On January 18th I deactivated my Facebook account. Maybe my move was prompted by the political protests of the day. But any political maneuver so convenient should be regarded with suspicion. 

I think mostly, I feel people are sick my bullshit (I am sick of their bullshit)- or at least confused and distracted enough by their own bullshit.

But most of all, Facebook isn’t cool. It’s doesn’t provide any kind of social or technological edge on other people. Everyone has it.

I mean, with G+, at least I’m networking with all my friends who are current Google employees, should I eventually need a job at that company. 

Facebook now is like… a tunnel of guided promotional reality. The information Facebook shows me loses its information value as it’s structured. It’s original value as a sex tool has been obscured by the emergence of a proto-public company. It really seems to favor itself over the content it supposedly conveys. There are very few people on Facebook I want to hear from - and despite my constant adjustments to my feed - it seems I’m constantly seeing the desperate poetry of very sad online individuals who I do not personally know. 

It reminds me of the “Hold it Against Me” Spears video. She is in a room with screens circling her - surely a kind of pop-panopticon. With the tone of famous Apple commercial directed by Mr. Scott. But I can’t tell who I need to hate and who I need to buy from anymore. 

I don’t want to be at the center of information anymore. I don’t want to know things in an efficient way. I read the New York TImes (I have a digital subscription of course, for my iPhone), I read other news and ad industry publications, I look at Twitter, and I look at Tumblr. For me, these are time-based enjoyments. They are fleeting and I’m always flirting with the idea that I probably missed a lot of information. I missed an important thing. I didn’t get a text. I’m out of the loop, maybe. Who knows? Who gives a fuck? There’s something sexy about that kind of information. 

When Facebook was about sex it was interesting. When Facebook became about ad sales and staying in touch with the family it lost meaning. Technology is still a cultural ghetto, to some degree. Social media websites probably can’t sustain mainstream cultural power, because we hold them to a higher novelty standards than other cultural institutions like say… the YMCA or Barney’s New York.

It’s too easy to just leave. To disappear from a tired scene. 

I’ve moved between cities at the drop of a hat a couple times now - I certainly don’t have any problem with erasing a big part of my digital life. Digital communities have a different character - they are not easier or simpler - but they offer certain kind of freedom that physical communities can never obtain. The old art of disappearing. Of logging off. Of going out into the woods. 

It’s sexier to just give up on site that feels even a little bit boring. It feels like letting go of something much heavier than memory. It feels like anything is possible.