I go with the times. I don’t bitch when something changes, like a new feature or tweaks to the layout of a favorite site or app. Most people shit the bed when this happens, you hear about it for like a week, as it’s this era’s water-cooler banter about the weather or big sports win the night before. And then it’s gone and everyone moves on to the next stupid thing that doesn’t really affect us in any way in the real world. And it’s fine. If it’s not that then it’s something else to break the ice since very few of us have anything tangible or original left to say. We’re just plodding through life, trying to make it as uneventful as possible between those endorphin spikes.

I love social media. I’ll make this point more than a couple times over the course of these entries, but it’s true that we are the most immortal generation that has yet to exist, with our memories and thoughts preserved here online for who knows how long. Forever? At the very least, we can imagine that our shares and likes will last longer than the yellowing photo albums of yore, never to curl, never to rot or be burned or torn… but with all these old dire fates lost to that fading age, new threats to our preservation have reared their ugly heads. Correction: I loved social media.

Like you (or not), my morning dump is usually spent blinking to while the rest of my bodily systems are prodded online to face the daily grind. During the hallowed ritual is when I’d swipe open my phone and check to see what kind of nonsense went on while I was in my eight-hour coma. It was great; liking was a perfect way for me to see friends and family without actually having to spend my actual free time going to visit, and in turn, deal with them. It was wins all around! Yes, less net-savvy folk act as share-bots posting lame-ass memes you saw back in the Myspace days but it was a tolerable, yet noteworthy con in a sea of pros and cons. We all knew what we were getting into.

But that’s the problem. Now we don’t, or at least, I don’t. Facebook tried to tell me what I wanted to see based on what they assumed I thought would be relevant… and I get it. They’re training AI and I’m super down with that, but the process was and still is pretty shit at the task. My top stories are cringe-worthy shares from someone I used to ride the bus to school with and haven’t seen (or stalked) in decades. There was a solution to this and it was called ‘most recent’. Bam. A couple taps and the feed is chronological, so I can skim indifferently through what was, at least, now sorted accordingly.

But now it doesn’t even do that anymore. I push most recent, and I get a recipe for shit-tacos posted by some jackass last Tuesday, and when someone I actually see in real life asks me if I saw a certain post, odds are, I didn’t. The feed went from inane, trivial life activities to dummies being tricked into feeding the click-economy with worthless shares that make my morning ritual an awakening to frustration rather than the uneventful browsing of the mundane. You know it’s gotten bad (or rather I do) when I actually miss blowing though kid/pet pix and blindly liking shaky videos I only watched for three seconds, max.

I’ve been engaged with social media for almost two decades now, with Facebook reigning supreme, having over ten years of the significant moments in my life voluntarily thrown into the digital pyre. I don’t plan to quit, and know that the powers that be are responding to whichever way the tide turns; the social engineers are responsive – hell, it’s their business to be and we can’t blame the beast for feeding where the fruit hangs lowest and the prey most docile. But I’m not feeling it anymore and while I’m not planning to close my account, I definitely get more out of life the less I log in. And perhaps… that was their plan all along?