February 2019.

     My regard for Eric Alterman cannot be higher.  When he took aim at Facebook for its exploitation of users’ data, it was an opportunity to roll out a short-form version of my spiel on social media.  On this topic, consistency is categorically not the hallmark of a hobgoblin-infested small mind.

Here’s Eric Alterman’s article:

Eric Alterman, “The Social Menace,” The Nation, 28 January/4 February 2019, 6 (www.thenation.com/article/archive/facebook-spies-alterman/).

Here’s the unpublished letter:

     Thanks to Eric Alterman for his incisive assessment of the arrogance, avarice, and mendacity of Facebook’s top executives and of the platform’s toxic impact on the nation’s politics.

     Equally troubling is Facebook’s sociocultural effect.  Years ago, a friend – a recent Facebook hire – pressed my wife and me to join the nascent social media behemoth.  I demurred because the enterprise seemed narcissistic, an invitation to drown in the trivial.  My Facebook-free existence has been in no respect inimical to personal fulfillment.  Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of boundless “connectivity” paradoxically leaves people atomized as, stricken by “fear of missing out” and grasping for “likes,” they tap, tap, tap and curate their lives for a faceless electronic throng rather than living them.  Immersion in social media is not inherently bad but there are so many better things to do.