie, the new piece of clothing, the sexy partner or the tinfoiled theory about how much the world sucks. This charade did it for me. I stopped paying much attention to the group because most of them were really a lost cause, and just tried to appear as “edgy” freethinkers. I was part of this scheme too. I had to get out.
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About a month ago, I began transferring material that I had written over the span of 5 years. The plan was to make my own personal blog. While I was in the midst of doing this, I discovered Steemit. The rest is history. I never looked back.
