Sneaking Past the Facekeepers

I am now a man without a face.

From three days ago:

Jasun Kephas:
I predict that, 72 hours from now, April 1st 2012, this Fool will sneak past the Facekeepers and scale the book-walls to freedom - leaving nothing but a few loose ends behind, and perhaps not even that.

I will be sad to go, yes. BUT, at the end of the day, the price is too high, the gains too few, to justify being in-corporated by an increasingly sinister and unethical commercial, espionage, and maybe even sorcerous agenda.

We are being harvested. Our faces and all our other vital data is being collected for the great Psychic Stew of AI's Body of Evidence. And in the final masterstroke of irony, none of this is being stolen: we are offering up our body parts (and our baby pics) for the dark, satanic broth.

I'd like to think I could set an example by leaving, but I doubt anyone will follow me over those prison walls, so it's more about not wanting to set a bad one. To those of you who I have only come to know, or reconnect with, via this devious domain, PM me in the next 3 days so we can trade data with an eye to meeting later, outside the Belly of the Beast, on less mine-infested ground.

A word to the wise while I still "exist" - FB's days are numbered, and who knows, if Id-Anonymous has anything to say about it the number may be smaller than we think (I am an optimist at heart). Would you rather leave the party of your own free will, or be unceremoniously spewed out with the seething mass, when the fire alarm gets pulled?

OK that's all for today. I can't say it hasn't been fun, or that I won't be jonesing for my FB fix for a while, coz I will. If anyone wants to help set up an alternative space for social networking that would be privately owned, let me know. I am still up for collaborating on that project provided someone with some know-how is on board.

Meanwhile, I'll continue dialoguing here til the final hour, if anyone wants to discuss the escape plan.

Here's some useful data to get you started: http://society.oshana.org/true-friends-leave-facebook/


Jasun Kephas:

• Awake at 3 am - is it a FB microwave attack?! Here is where I ended up, at any rate. Since Steve Willner's comments, below, have indicated that EVERYONE finds my (poetically phrased) reasons for leaving FB "ridiculous," I'm going to reiterate the reasons I gave the last time I left FB, since they hold good today:

FACT ONE: FB is at least partially established as an intelligence-gathering program for corporate and governmental interests.

FACT TWO: By participating at FB, I am not only tacitly endorsing that agenda but also adding both my data-flow and my own particular creative input to the mix. I am thereby increasing not only FB's data bank but also its credibility and appeal (if I may be so immodest).

FACT THREE: The combinations of facts 1 & 2 inescapably lead to the fact that I am, like it or not, serving the afore-mentioned corporate-governmental interests, and on zero payroll to boot.

All this has real-world consequences that NO ONE here can fully account for - yet all the same, we are all accountable for them. The only rationale for ignoring the consequences and our accountability - besides a cynical rejection of ethics or individual responsibility - is that "the end justifies the means." This reasoning would be based on a belief that the good I can accomplish by being at FB outweighs those unknown negative consequences, both for myself and others. FB does allow me to direct traffic to my blog, it's true, but to what extent is unknown and the actual results are so far negligible (there's been no increase in comments at my blog over the past year or so). So what does that leave?

The most obvious benefit of being at FB is that it allows me to connect to people I wouldn't otherwise connect to - either for the first time or on further, random occasions, as with my recent exchange with Steve Willner, an exchange that would not have occurred anywhere but here. A glance at said exchange clearly brings into question the value of such "connecting." It's fun, sure, but what's actually accomplished?

Connecting for its own sake is of no inherent value - if it were we would email each other all day long, but we don't do that (we text each other, I guess, but I don't have a cellphone so I cant speak for the pros of that ritual). We do have exchanges at FB however, where others can read them, since we are in a public domain. So the appeal of this sort of connecting - this is true for me at least - has to do with there being a performance element to it. Idle banter with an audience or in a group - or even at times creative discussions that, nonetheless, rarely lead to any real-time action. For all the talk of social networking, how many people use FB to implement any sort of social engagement? It's 99% fluff (even when intellectually stimulating fluff), and we know it.

My effort has been to counteract that with some more (intellectually) meaningful content - as many of my "friends" also try to do here (an obvious example for me would be Christopher Knowles). But the net result, I believe, is that we only help to increase the spell of the delusion that we are doing anything besides squandering our time and energy, working for a mostly hidden corporate body that intends to assimilate us, body and soul, in the due course of time, into its dark & secret agenda.

This post took 30 minutes to write! It was a alternative to lying awake in the dark thinking about why I was leaving FB, that's all. Next time that happens, I will have something else to think about.

Peace be to all.


Jasun Kephas:
Paranoia is the beginning of awareness...?

As some have suggested, I may be overstating, exaggerating, or overreacting in my Case Against FB; but intuition tells me that FB and other corporate Net giants are the Thin End of a Wedge currently being driven - slowly and carefully - into the innermost recesses of our lives. I think we are being subtly seduced into a series of incremental agreements that are leading to a final result which none of us would agree to if we could see it coming. Because of that, now may be a critical time that will determine, if not the future of the species, at least our own place in that future. It's a time in which it is increasingly necessary to say "No" while we still can, instead of, "What's in it for me?" Just Say No to a future of psychic enslavement! - because the answer is that there's nothing in it for you, because none of it was designed for you, though of course it's "custom-made."

We've been told that we are the consumer, but what if it turns out that we are being consumed?

My leaving FB is a sort of ritual, a symbolic enactment that I hope, like FB itself, will have real-world repercussions and consequences, at least for me. I guess you could say that it represents a stance, a line drawn in the sand, representing my turning away from something which I know in my bones is false, so I can begin to face in a new direction, and to live a new, more authentic, kind of life.

Not to end on a bum note, but I suspect, based on some of the comments here, that some of you are overestimating your powers of discernment. In the long run, that can prove fatal. If there WERE a psychic conquest of the collective soul that was currently nearing its very final stages (just suppose!), the naive assumption that we would be able to recognize all the signs and that there was no need to worry about it, would be exactly what would allow for you to be "bagged."

But yes, I *could* just be paranoid. Time will tell, but YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED, and so my responsibility here is now (almost) over.

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Account now deactivated, in process of deletion.