Adios Facebook
For Now or For Good...Time Will Tell
Is it part of the cycle of self-awareness or just the journey of this lifetime that brings you to these places where you feel more yourself than you have in years? That’s a big question you can ponder in your own time. My evolution is being revolutionalized by the life I have been living. As I have written about before, things are speeding up all around us, which plays into where and who I am today.
I wanted to write about turning off Facebook and social media channels that bring me less joy than when they started. Still, as this thought percolated, I am beginning to realize it is more than just moving away from those applications.
It is really connecting again with who I am as a human.
New York has a lot to do with who I am. I can be loud, opinionated, and noisy and I don’t think all those traits are necessarily bad. Unfortunately, at times some of them can be fucking overbearing and a pain in the ass, and I apologize to everyone. But I know who I am, and under this noise and bluster, I love and connect with people. I will always be a work in progress. Here I am progressing….
Thinking about my 16 years on Facebook, I know it started because I was missing out. This was my first bout of FOMO due to a software application. My now ex-wife was an early adopter. She was a loud, noisy, and opinionated Mid-Western Leo. (See, it is not just New Yawkers!) We were twins by astrology and other traits aligned. Suddenly, her energy was captured by connecting with people locally and back in the old US of A.
I was avoidant but paying attention.
After months of “Facebook this” and “Facebook that” tossed in my face, I realized I had to create my Facebook Account.
Here is my first post:
And here is an early exchange after I joined with my good friend Paul:
Seems I had it right at the start.
Or this early message from Swampgoanna foreseeing my future in 2025.
You could see the tentative steps, and I eagerly watched my friends list grow as I searched for old mates and school/work people from my 50 years on the planet. This list of friends grew close to 2,000 at one point when I was writing music reviews/interviews and adding musicians and others to it. As the years passed, I decided to limit my Friends List to people I had met or talked to (mostly) and brought that number down a lot.
This decreased some of the noise.
The noise was not bothering me. I enjoyed evangelizing about the music I loved and posting YouTube Clips, videos of gigs I had been to recently, photos (so many photos), and silly status updates about the news, my life, and whatever nonsense came to me.
Like this new Sierra Ferrell clip for Valentine’s Day…
For a while, I did not have Facebook on my phone, and that seemed to limit the drain; once it was on my phone, it became almost a default part of the way I rolled—not always, but quite a bit. My thinking would be that I should post this on Facebook. It became part of my personality. People in conversation would say, “Oh yeah, I saw that on your Facebook.”
I don’t think that gave my ego much of a buzz, but it kept me involved with the game. The dopamine hit of connection and visibility to others. Yeah, OK, I guess that is part of my ego being given a nice rub. Yeah, it was undermining, but getting 100 likes or whatever on a post was sweet. But shiiiittt, what the hell does that mean? Thanks for the click?
Elections and social media….oy vey. We are now much more knowledgeable about their impact than in 2016. During that election cycle, arguments ensued, battlelines were drawn, harsh words were spluttered with fingers, and people tried to be the first to block someone they decided was non-human or an idiot—or both.
I know for certain I was labeled that by some right-wing, conservative MAGA supporters. Those MAGA supporters in my feed were people I had not had a real conversation with since high school or somewhere in the 1980s. It raised my blood pressure and took up time. I was surprised at the shift in their politics. I wanted to change their minds. I knew that was futile, but i persisted.
Bring on 2024, and most of the MAGA people I got involved with were on other people's posts and comments within news articles. When will we learn not to read the comments? There may be humour in those hills of comments, but there will always be one that will get your damn knickers in a twister, a tornado of twisting, that will then make you start to type, and your filter is off.
Did I call someone I don’t know in Indiana a dead knob jockey and wish them etc….
Interestingly, in 2016, I was repeatedly banned due to my lack of kindness and use of words that the checkers at Facebook thought were antagonistic. Yes, I once called someone a monkey wrench, which got me banned for weeks. I still assume the monkey part caused the FB nuns to hit my hands with the virtual ruler. I was not being racist or unkind to monkeys.
Nothing is perfect, and things have gone downhill over the last 10 years. The algorithmic drive of Facebook and the commercialization/capitalization of the platform sucks, and let’s talk about politics because politics is part of the reason I am leaving. Yes, the personal is political and vice versa.
The US election in 2016 was meddled with big time on Facebook. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which they gathered 5000 data points on over 220 million Americans (from a Facebook leak of data), should have driven me away. But no, this made me become more political online. We feared a Trump presidency, and many of us made a racket.
Many have said, “If you lose a friend over politics, they are not your real friend.” At one point, I might have agreed with that statement, but no longer. Today in 2025, we have reached a destination where voting for Trump truly displays much about your morals and ethics. Simply, the Orange Psycho is an evil man who has surrounded himself with ass-kissing rich mofos who simply want more power and money and truly are as evil as he is.
America is in trouble. Democracy around the world is in deep trouble.
I took short vacation breaks from social media, and when I returned, nothing had changed. I was never one to worry about my data being collected because, well, who the hell am I? But of course, data collection is what Meta is all about. They know who you are, and they can programme your feed. It becomes an echo chamber or a horror house of advertisements.
Bring on the election of Orange Psycho 2.0, and the last remaining Trumpsters I knew showed their ethics and insanity above the parapet, and BOOM, they were BLOCKED. This was not fun. This caused energy and anger that could be channeled in more productive and fun ways.
I am tired. I am bored. The give-and-go, the conversations, the people—all seem to have faded away. There is very little life left on the pages of social media. I will miss broadcasting my writings and telling people what music I listen to today. Of course, I will miss the music recommendations and gig announcements. I will miss the many posts each day from my mate Max.
I will miss people getting a look into my life as they troll through my life down here in Australia. Some connections only happened there, and I choose to shut them off. I find this the hardest part. To combat that, my goal is to contact people using the phone, email, and snail mail, and fuck yeah, IN PERSON.
I think I will have some sort of withdrawal from the fray. Over 2024, I kept removing FB and Instagram from my phone, and it would find its way back. This was like throwing a 1/2 pack of cigarettes away when you were trying to quit, only to buy another pack 3 days later. I was also confined to home for part of 2024, so my real in-person social life was damaged.
There will be more time at my disposal. I will try not to fill it with endlessly scrolling through the news and making comments on the damn articles. I will write more on Substack. There are things I want to accomplish, and I will focus on them instead of that damn phone and this damn ICON.
My need to broadcast my life online on that platform has ended. There are political and personal reasons that I am leaving Facebook behind. Politically, this power grab by the techno-billionaires should scare us all away from having them in our lives at all. By using the data they have and the politicians they support, they are proving that they only have one thing in mind: Power and Money. They are not here to help you connect to your friends and family worldwide.
Look, over the last 3-4 months, with AI flowering out of control, it has been hard to keep up with fact-checking. Deepfakes, bots, and trolls from all over make navigating what was once a simple place to have conversations with friends like walking through the minefields that litter Cambodia. They use hero rats to sniff out mines now, something I did not know until a few minutes ago. I needed hero rats for safe social media surfing.
Alas, finding a hero rat is harder than departing and leaving Meta behind. I don’t have the patience to teach a hero rat how to think or talk and type like me. If I had a hero rat I would want to dress it in a Super Hero outfit. Super Rat!
I will continue to write and communicate via Substack, and the community there is intelligent, and many of the writers there have politics that align with mine. It is also a place to read and not endlessly watch reels for however long.
Yes, I could see and feel the dopamine hit of reels and them eroding my attention span.
You can make your own choice about leaving Meta, and you will. One of the last comments I received from a friend on FB, someone I have yet to meet in person (but I will), made me feel fuzzy and warm and also echoed my thoughts about Zuckerberg’s Folly:
I look forward to catching up with you in what we call the real world, or is it the OLD WORLD….whatever it is; I won’t be responding with some sort of emoji…sometime soon.
Join the revolution…..Why Are you On Facebook?
Love you PB 💕