There are Facebook users, reluctant Facebook users, and then the Facebook diaspora
Connect these small facts however you want…
1. It’s not clear right now who the end user is. While you are a brand, I’ve been told to treat my personal experience on Facebook as if I, too, am a brand. The social network uses both you and me. We toil to create the content that sells its highly targeted ads back to us.
2. The 16-month period between the release of David Fincher’s The Social Network and the announcement of the IPO is as distinct a delineation of a generation as we have right now.
3. If Facebook is a nation—as we insist on labeling it—this is its Exodus moment. Those adept at reading the tea leaves have seen the shit is getting real. If they haven’t already left, they’re trying to leave.
4. In the 16-month period between movie and IPO, the literature of “like” or “dislike” gave way to the literature that pronounces where this fits in history. The New Yorker, Atlantic, GQ, n+1 literature. There’s a common timbre to this literature, summed up in Paul Ford’s recent New York Times Magazine essay: “I do not enjoy Facebook. I find it cloying and impossible, but I am there ever day.”
5. Zadie Smith’s essay in The New York Review of Books is the most consequential. She introduces the term “denuding,” which pops up in much of the literature that comes after. Denuding means to strip somebody bare. To strip away that vegetation that covers an area. It’s hard to find an antonym to denuding. Your professional brand. My personal brand. Like the forest that once sat atop the pits of tar in Northern Alberta, whatever you try to put back after is not the same.
6. If you want an especially symbolic moment in the past 16 months, Salman frickin’ Rushdie battled Facebook—using Twitter—for the right to use his own name on Facebook.
7. When I read this literature, Arcade Fire’s “Neighbourhood #1” trembles between my ears:
And if the snow buries
My neighbourhood
And if my parents are crying
Then I’ll dig a tunnel
From my window to yours
8. It’s at the above point in the song that an image clicks into my head. It’s an unseasonably warm autumn day in Vancouver. One year after the movie. Six months before news of the IPO. Zuckerberg’s waiting in line for a Japadog. Japadog’s cart is like the gnarliest kind of Facebook wall, covered in cryptic “likes” and comments from people like Ice Cube, Steven Segal and Anthony Bourdain. Japadog connects geography, mythology, culture and people that would always seem to have been connected in a way that only seems obvious after they’ve been connected. Nobody but the person who has clandestinely snapped the photo on a phone even recognizes him. And it’s not the hot dog cart itself, but rather the thought that the creator might duck beneath the proverbial social layer, and physically line up for the most overhyped hot dog in town.
9. Zadie Smith insists that to know Facebook—and read the tea leaves—you must know the mind of its creator. She notes that “he uses the word ‘connect’ as believers use the word ‘Jesus,’ as if it were sacred in and of itself.”
10. Sometimes you and I cross paths on Twitter. And I think we saw each other briefly on Google+, which is the physical and spiritual equivalent of seeing you at the methadone clinic. And there is no higher connection than that.
11. Three things to remember about diasporas: i) It’s not the former homeland they despise, but what’s become of it; ii) Intensely loyal; iii) Need a new homeland.
12. The song continues:
You climb out the chimney
And meet me in the middle
The middle of the town
And since there’s no one else around
We let our hair grow long
And forget all we used to know
13. There’s a whole new open source social network that is poignantly called Diaspora. You don’t necessarily need to be on it. You don’t necessarily need to be Colbert and Stewart and set up a gathering in Washington. You don’t need to build Israel, Korea Town or have a presence on Calle Ocho. You don’t need a wacky hot dog cart, where my photo will be taken. But you need to start digging that tunnel. A secret place for us to meet, away from Twitter and Facebook and all the unseen prying eyes.
Chris Koentges is an award-winning writer based in Vancouver. His work has appeared in The Walrus, Maisonneuve and Reader’s Digest.
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