An extract from my novel-in-progress Out of the Darkness:
a man who writes words for other people’s mouths waits for a client, and thinks about social media…
(Published as written in the first draft.)
Once Facebook had graduated from a college dorm in Harvard and, over a few short years, became a way in which one could provoke — and feel — capitalist-approved envy in people you hadn’t seen in a decade or more, and those you saw every day, people you just happened to share a carpet with for eight hours a day, it had become a place of budding resentment.
As time passed, and Facebook had gone from a web page you accessed only from work — i.e., the place where you connected to the internet — to, post-invention of the iPhone, an app you could browse while weeping in the workplace toilet, a certain degree of “fuck ‘em” disinhibition had seeped in.
And it hadn’t been flushed away, unlike ideals from one’s teenage years. The move away from complimenting baby photos taken by someone with whom you went to primary school was compounded by algorithmic targeting. Not only the ads for the very objects you’d recently been searching for, but the “groups we think you’d like” section. And of course, in the privacy of the workplace toilet, when some asshat had just rubbished not only your contribution to a meeting but your cultural attitudes, you wanted to press “join” on some fringe group full of pissed-off people who shared more than just your tendency to cry in the toilet.
They, you knew — as did the algorithm, which generated another data point when you pressed “join” — were your tribe. And there would be other tribes to come once the algorithm had adjusted your news feed to the new intel, which you saw, again, in the toilet. But this time, you were not there crying. Oh no. Now you were feeling something far more exhilarating than the shedding of tears. Now you could feel righteous indignation.
Sometimes you went to the bathroom not because you were pissed off, or in need of a piss. Now you went to the bathroom to add your stream of piss to the fissures that were growing in society. And that was the fucking business. OK, sometimes you felt a few pieces of the grit of existential dread in your joy.
But the certainty — never questioned — that one’s opinion mattered, that it was making a difference and being read by the right people, remained intact.
Not just any people.
The right people.
You kept the flag flying, framed by gusts of fresh hot air.
If you think this is a damn fine piece, of writing, maybe you could buy me a coffee