Well, this is delightful. Turns out that Facebook’s “Portal”—I’m putting it in scare quotes because it is scary—will totally be able to record everything that you’re doing with its four face recognizing cameras, save everything it records, and direct advertising to you accordingly…and also sell all the reams of information it “harvests” to anybody that wants it for enough money.
What a brilliant gadget. You buy The Portal—which is only meant to make Facebook messenger into a video option, which it, get this, already is, as in, you won’t be able to surf the web or integrate the thing with any other technology you have, I mean, you can listen to music, but you won’t even be able to look at your own facebook feed—and Facebook, in return, will take all the information it can possibly get from all your video chatting…and that’s it. That’s the deal. I mean, I know I can literally facetime, skype, google chat, WhatsApp, or just make, as it were, a Phone Call with my Phone, but its never enough is it. I need to turn messenger into a video option because what I have time to do is stand around in my kitchen not just talking to all my children but also talking to all the people I currently chat with by writing to them when—and this is the kicker—I have time…
Oh, I see, I see, I need to stop my whole life and give it to Facebook on a little platter, like John the Baptist delivered up by Salome, that great prize that turned out to be just a touch more costly than anyone imagined at the time.
You know what I miss? I miss the bad old days when the chatting function on Facebook was literally attached to Facebook and I didn’t have to go to another platform to chat with people, a platform that Cannot Handle that I will not turn on its notifications. Every day it screams and rages at me that it can’t tell me that my friends want to talk to me because I won’t turn on the notifications. And every day I push NO, over and over and over again, like it expects some kind of crazy different response from me. Remember how you could navigate around Facebook and chat without having to leave Facebook? Gosh those were the good times. Now, of course, I have to pop back and forth between fifteen different modes of communication. I can WhatsApp on my phone but not on my tablet or computer. I can FaceTime on my tablet but it doesn’t work so hot on my phone. I can email more easily on the computer but then I have to beat my way past all my books and papers to get into the chair and actually sit down, shoving the dog over who then growls at me because its not actually my chair but his chair…
…and all the while All The Children Are Screaming and I’m Screaming And Everybody Is Screaming.
Oh my word, Zuckerberg, every day you bring me This Much Closer to taking all my devices and flinging them into the Susquehanna, to deleting Facebook forever and walking back into that calm sane place that once I occupied, that place where I literally walked through my day thinking thoughts and living my life and reading books and talking to people Face, as it were, To Face.
Talk about corrupting both the word Face and the word Book. Facebook is neither of those things. And bringing four obnoxious cameras into my house so that I can continue to spin out in an anxious and insane world is not my idea of a good time.
Keep at it Zuckerberg, my finger is hovering over the delete button.
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