… or whatever you want to call this time of year – also my first actually thought-out, direct-to-Facebook post in several months. I’m sure this one oughta win me lotsa new friends..

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This is what I’m thinking about in the early evening of a cold Sunday in December:

First of all, this thing we call “Christmas” starts out as a religious holiday and as such has no business being on the “official” calendar of a nation that honors that other tradition called “the First Amendment.” But never mind, it’s a nice tradition (even if it does come in the dead of winter, and for some reason coincides with the not only the worst weather of the year but the worst traffic as well…).

Coming as it does on a Monday this year, I’m thinking the tradition could use an updating. Call it “XmasOS2017”:

For starters, the date is entirely arbitrary since nobody really knows when Jesus or Emmanuel or whatever his actual name was was actually born. It could just have well been in March or August. The only reason a date in December was chosen – back in something like the 4th century – was to co-opt the Pagan traditions around the Winter Solstice.

So how about – instead of a religious holiday on Dec 25, we declare a religiously-neutral holiday for friends-and-family gatherings and gift exchanges on the Monday following the last weekend in December? Then every year we’d have a three-day weekend at the end of the year.
I’m trying to think what to call it. How about…oh, I know…

FESTIVUS!
(damn, why didn’t <I> think of that…?)

OK, that’s my contribution to the occasion. Now, please don’t lecture me with “…. but this is a Christian Nation!” Oy, don’t start me…

And in case your wondering, Thomas Jefferson pretty much agrees.

Probably not, since it’s all been superseded by the shit-show that 2017 turned in to.

Nothing to do now but bring on 2018…

Here is an illustration of what I find so disturbing about of social media:

First, a genuine (if somewhat deliberately obscure) existential cry for help:

… generates all of six “Like”s and one comment.

But a fucking CAT picture:

…generates forty+ likes and a dozen+ comments.

Hence the rhetorical question, “what’s wrong with this picture?”

–– in answer to the question “Is Mercury in Retrograde?”

It goes “direct” just in time for that ‘Christmas’ business…

From the Department of “stop me if you’ve heard this before.”

Frankly, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to avoid the day-to-day Drumbeat Of Doom. No amount of putting my hands over my ears makes any difference. It’s hard to enjoy Christmas music at the mall (irony alert!) when all you can hear inside your own head is the soundtrack from “Jaws.”

And despite my best (?) efforts to the contrary, I still find myself sucked into the vacuum. Empty feeling inside? Meet the infinite random trivial generator. How’s that working out for you? Not so well? Scroll some more…

I know I’m not saying anything particularly original here.

And I take little solace when I see other voices – supposedly speaking with some higher authority – echoing the themes that I’ve been expressing here for the past several months.

For example, a former Facebook executive who now confesses his personal guilt for breathing the life into Frankenberg’s digital monster:

Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a “hard break” from social media.

A “hard break” from Facebook. That’s what I’ve been trying to do since October. But it’s, umm… hard….

Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

Apparently this guy has a new job title, “Master Of The Obvious.” From which pedestal he further enlightens:

“Your behaviors… are being programmed…”

And this from a guy who left Facebook SIX YEARS ago! Dude… you’re just now figuring this out??

Personally, I find much irony in Palihapitya’s comments – and the fact that these digital media outlets are publishing them. All these people are suddenly waking up to the realization that new technologies are unpredictably disruptive.

Gee, who’da thunk?

Right now, in the wake of all the revelations about the 2016 election, Facebook and Twitter are getting all the critical press. But it’s not just Facebook and/or Twitter. It’s the whole new digital environment, everything from smart phones to Netflix to the incredibly shitty new NYTimes iPad app.

Why is anybody surprised that all of this new technology is re-wiring our brains, and, consequently, the whole fabric of society is being rewoven in disturbing new ways?

To observe these impacts now is like registering surprise that “this hammer, it keeps banging on nails!” That’s what hammers do. They bang on nails.

And that’s what new technologies do: they fuck shit up.

That is why even the gentle strains of Bing Crosby and David Bowie crooning together on “The Little Drummer Boy” sounds like the soundtrack from a forty-year-old shark movie.

Here is what my “addiction to the algorithm” has produced today:

What have we really created? What psychology might call a double infantile narcissistic regression….

Is it any surprise then that societies are regressing, too, when tech is creating algorithmic addicts stuck in infantile states having counterfeit relationships, not, let’s say, vibrant citizens and neighbours and friends and institutions and trust between them all? … by regressing us to fixated infants searching desperately for the next fix, a dopaminergic approach to human possibility makes us less capable of genuinely adult behaviour: really openly discussing, handling, managing, our many great problems, from inequality to climate change to predatory behaviour.

Or, as I keep saying to anybody who will listen: “Trump: Because the Internet.”

Follow the link for the ‘rest of the story’:

The Dopamine Economy: The Mad Men Created Consumers. We’ve Created Algorithmic Addicts

…why I don’t hang out on Facebook much any more.

It’s not the headline, it’s the “WTF” from the guy who doesn’t get the joke.

And the fact that I had to spell that out.