yustyoking

“Don’t give me headaches” I tell people. Facebook is a headache, and not only in the way everyone is complaining about. Sure it’s no fun to have your personal data sold to the lowest bidder, but those of us who are new to Facebook also find it a disaster.

Yes, Zuck sucks. Facebook is Zuckerberg’s Frankenstein monster. A great lumbering leviathan that tramples everything and everyone in its path. The polarization of America can be traced in part to Facebook. I’ve served in war zones and I have never found such an unremittingly sour experience as struggling with fucking Facebook. At least in a war zone, we could still get drunk and get laid.

Full disclosure: The main reason I am on Facebook now is to flog my Swedish band realPfft. (Flog! Flog! “C us on YouTube!”) Yes, I feel sorry for Facebook’s two billion members, but really, folks, grow up!

What’s so crazy about Facebook? What’s not? A site where you “friend” and “unfriend” people? What is that? Are we back in high school where life is a popularity contest? I come from a world where soldiers take responsibility for one another, whether we like each other or not. You respect the uniform. You don’t leave anyone on the battlefield. Facebook is the epitome of fair weather friends. “Oh, hi!… Oops!… Bye, bye! I’m unfriending you!” Yikes!

Joining Facebook isn’t simply hopping onto “a program already in progress,” it is like trying to jump aboard a moving train. It’s doable, but you get bruised.

I have to log on with Firefox so Facebook can use cookies to make inane suggestions based on my IP address. I’m a very private individual and paranoid: In the military, I served in harrowing situations among people with guns and grievances. I don’t want any of them showing up 20 years later and blowing my brains out. So I watch my back.

The idea that I am going to list all my friends on a social media website is from hunger. I assume I am going to get hacked. I always have. I never write anything in an email or text message that I wouldn’t want on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. (I’m showing my age. What’s a “newspaper”? Google it, kids.) I use an electronic postbox to correspond with my friends, I don’t do it on social media.

Cut to the chase: I am on Facebook and since I don’t have a friends list, I join groups. OR TRY TO. Jesus sweet fucking Christ, att ha främmande människor bestämma om jag får vara med i deras förening är helt absurt. To have strangers judging whether I am worthy of joining their group is totally absurd. They don’t know me and I don’t know them. If I’m willing to put in the time and effort, whether it’s the PTA, Little League Baseball, Friends of the Library (“Library”? Google it, kids!) or any other organization, I expect to be accepted. That’s been my experience.  I’m glad to be there and they are glad to have me.

I suspect that’s how Facebook was in the beginning. Welcoming. Then a million flamers and trolls apparently misbehaved, everyone went into a crouch and now it’s “Oh, goodness gracious, don’t write anything controversial or upsetting on our group site!” Must all groups compete to see who can be the most meh?

I mean, I love Twitter. Everyone tries to be snarkier than his neighbor. And there are no class monitors to freeze U out of their clique or send U 2 the principal’s office!

We’ve all seen the movie The Social Network and learned how poor little Mark didn’t get into any of the clubs at Harvard, so he’s created his own club but you can’t join it, boo hoo hoo, “This is my group, my group is for the really cooool people, this group is only for really nice people and you don’t qualify, nya nya, nya nya!!! Take that, Harvard!”

Facebook is an exceedingly childish invention stranded somewhere in the first year of college.

Virtually friendless— ha! ha!— I search under the title “humor music” and click on “groups.” I find a great group with over a thousand members and click on the administrator… who is a good-looking young woman who is absolutely furious at someone who is stalking her. She’s ranting, she’s fuming. Well, I’m not the stalker and I still want to join her group. This being Sucky’s Facebook, when she turns down my request without explanation, I don’t even get the benefit of a reply. I hear nothing. Nothing! Rejection isn’t my fave experience. I find getting the cold shoulder to be pretty annoying.

I try another humor music group. This one has a grown man as administrator and… not only does he blackball me, he blocks ever receiving any messages from me! Nice. My crime? I clicked on the button to join his group. Well, excuse me!

Among music fans, I finally find three groups that accept me.

I’m a Swede, the band is Svedish, so it finally dawns on my dim sum brain that maybe I should apply to, you know, Swedish groups. Svenskar. Swedes in America.

It’s always more gratifying to click on “Join+1” and actually get some Q’s from the administrators. I’ve begun to understand that my response is, in fact, a job interview. I should put my best foot forward. But one Swedish group with 6,000 members demands… demands… that I list my hometown in Sweden and where I currently reside in America on my PP, my Public Profile. That’s all they care about. Not why I am in America, not what I work with, nada.  Well, okay, I live in Maryland! But I don’t want every Tom, Dick and Harry stranger to know where I come from. That’s pretty personal info, people. Grudgingly, I put down where I am from. Clearly the administrators want to curb flaming and trolling, but their demanding style, the wall they’ve built and their lack of response all make me see red. Furiously angry, I am experiencing exactly the kind of rage they seem to want to prevent in their group. Inte bra, tjejer!

I am a Swede in America. Eureka! I have been accepted into one of the three biggest groups specifically for Swedes living in America. Thank you! Tack ska ni ha! Now if I can just get into the other two…