Entry 420: My Social Media Experiment, Phase I

For the past year or so, I've been active on social media.  I've posted at least one tweet everyday (which automatically posts on FaceBook), and I've been following people, soliciting and accepting friend requests and followers, and checking Twitter and Facebook frequently.  It's Phase I of an experiment I've been running in which I'm the only subject.  I've been questioning the utility of social media for a long time, and I've often wondered if, as a society, we would be better off just not using it at all.  Of course, this is not an original thought -- there have been countless think pieces written over the past decade (at least) about how things would be different (better) without social media.  And of course, there is no way to really test it.  We can't just make everybody stop using social media and see how it goes.  However, I can do that for myself -- so, I'm doing it.  I went "all in" on social media, and now the time has come for me to take a break.  I'm not going to use Twitter or Facebook or any other form of social media for an extended period of time -- at least several months.  I'll see if I notice a difference in quality of life and report back to you.

The timing of this is not totally arbitrary.  I never set a firm stopping date for my social media use when I began this little experiment.  It's been precipitated by a few current events.  One is Mark Zuckerberg's testimony before Congress on the Cambridge Analytica fiasco.  Honestly, the sale of personal data, in and of itself, doesn't bother me that much -- maybe it should, but it doesn't.  What bothers me is Zuckerberg himself -- not in his personally life (about which I obviously know next to nothing), but in his business life.  Zuckerberg qua Facebook CEO is one of the least impressive people in public life.  He's either coldly mendacious or incredibly naive or, most likely, some combination thereof.  He runs a multi-billion-dollar corporation, and so he makes decisions that are in the best interest of this corporation's bottom line, but then he acts as if he's just this nerdy tech guy trying to make the world a better place with his amazing algorithms.  He's just trying to connect people -- how many times does he say that? -- and if it so happens that he amasses more wealth and power than any one person should have while he's connect people, that, I guess, is just an fortunate side effect.

Again, it's unclear to me whether or not Zuckerberg believes his own BS, but it doesn't really matter.  My favorite quote ever is by Upton Sinclair -- "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" -- and it's particularly apt in this instance.  There are things Zuckerberg could do that would make Facebook better -- better for the user and better for society.  Here are three:

1. Be more upfront about how personal data is being used and what is given to advertisers.  If users want to trade personal data for free use of Facebook's platforms, fine.  But make sure everybody knows what the agreement is.  Don't hide it in user agreements nobody reads or make users adjust a bunch of settings.  Put it out there explicitly: "We are going to manipulate your shit as follows...  Click here to continue."
2. Offer a subscription model so that users can opt out of advertisements and not have their data  be shared.
3. Adopt a set of journalistic standards and vet websites before allowing their articles to be shared on Facebook.  Suspend users' accounts if they are posting a bunch of untrue things.

These are unlikely to happen, of course, because they are not in Facebook's best financial interest.  With 1, this is obvious -- explicit warnings would scare away some users.  With 2, people are generally averse to paying for social media platforms, which, honestly, is more of a problem with us than it is with these products.  It never ceases to amaze me how little people value their time, privacy, and peace of mind (not being bombarded by ads) when it comes to "free" online content and services.  Also, a subscription model might create a tiered system in Facebook -- the haves and the have-nots -- which is contrary to Zuckerberg's stated kumbaya mission of connecting people of all walks of life.  With 3, you would have a total revolt by Trumpists and other trolls -- a nontrivial faction of Facebook's users -- who like the platform explicitly because it allows them to proliferate disinformation.  They can read and share "news" that isn't filtered by the "liberal media" (i.e., that isn't fact checked or authenticated in anyway).  Matt Iglesias of The Weeds podcast once said something to the effect of, "Facebook could do a bunch of things to drastically reduce the spread of fake news, but it would piss off conservatives, so they don't."

In fact, we saw this in action during Zuckerberg's testimony, when he was being questioned by Ted Cruz about liberal bias on the platform.  Cruz went through a laundry list of "conservative" groups that Facebook had shut down, for unstated reasons, and then he pressed Zuckerberg if any "liberal" groups, like Planned Parenthood, had been shut down.  If Zuckerberg wanted to, he really could have stuck it to Cruz here.  He could have said something like, "Congressman, we do not discriminate at Facebook based on political views.  However, we do have an objective standard of conduct for our users groups that includes no bullying, racism, or misogyny.  If conservative groups are being shut down on Facebook, might I suggest the problem is not with Facebook?"  But, of course, he said nothing like that.  He totaled weaseled it, acquiescing to Cruz, admitting mistakes were made, and then vowing to do better -- his standard line.

In my opinion, the fundamental flaw with Zuckerberg is that he doesn't understand (or doesn't want to understand) that you can't be the head of a zillion-dollar, for-profit corporation and be an altruistic force of good in the world.  That's not how capitalism works.  No matter how much somebody like Zuckerberg personally donates to worthy causes, and no matter how useful their product seems to be to the public, at some point the profit motives of their company are going to come into conflict with the greater good of society, and their profit motives are going to win.  (Perhaps that's why Bill Gates got of the game before going full-fledged humanitarian.)  I think there is some serious cognitive dissonance with Zuckerberg on this point.  It seems as if this is not something he really wants to acknowledge or deal with, which is why, as somebody on a podcast pointed out (I can't remember who or which podcast), he's so quick to hearken back to his early days, when he was just a geeky college kid, doing innocent geeky college things... like publicly rating which sorority girls are the hottest without their knowledge or permission.

This brings me to another one of my favorite quotes: "To me, one of the patterns we see that makes the world go wrong is when somebody acts as if they aren’t powerful when they actually are powerful."  This is a recent quote by Jaron Lanier from this fascinating interview.  And this article is another big reason why I'm choosing to get off social media now.  Lanier makes the anti-social media case better than I can, and I highly recommend you read what he has to say.  Although, I must confess, I don't totally get his final, grand point about social media as a religion.  But I've never really understood religious (or spiritual) arguments in general.  It's probably why I'm not religious (or spiritual).  To me, there is a much more compelling, earthly reason against social media: It's a terrible time suck.  It's something you do, for little satisfaction, that prevents you from doing other more satisfying things.

Over the past year, as I've ramped up my social media use, I've developed many bad habits that are going to be legitimately difficult to break.  I constantly feel the need to check my phone, no matter what else I'm doing -- playing with the kids, check the phone; stopped at a red light, check the phone; can't sleep, check the phone; break at work, check the phone.  It's gotten to the point where I found myself holding in my piss until I could get to my phone, because I wanted to look at it while I was peeing.  Heaven forbid I relieve myself without checking if anybody commented on my post about Nic Cage movies.  And for what?  What do I get out of it?  A fleeting shot of dopamine, triggered by a little thumbs up icon?  A split-second high?  I want a new drug.

Of course, there are things I'm going to miss about social media -- there are good things about it.  (Although, as Lanier lays out, some of things we think are good about it, might not actually be good overall.  His point about positive online political movements causing more powerful, negative backlashes is particularly interesting... and disconcerting.)  Being able to stay connected with old friends, with whom I would otherwise lose touch, and being able to easily see pictures of my friends and family and their kids are things I will miss.  However, "I like to see pics of my friends' kids" is a total lie we tell ourselves to justify using Facebook.  Because if all you cared about is keeping tabs on friends and family and seeing pics of their kids grow up, your total time on Facebook would be about a half an hour a month.  Kids don't grow that fast.  Also, there is the issue that you aren't seeing your friends and family, as they are; you are seeing them as they wish to present themselves on social media.  But that's an entirely different topic.

Anyway, I think I've spilled enough virtually ink on this topic.  I'll keep you posted on my social media-less life.

Until next time...

Entry 419: Hurt Legs and Acromegaly

Lil' S1 has complained a couple times in the past few weeks that his leg hurts.  It's tough to tell if it's real or not, because he only does it in the morning when he doesn't want to go to school.  He collapses in a comically overly dramatic fashion, and then crawls around, insisting he can't so much as stand up.  But then once he gets bored or something comes up that he wants to do, for which he needs use of his leg, it's magically better.  So, obviously it's not hurt that badly.  But what I can't quite tell is if he's basically making it up whole cloth, or if it really is bothering him, and he's willing to ignore it when he gets to do something fun, and then overselling it when it's time to go to school.  Anyway, something to keep an eye on.  And maybe we need to sign him back up for soccer.  He might be a natural.





Speaking of injuries.  I watched HBO's Andre the Giant documentary last night.  I thought it was excellent.  Andre was a big deal (get it? big?) when I was a kid, because I was a huge wrestling fan right at the time of his infamous heel turn.  We bought the WrestleMania III pay-per-view and had a little party at our house, so I watched Hulk slam Andre in real-time.  In fact, I think I can still name every match from the event, like, literally every match.*  It's tough to overstate what a big deal this seemed to be at the time.  It helped that I was 10 years old -- the perfect age for wrestling -- but even the adults watching were getting kinda sucked in.  (I remember my dad being like, "I'll say this, about it:  It might be phony, but it is entertaining.")  That was just the allure of Andre the Giant.  What was amazing to me watching the documentary was how bad of shape Andre was in physically during the match.  He could barely walk, which is why they used these little mini-ring shuttles to get wrestlers to and from the locker room (seen in the video below).  The match itself was a technical dud because Andre was so limited, but it still totally worked as a spectacle.  Another interesting thing is that Andre kept everybody in the dark about how it was going to end until it actually happened.  It was some sort of power trip or joke or something on his part, but he just refused to commit to anything -- he refused to even really talk about it -- and Hogan didn't even know for sure that he was going to win until the final bell rang.  Crazy.

Something else just popped into my head about Andre.  I have a friend whose older brother worked in the Tacoma Dome as a teenager, so he would be backstage with the wrestlers sometimes when wrestling events came to town.  And he said that before a match Andre would polish off several boxes of wine by himself, and that he was so big and immobile, he couldn't clean himself properly, so he had drabs of crusted shit stuck to the back of his legs and his wrestling shorts.  I was always dubious of this story, but after seeing the doc, I think it's properly true.  The wine part totally checks out, and seeing footage of him and hearing about him at the end of his life (which is when my friend's brother would have seen him), seeing what bad shape he was in, it seems very likely he would not have been able to wipe his ass properly.  It's sad.  But then again, he had an amazing prime.  He got be somebody special, and do amazing things nobody else got to do.  He knew he was going to die young, and in a way, he chose to do so, as he opted not to receive treatment for his acromegaly when he had a chance.  Given the hand he was dealt, having a flash-bang of a life, seemed the best option.  I would have done the same thing.  (But he was only six years older than I am now when he died, so I reserve the right to change my mind about this in six years.)



Anyway...

Concerning other things I've consumed recently that I recommend, this article about our lovely president is really good.  It's not anything we didn't know, but it's fascinating to read in such explicit detail nonetheless.  We actually get to hear audio of the president of our country, as a younger man, pretending to be somebody else so that he can con a reporter into putting him on a list of super-rich people, on which he doesn't actually belong.  Think about that.  And as somebody on Twitter mentioned, it does make you wonder if the main reason he opposes Mueller getting close to his finances is simply because he doesn't have the amount of money he says he does, and he doesn't want it exposed.  It makes sense.  His supporters wouldn't care -- they will immediately forgive/deny anything negative about him -- but he would care.  I suspect he cares more about being perceived as super-rich than he does about not being perceived as a criminal.  Like, if you gave him the option to either go to prison and have everybody think he's the richest man in the world, or stay out of prison and have everybody think he's a pauper, I suspect he would pick the former.  Now, if only we can find a way to make his hypothetical wish a reality...

That's all I have time for today.  Until next time...

*Here are my guesses at all the matches, roughly in order: 
1.  Can-Am Connection vs. Bob Orton and Don Muraco
2.  Hillbilly Jim and two little people vs. King Kong Bundy and two little people
3.  Fabulous Rougeaus vs. Greg Valentine and Brutus Beefcake
4.  Junkyard Dog vs. King Harley Race
5.  Roddy Piper vs. Adrian Adonis (loser gets their head shaved)
6.  Ricky Steamboat vs. Randy Savage (for the Intercontinental Belt)
7.  Heart Foundation and Danny Davis vs. British Bulldogs and Tito Santana (for the Tag Team Belts)
8.  Nikolai Volkoff and the Iron Sheik vs. the Killer Bees
9. Butch Reed vs. Koko B. Ware
10. Jake the Snake vs. the Honky Tonk Man
11. Hulk vs. Andre (for the Championship Belt)

Let's see how I did... Damn!  I missed one -- Hercules vs. Billy Jack Haynes.  Still, 11-for-12 ain't bad, considering the event happened 31 years ago.

Entry 418: Diaper and Crocs Weather

We are getting some yo-yo weather here in DC.  We went from chilly and blustery on Thursday to warm and delightful Friday and Saturday, back to chilly and blustery today.  I made the most of the nice weather, though.  Friday evening I went to the Nats game (that's baseball for you non-sportsball fans) with some friends.  It was an incredibly dull game from a watching-baseball perspective, but it was a good time when considered strictly as a social event, which is how all live baseball should consumed.  The game is just an excuse to sit outside and drink overpriced beer with chums.

Then, Saturday our neighbors came over for a little cookout.  They literally live a block and a half away, and we see them maybe three times a year.  They're really cool and they have three kids ranging in age from seven to one, so they're good people to hang out with.  I did up my cookout special -- sausages with grilled peppers and onions and grilled asparagus.  I realized I'm a halfway decent griller -- I mean it's not hard -- don't overcook the meat and time it so that everything is done at about the same time -- but I've definitely gone over to people's houses who've messed it up.  My one critique I have of myself this time is that I used a bit too much olive oil in preparing the veggies.  Their natural juices really get going in the hot foil, so you can get by with less oil than you might initial think.

Last year we totally re-landscaped our backyard, and it was glorious to finally sit outside and use it.  We did it toward the end of summer, and we laid down new sod, so we had to wait for a few weeks before it was ready, and then we went on vacation, and by the time we returned the weather had mostly turned cold.  Plus, in DC the mosquitoes can get out of control late in the summer and sometimes it's too hot to be outside for long periods of time.  There is a narrow range of good outside days, and you have to use 'em or lose 'em -- 80-degree April days are perfect.  Unfortunately, our nice dinner was somewhat abruptly ended because our friends' four-year-old son bit his tongue and opened it up pretty wide.  It was one of those things where our friends went from "maybe we should leave now" to "maybe we should call the doctor" to "maybe we should take him to urgent care" to "we spent 12 hours in the E.R., and he had to get eight stitches on his tongue."  Just about every parent with young kids has been there at some point.  It's awful.

In other news, lots of political stuff going on these days.  I'll touch on a few subjects briefly.

• Our egomaniac-in-chief remains as egotistical and maniacal as ever.  The office of his lawyer, Michael Cohen, was raided by the FBI, and it's apparently made him madder than usual.  I have no idea how this all ends.  I think Trump eventually forces Mueller out somehow, and then... who knows?  Republicans have been saying firing Mueller would cross some sort of line, but they've caved on just about everything else with Trump -- why would this be any different?
  
• Perhaps related to the point above Paul Ryan announced he won't be seeking reelection this fall.  This is a good thing for two big reasons: a) It makes his House seat more likely to be flipped by the Democratic candidate Randy Bryce (aka "Iron Stache"); b) Paul Ryan sucks, and I'm glad he won't be in Congress anymore.  Paul Krugman had Ryan figured out nearly a decade ago, and his analysis has proved truer and truer as the years went on.  The snarky thing liberals always say about libertarians is that they got into Ayn Rand as a freshman in high school and never grew out of it.  But this seems to really be what happened to Ryan.  Literally, the only thing he seems to care about as a public servant is depriving the poor of public goods and services in order to fund tax cuts for the super-rich.  (And when it was too politically difficult to limit goods and services to the poor, he cut taxes anyway and put it on the country's credit card.)  I dabbled briefly in the "makers and takers" ideology on my own when I was, like, 14 (I never read Rand) and thought it was something something new and profound, and then I got older and realized it was incredible trite and shallow.
  
• Apparently we are bombing Syria again.  That we will we bomb a country in the name of protecting their children, but will not take in these children as refugees is among the more hypocritical and morally reprehensible things we've done as a country in a long time -- and that's saying something.
  
• Speaking of reprehensible, read this story.  It's absolutely awful.  It encapsulates so much of what's wrong with our society -- racism, irrational fear toward "others," immediate escalation of a nothing situation, and of course guns.  As it turns out, a good guy with a gun who tries to kill a black teenager for knocking on his door is not a good guy at all.  The only heartening things about this story are a) the guy missed, b) the sheriff recommends throwing the book at this trigger-happy paranoiac.
  
• In terms, of racially motivated overreactions, this Starbucks one seems to be grabbing more headlines.  It's quite ridiculous.  I will say, however, that many a Starbucks located in the heart of big city will deny you bathroom use and ask you to leave if you don't buy anything, even if you're white.  I know from experience.  (In the suburbs, where space isn't at such a premium, they're much laid back about it.)  I seriously doubt that they would call the cops however.  Again this is somebody turning a nothing situation into a major incident for no reason.  And I don't totally let the cops off the hook either, under the "they were just doing their jobs" excuse.  From everything I've read, they absolutely could've resolved things without any arrests.  I bet what happened is the responding officers got chippy because the guys wouldn't leave immediate when asked (because they didn't really do anything wrong), and so they felt disrespected and weren't going to let the guys off scott free because of it.  In my experience, offers hate it when you don't jump when they tell you to, even if you're in the right.  They know that they can't do anything to serious to you, but they feel the need to do something, so they ruin your day and waste your time.  I've had it happen to me, and I'm white.  I cannot even imagine how much worse it would be if I was black. 

And on that note, it's now 9:30 pm Sunday evening, and I have a mountain of dishes in the sink to attend to.  Until next time...

Entry 417: A Week in Columbia and a Night Charlotte

Lil' S1 goes to a year-round school, so he has breaks at weird times.  For example, for spring break he get two weeks off instead of one.  It's slightly annoying for us, but not too bad, because there is an entire cottage industry in the DC area of day camps and such for kids to attend when their schools are on break.  The first week we sent him to Alliance Française, a French school, near S's office.  It was S's idea.  I was fine with it because she said that she would take him to school in the morning.  (It would add about an hour to my commute.)  But, of course, whenever your spouse says to you, "Don't worry, it won't affect you," you should be worried because everything affects you somehow -- that's what being in a family means.  In this case, S double-booked a meeting at the same time as Lil' S1's drop-off, and it was an important one with her boss and her boss's boss and her boss's boss's boss, etc.  It was one of those things where, she would only be five minutes late to the meeting, but the thought of being late at all was stressing her out.  So, I hesitantly chimed in, "I could take him, I guess, if I really need to," hoping she would respond, "No, it's right next to my office.  It would double your commute.  That doesn't make any sense.  I'll figure something out."  Instead she said, "Yeah, that's probably best.  Thanks."  *Sigh*...

The school is only about three miles from our house, but it's three miles through thick DC rush-hour traffic the exact opposite way as my office.  Then I had to park, and everything in that area is zoned for embassies, so I had to find a side-street and walk, which added another tens minutes to the trip.  I didn't have anything pressing at work, so it wasn't that big a deal, though.  Plus, I got to tell everybody at work that I was late because I couldn't find parking at my son's French school because there was only embassy parking on the street.  I felt like a real member of the DC Elite.

I don't think anybody cares when I arrive at (or leave) work anyway.  I never put in eight hours at the office anymore.  I arrive between 9:30 am and 10:00 am every morning (because I have to drop both kids off in the morning), and I leave at 4:45 pm, so that I can make my Krav Maga class at 5:00 pm.  If you do the math, that's only seven hours, and that's including my lunch break.  I also work from home two days a week, and I work longer hours from home (no commute), but I doubt I work enough to offset my short days in the office to achieve the traditional 40 hour work week.  But I don't care (I'm about that ROWE, boss), and my company apparently doesn't care, as they just gave me a big raise, so... I'll just consider myself fortunate that I have job like this.  Of course, I had a big hand in it -- I went to school for many years to learn valuable skills that relatively few people have -- but a lot of it is just luck too.

Working remotely is a huge plus about my job.  For the second week of Lil' S1's spring break, we went to their grandparents' house in Columbia, SC, and I worked from there.  It's nice, actually.  They have a little office I can use.  I can take a break and jog around the little man-made lakes by their house, and the kids are occupied by the in-laws and their friends.  (They're close with a younger couple who have an 11-year-old and a five-year-old.  So, the older kid can basically be the babysitter of the other three, and then you just need one adult on the premise in case of an emergency.)

Also, I can do things like, what we did on Thursday, and drive up to Charlotte at lunchtime, and then work a few more hours in a hotel, and then enjoy a nice kid-free evening with my wife.  It was great, actually.  We get to do this only once or twice a year.  This time we had a bunch of credit card points, so we did it up and got a chichi hotel in downtown Charlotte, and it was excellent.  I realized I'm a huge sucker for decor.  I'm willing to pay a lot more to be in a place that feels cool (for one night, anyway, without kids).  We went to dinner at a nearby tapas restaurant, which was delicious.  Then we went back to the hotel (if you're gonna pay for it, you might as well use it), and watched Get Out on demand.  It's a fantastic movie -- the perfect horror film, in that it creeps you out from the get-go, but you don't really know what's going on for most the film, and then everything ties together beautifully at the end.  I was thinking about it half the night, partly because it gave me the willies, partly because I was remembering early scenes with knowledge I didn't have at the time, going, "Oh... now I get what was going on there!"  Even without falling asleep right away, it was still an early night for me.  I think I was asleep by 11:30 pm, which is before I usually fall asleep.

We had to get up early the next day to get back to Columbia.  We both had work to do.  I had to call into a meeting that lasted so long, my phone battery died while I was on it.  (We were already done with "my part" of it, so it wasn't a big deal.)  For long stretches of it, I put the phone on mute and did calisthenics during it, and then I ate lunch -- another advantage of working remotely.

The next morning we woke up super early -- before 6:00 am -- to hit the road back to DC.  S is very anal about driving as much as we can while the kids sleep.  It makes sense Lil' S2 gets carsick easily, so we don't like him to watch iPad in the car much, so there is nothing for him to do but sleep or annoy us.  Still, getting up so early and driving is a recipe for fights, as everybody is extra irritable and we are already doing something that can be highly irritating (driving with kids) and Lil' S2 is at an age where he can be nearly unbearable.  He just spins off the rails from the slightest things and then it's almost impossible to calm him down.  It's really awful, actually.  Then to make matters worse, it poured rain the entire drive back. 

But we made it, with only a few meltdowns, and I'm back in DC enjoying my buffer day.  The kids are at a friend's house, but they will be back soon, so I should wrap this up.

Until next time...