Give me back my broken night, my mirrored room, my secret life
By 
Lili Loofbourow has seen the future and it’s Facebook:
The feeling has come slowly, I’m sorry to say—I wish I’d been quicker on the uptake—but now it’s here and it’s overwhelming: I am depressed about Facebook. Not the idiotic rebrand (as blatant an effort to interrupt bad publicity as I’ve had the pleasure of observing) and not the site itself, which I don’t use anymore (Twitter does a good enough job making me unhappy). It’s not even the barrage of recent revelations about exactly how much Facebook itself knew about its destructive effects, or how determinedly it incentivized divisive content anyway. That’s all bad, and the geopolitical implications of a corporation that started off ranking girls’ hotness and is now capable of swaying elections in multiple countries are dire. But they’re not even what I mean.
What’s hitting me just now is the grim story all this tells about the “human spirit” or whatever. How flattening, how insulting to whatever we humans hubristically imagine ourselves to be, that we’re all so obviously vulnerable to these algorithms. That our feelings and convictions are this easy to manipulate, that the shape of our day can be affected by a choice as vapid as someone deciding to weight the “angry” emoji five times more than the others because it maximizes engagement. This last is so monstrously stupid as a damning revelation that I almost can’t bear it: What forces brought us to a place where this counts as major news and must, because the effects of the angry emoji are humiliatingly undeniable? A few weeks ago, I spent some time looking at the Herman Cain Awards—a subreddit dedicated to documenting anti-vaxxers’ COVID cases as told through their Facebook posts. One of the many things it proves is the extent to which Facebook shapes not just lives but deaths.
The revelations in the Facebook Papers are insulting even to our divisions, which I have formerly preferred to think of as principled—or philosophical, or at least rooted in something other than dopamine hits from “shares” and “likes.” But reporting on Facebook confirms the extent to which Facebook doesn’t just reflect our polarization—it drives it. I’ve read all this before, of course, but I’ve found it hard to really take the measure of it without succumbing to its absurdity. “Facebook? Which Sex and the City character are you Facebook? Repository of vacation photos Facebook? The place that made “poking” your friend an option and “It’s Complicated” a relationship status? This is what’s radicalizing the world?” Desperate to reassure myself that ours is not the only stupid time in history, I’ve been revisiting the history of the Church of England. It seemed like a promising source of comparable inanity: King Henry VIII’s crush on Anne Boleyn veiled in the imperative to produce a male heir was an appalling rationale for an entire church’s founding, after all. A lot of people died over whether Henry ought to get to be the head of his own church so he could do what he wanted! But even those deaths don’t feel meaningless in quite the way these Facebook deaths do; those disagreements intersected with God and the Reformation and literacy at least.
Things can change quickly, politically and culturally. In Reaganland Rick Perlstein documents many people arguing that the Republican Party — which held 143 House seats, 38 Senate seats, and 12 governorships — was dead for a generation in 1977. But the pessimism of the intellect is sure coming a lot more easily than the optimism of the will right now.