Mark Zuckerberg and The End the World

What are the odds that Facebook will

bring about the Zombie Apocalypse?

(c) 2012 by Tom King

I love all the pundits that are busily predicting the end of Facebook with a note of sadistic glee in their word processors. Yeah, the IPO didn’t go as well as everyone hoped (presumably including the inimitable Mr. Zuckerberg). So what? Why should Facebook’s hiccups make so many intellectual snooty persons happy?

I think it’s all the ordinary raggedy humans on Facebook that bug them - all those ignorant masses trolling around on Facebook telling their friends all about themselves. Here we have a publishing engine that allows people to present themselves in a deceptively attractive online format, their ruminations completely unedited and uncensored. And all these untrammeled thoughts and ideas, pictures and art just flow through Facebook’s pipes like either some sort of gigantic sewer system or like the vascular system of some amazingly vast unpredictable fun beast.

Which you see it as, rather depends on whether you are a regular raggedy human being or one of the legions of self-appointed arbiters of taste and culture who think that information flowing to and from “the masses” ought to pass through them to be cleaned up and made presentable first.

One good professor argued recently that Facebook and its social media compatriots, the smart phone, laptops, tablets, podcasts and eBooks threaten to make us all narcissistic slaves to cultural group think. He joins a tiresome procession of pundits who have predicted the end of civilization as we know it if some technology or other becomes widely adopted.

The telephone was supposed to make us slaves. And for a time, it did keep us hopping to answer the thing every time it rang. So, we invented the answering machine and voice mail so we didn’t have to get up from our movie or our book or our supper to answer its jangly summons. Email was supposed to chain us to our computers answering a vast flood of trivial communications. We invented the spam filter and learned to block obnoxious communicants the way we learned to throw out junk mail without reading it.

Now Facebook has changed our concept of friendship. Not to worry. Facebook and other social media have only freed us from geographical proximity as the end/all be/all basis of friendship. Facebook and its ilk have, instead, replaced geographic proximity as the primary determiner of friendships with social proximity through electronic connections. Facebook became as an expander of human relationships. With it and the modern array of tele-communications tools available, it is more than ever the kinship of ideas, beliefs and interests that form the basis for friendships. We may have 1200 Facebook friends, but we still effectively communicate within only a relatively small circle of active friendships.

We are no more slaves to the temptation to narcissism and groupthink than we ever were. Used to be we all accepted what the newspapers told us about the world. Later it was two or three radio networks, then pretty much it was Walter Cronkite on the six o’clock news. Now, you can find both sides of any story if you don't mind cruising around the cable news networks. You can even subscribe to a plethora of newsfeeds that send the news of the day in all its conflicting forms directly to your cell phone.

All this technology has NOT led to a melding of the minds or robot people with no will of their own. Au' contraire. The explosion in communication technology, far from drawing us all together, has confirmed us in our differences. Arguably better communication with our peers has led to near anarchy in places like the Middle East and to a looming civil war between the right and left in our own country. It’s not the smart phones that will destroy us. The technology itself is benign. If the world rings down to an end it will be because we surrender ourselves to the same old impulse to greed, lust and power that’s haunted the human race since time immemorial. It wasn’t cell phones that started the Crusades, the Holocaust, The Cultural “Revolution” or the Inquisition. If anything, improvements in communications technology have dragged such nastiness out from under its rock and killed it with light.

Let’s face it. Most of us realize our hundreds of "friends" on Facebook are just a network of acquaintances with no more influence over us than mere acquaintances ever have. Our circle of true friends still remains rather small - limited almost entirely by our inability to cope with more than a finite number of close relationships anyway. It's just that some of our new "friends" live halfway round the world. Thanks to social media, we are free to choose our friends these days unbound by the constraints of geography.

I think I’ll Skype my buddy, Martin, in Poland this weekend.

How cool is that?

Tom King
Puyallup, Washington
Now you know someone you can worry about if you ever hear that Mt. Ranier has blown up.

Little Faces Looking Up - The Urge to Leave the Earth

From: Trader to the Stars

• ....tools settle the possibilities: you can't have interstellar trade without spaceships. A race limited to one planet, possessing a high knowledge of mechanics but with all its basic machines of commerce and war requiring a large capital investment, will inevitably tend toward collectivism under one name or another. Free enterprise needs elbow room.

- Poul Anderson

Upcoming Dragon X rendevouz with the ISS

I admit it, the idea of commercial space travel makes me happy.  Since the turn of the century when it became apparent that NASA was losing its drive (not to mention its funding) for space travel, innovators in the private sector have stepped forward, apparently eager to pour their fortunes into efforts to find new an innovative ways to claw our way off this ragged planet and to make the effort pay. 

With only a stingy bit of encouragement, spaceships began to be built and successfully flown. Burt Rutan reached the edges of space to win the X-Prize and is pressing hard to build a fleet of reliable space planes to carry ordinary people into orbit soon.  Space-X has already successfully flown orbital vehicles of their own design. Others ideas are on the drawing board and even the big guys like Boeing and Lockheed who have already built spacecraft for NASA are looking at joining the commercial space industry on their own hook.

We seem to know that the Earth is too small a place for mankind to remain trapped here much longer - not without very bad things happening. We see the signs of what Poul Anderson predicted in the quote above. Concentrated here on Earth, we tend toward collectivism (socialism, communism, progressivism, call it what you will).

God, in His wisdom, decided to give us free will and let us choose what we did with it. In many instances, we have chosen poorly. In others circumstances, we have chosen bravely and well.  When we lift our eyes to that which is greater than ourselves, we tend to choose unselfishly and it is well for humanity. When we surrender to despair and decide that what we see is all there is, we tend to choose selfishly and humanity finds itself under the thumb of one more would-be god who thinks that by accumulating power over others, he can somehow forestall the death and oblivion beyond which he cannot see.

We are born creatures of an infinite universe and designed for immortality. It is why we hate death and it is why we look to the stars with such longing. We do not like being cooped up in one place. It is why as children we long to run free in fields and woods. It is why we climb trees and mountains and jungle gyms. When our eyes are lifted up we are fearless and free.

But, when we turn our gaze downward, our eyes on our feet, our hearts embracing fear, our vision becomes so constricted we cannot see beyond the walls that hem us in and hold us to the ground. When the Earth and this one life become all there is for us; when we cannot imagine that we will ever move out among the stars; it makes us mean and ill-tempered.  

Tom King

Making Peace With Wolves - An Aesop Fable

Creative Commons: Some rights reserved by Harlequeen

“WHY SHOULD there always be this fear and slaughter between us?” said the Wolves to the Sheep. “Those evil-disposed Dogs have much to answer for. They always bark whenever we approach you and attack us before we have done any harm. If you would only dismiss them from your heels, there might soon be treaties of peace and reconciliation between us.” The Sheep, poor silly creatures, were easily beguiled and dismissed the Dogs, whereupon the Wolves destroyed the unguarded flock at their own pleasure.

 - Aesop

 Creative Commons: Some rights reserved by tonynetone

Aesop understood this principle more than 2.600 years ago and yet apparently highly educated politicians still want to send away the dogs and trust in the promises of wolves. Aesop told a second story (below*) with the same theme. He must have thought it important to tell the story twice.

 - Tom

Creative Commons: Some rights reserved by slightly everything

 * A HORSE SOLDIER took the utmost pains with his charger. As long as the war lasted, he looked upon him as his fellow-helper in all emergencies and fed him carefully with hay and corn. But when the war was over, he only allowed him chaff to eat and made him carry heavy loads of wood, subjecting him to much slavish drudgery and ill-treatment. War was again proclaimed, however, and when the trumpet summoned him to his standard, the Soldier put on his charger its military trappings, and mounted, being clad in his heavy coat of mail. The Horse fell down straightway under the weight, no longer equal to the burden, and said to his master, “You must now go to the war on foot, for you have transformed me from a Horse into an Ass; and how can you expect that I can again turn in a moment from an Ass to a Horse?”  

- Aesop