Facebook, more like "talk to the hand book"

Scho, I suspended my facebook account a few days ago. I feel pretty good about it for now. I suppose there were a few people on there I enjoyed following and talking to once in a blue moon. Perhaps 6. But overall it felt too much like church. My parents were there (all of my extended relatives in fact). And unless I wanted to get into drama-generating arguments with various people because my life and lifestyle conflict with their own I had to watch what I said and the type of pictures I posted. Which is just stupid. Ideally I should just be who I am without taking crap from friend or family about it, but until that point, I'm just avoiding environments I don't feel free in. Which was facebook. And that's leaving aside the whole, massive invasion of privacy thing they have going on. Anyway, it was just time for a change and cleaner headspace and facebook wasn't helping. So it's off for a while. For now, I feel good about that.

Speaking of privacy invasion, I'm super pessimistic about giant corporations right now. The Google/Verizon net neutrality issue is disgusting, but am I really wiling to stop using google search, or gmail or any of the other google products I enjoy? No, and that's largely because there aren't really good alternatives. Alternatives certainly exist, I simply don't enjoy using them. And what are my options? The cell carriers are all equally soulless, Apple already has a logo stamped on my brain and Microsoft products are not pleasant to use (even if they are turning out to be the white knight on social/privacy issues). I suppose I could just go open source, install ubuntu and somehow put together all the functionality I get currently from my google/apple universe. My gut feeling is this will involve far more tinkering and ongoing maintenance than I care to perform. And to top it all off, I don't think my boycott of google or apple or anyone is really going to change things.

So I'm going to buy a google phone, and make the best use of it I can. Net neutrality may or may not crumble. I suspect it will, but I'm feeling pessimistic, money is power and it's not like your average joe is swimming in money right now. The balance of power shifts ever more to the enfranchised as far as I can see. In the meantime, Apple will continue to dumb down their devices to big friendly icons that make happy things when we press them. Eventually I suspect the icons will fill the whole screen and you will just smack it with your full palm to turn it on and flip through applications by swiping (pawing) at the screen. In short, all I see ahead of us is an internet finally carved up by the powerful and dumb, chubby, incurious people consuming the resulting corporate entertainment flows on devices they barely understand but are simple enough for two-year-olds to navigate (Seriously, WATCH idiocracy. All the machines essentially run an iOS). And I say this as a chubby ipad owner (projection much? I KNOW).

It's like some bizarre alternate universe where idiocracy and WALL-E were taken as guideposts for the future instead of gentle satire about places we probably don't want to go.