The Psalms

The monumental amount of unsubstantiated gossip and conjecture enabled every day by Facebook is lethal to the human intellect. Can fire be fought with fire?

Today, after positing on whether or not a pastry was in fact the namesake of the battleship Bismarck, I was told by its owner – a local woman of a far-from-excusable age – that “[I] should be on that big bang show.” Upon such fuckery, I looked her in her eyes and informed her that she'd just changed my plans for the night: I was now going to go home, wrap my lips around the barrel of my Beretta, and blow my brains out. I should've known better than to so jest with a boomer immediately after receiving such glaring indicators of minimal intellectual function, but I fell for the hope – as I often do, to no avail – that such a jarring reaction would encourage reflection on her foul, tragically misled sentiments regarding the general state of youth, and perhaps even spare a peer or two from future tribulation.

Instead, she called the police.

Three round cops found me, an hour later, approaching hesitantly. Strangely enough, they were chuckling – maybe to a little joke about all the recent hubbub on the radio covering a recent wave of blatantly negligent medical care in American prisons, though I hope nervous laughter is just SOP when responding to a suicide threat. As all Columbia cops always are toward me, they were aggravatingly genuine and hilariously understanding. I began by simply recreating my interaction with their summoner, quoting her word-for-word, and – I swear to my new Lord – all three immediately released a choral “ohhhhh” in unison. I'll never know for sure if they actually assimilated the reality of the situation so quickly, but it'd certainly seem that way.

Clearly, I should've threatened her life.

Despite the day-to-day expression of our recurring wisdoms, habits, instincts, patterns and cycles of cultural metamorphosis in the discourse, the stream of “well, you know they were sayin' the world was going to end when I was in elementary school” to my ear has fallen abruptly silent since the inauguration. Our parents and grandparents are both impossibly fortunate and unfortunate, having to duck out as the most multiplicative (read: sickest) cerebral orgy in the history of mankind will just've begun nibbling on the slope to its climax. We'll be lucky if we'll still be able to articulate our goodbyes by the time they reach the door. Nonsense does a fuckin number on perceived wisdom, but the gaps are widening at a dangerous pace. Tectonic or domestic, we are all straddling expanding space, and the chill of its draft is now stealing too much of our heat to ignore.

Though it is entertaining in the moment (and otherwise redundant,) it would not be well-to-do of me now – nor was it, then – to leave the conversation in edgy absurdity. Yes, a part of me would like to campaign for Sheldon to be reclassified as an expletive, in disgust, but – as an adult in all-out sprint to make up for stalled emotional development – I must note that such a display of concern should've been at least reciprocated with a bit of explanation, if not appreciation. Still, there are much more appropriate reasons and situations in which to waste public servants' time.

It's not news – the Theory is providing some ghoulishly skewed portrayal of less-than-forty pseudointellectuals. Obviously, my savior's time was worth very little to her, but the fact that she spent any quantity of anything at all engaging with even a decidedly mainstream generationally ambassadorial bridge could be regarded – if stretched – as the result of a curious seed, which has skyrocketed in human value, as of late. It is undiscouragable. Read the trail a bit, and you'll find that your frustration is simply an expression of the terror that's ignited by the stagnancy of their pace.

It's great that you've managed to inch over to modern-ish sitcoms from Judge Judy and Independence Day , mom, but you're gonna have to really pick up the pace and work on following a few body modification communities on the darknet.

If an absence of solutions are the crux of the blog, here I'm now gloating.

To whom does the commoner look to for such solutions when they'd prefer not to terrorize their kooky middle age parents into a half century of brutal fasting under vows of silence?

The Big Thinkers! The Men of the Hour.

Yes, men. All Big Bumbling Billionaire Imbeciles.

Elon Musk cannot be the Nicola Tesla of the 21st century, or even the 20th, for that matter, because literally every mechanically-minded professional I've ever heard talk about battery technology has condemned it in some manner as an inescapable dead end, developmentally. Perhaps, then, the champion of electrochemical storage is the False Prophet.

No, I'm not capable of citing research or conjuring Mars-capable spacecraft, but I've been a bit too preoccupied with my country's class war and its 10% adult illiteracy rate. It's all well and good to be privy to romanticism, but it's not the 1960s anymore. Even Howard Hughes would be more concerned for the wellness of the species than our continued reach for the stars, were he still alive.

Well. Maybe not...

Charles Lindbergh would be, though.

We spent the 1990s preparing to rid ourselves of history because the smartest among us foresaw some facsimile of the renaissance we are currently experiencing. If they'd been shown a glimpse of some statistics on the volume of media we consume, they'd exclaim of their pride – no doubt – in their species' capability to progress, and perhaps even their own contribution to it. However, extended observation of an average American's day-to-day life would be lamented, in disgust, and a huge portion of the blame can be placed on one t-shirt-touting cyberyokel: Mark Zuckerberg.

His name is stupid, his spawn is ruining my life, and he continues to insist upon saying shit that frightens the bejesus out of me.

Zuckbrain is fucking scary.

“Wiring the globe” is fucking scary.

Jarvis is fucking scary.

But Fuck, himself wouldn't be at all intimidating without his money. The scariest bit is the lack of class in the criticisms of his intellectual influence. Farhad Manjoo's attention has been diligent and premium as a Times er's should be, but the same occupation bars him from authoring with the color of unsubstantiated claims.

Mine does not.

Elon Musk is not an apologetic genius. He's willing to joke about his intellectual distance from the planet and its populace on Twitter. Apparently, his mind's even surpassed the need to punctuate. Crazy.

Google is well on it's way to becoming the neo-Vatican... yada yada yada, but they're too far gone – I do not have the expertise to address them. Fuck, though, is a singular short-sleeved, Even Stevens -haired young man without so much as private office space (even though his sentiments on breathing room at home are obviously inverse.)

Clearly, it's all just to protect him from the truth: The Apostle John's Book of Revelation is about Facebook. Fuck's cyberchild is the horseman, the beasts, and the plagues, stuffed into one tyrannical website.

And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.

If I can repeatedly trigger accidental voice calls on Fuckbook Messenger, don't tell me it's not possible to inadvertently live stream myself on the pot.

The beast that thou sawest was, and is not; and shall ascend out of the bottomless pit, and go into perdition: and they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world, when they behold the beast that was, and is not, and yet is.

Of course, it's unlikely that Mark's essence was bred entirely of evil, but – like Tump, in many ways – he is an excruciatingly wealthy idiot. Though he is spending 2017 touring the United States, he doesn't seem to be all that interested in actually closing the gap between himself and the rest of us, which suggests that he only wants us to throw us off his extra-terrestrial, xenophobic scent. I can't imagine what The Mothership would really want with my Amazon browsing history, though.

And another angel came out of the temple, crying with a loud voice to him that sat on the cloud, Thrust in thy sickle, and reap: for the time is come for thee to reap; for the harvest of the earth is ripe.

Just to be clear, he is not The Antikhristos.

He'd better not be, anyway. I'd be absolutely Livid with Lucifer if his choice of a figurehead for his Big Plan was such a Fucking dork.

I mean... if Fuck wanted to spend his time crafting 6000-word essays, why the Fuck didn't he just build a Fucking CMS back in his Jesse Eisenberg era instead of the actual weekly-updated tower of digital Babylon? Surely, Satan would know better than to waste resources and pulverize creativity by ordering his Demonic Dev team to release regular builds for build's sake rather than on a per-need basis, but that'd be because The Tempter is an authority on incentive as thoroughly as Fuck isn't.

If you’re equipped with the privilege of literacy, you’ve been reading a lot about Fuckbook’s political consequences, recently. Frankly, it’s about Fucking time, but I’m compelled to emphasize that the most significant motor driving the politik is fueled by the eldest, fossilized portions of our thought meat. According to Manjoo, “the News Feed team’s ultimate mission is to figure out what users want,” dipping in Facebook's ocean of action data, searching for a soul.

Yet another Fuckism that suggests he's an alien: everybody knows that nobody knows what they want.

There's a central mechanic of our brains that by nature wreaks a whole helluva lot of contradiction. If you've ever mentioned ADHD with your doctor, or know a hypochondriac/adderall fiend who has, you may have heard it described as “the lizard brain.” Simply put, it's the brain stem, and it's responsible for the most basal and primitively emotional instincts and habits; an anti-intellectual agitant, arguing at all times for the course of action with the most immediate gratification. The Great Clickbait War of 2013 was a startling demonstration that revealed the strength of the hold Fuckbook had (and still has) on these reptilian bits – the true location of its power.

“In surveys, people kept telling Facebook that they hated teasing headlines. But if that was true, why were they clicking on them?”

Volition is the Word of the Day. Here, we must once again invoke an ancient parable from the wise foretellings of the Disney film, Smart House: when dealing with human beings, boundless compliance quickly leads to abject misery for all parties involved.

Mindlessly, habitually, endlessly clicking... this is how we die.

Something about Fuck's direction is fundamentally poisonous to the human mind. Yes, he is assuredly too Fucking democratic, but misinformation is far from the only form of evil his creation has assumed. If you can jog your memory back a bit, you'll remember a much wider variety of brain-rotting filth.

In lapses of their existences' finitude, the 40-something second cousins of the world may still send you the occasional Can Crunch Saga invite, jarring you back to Jr. High in 2009, and forever associating themselves in your mind with the horrors of mortality and f u c k b o o k g a m e s.

Elon is a more likely candidate, but I'll leave those differentiations to the not-idle cult masses.

More than one sixth of all living eyes see Fuckbook every single day, placing its consumption behind only eating and drinking as the most universally human activity.

Mr. Fuck achieved his vision and became perhaps the greatest purveyor of words who's ever lived. He's taught (or... is teaching) us something very profound about ourselves: capability is not the whole of the equation. Ability on its own cannot guarantee growth, but it can often result in decay. Discussion does not inherently lead to connection. Population is not a cure for isolation.

That said, I must begrudgingly admit to you that I, myself am one of the 100 million users who've depended upon a “very meaningful” Fuckbook group for a “physical support structure” for which I have Fuck to thank.

I've spent half of my existence watching cheesy barnstorming movies, whirling around die-cast biplanes, seeking out stories from old pilots – military and commercial, and eventually trained to become one myself. As regular activities at young ages do, aviation became deeply ingrained into my identity, but my local community is very sparse – it's not exactly cool, these days. On Fuckbook, an unofficial group for members of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association has allowed me to stay connected to the rest of the world's Soaring Nerds, which is no small deal. It's the only forum which I am compelled to participate in with 100% sincerity and emotional effect.

Photos of members standing proudly next to their first airplane, or of adolescent students in a similar pose after their first solo, or of three old white rubes on a hangar picnic, laughing around a fold-up table full of rudimentary ham sandwiches in front of two gleaming Stearmans...

They tug around on my heart like nothing else in life can.

I stopped flying lessons at 16 because I began to see behind the naivety of my childhood perception of what it meant to fly commercially and realized that I was unequipped for- and uninterested in the sort of challenges it presented. I haven't flown in seven years, but the community will always have a tremendous dividend of my core being.

These days, not a single person in my day-to-day life knows or cares about aviation, which wouldn't be laudable whatsoever – it's not exactly the most relevant goingson at the moment – were it not so emotionally necessary for me.

A few days ago, a member shared a photo with the group of Charles Lindbergh's modified Ryan cockpit, captioned “what airplane am I?”

In my youth, Lindbergh filled my closest equivalent to the 'childhood hero' role. My grandmother bought me a first-edition copy of The Spirit of St.Louis from a small town bookshop when I was six or seven, and I carried it literally everywhere with me until middle school. I watched the Jimmy Stewart film tens and tens of times, and I cried when I saw the Spirit in the flesh at the Smithsonian, yet I've never had an informed conversation about any of it with another human being. It really warmed me to see how many of the comments were correct answers.

Breaking news: it's nice to know that there are other people on Earth who give a shit about the same things you do.

Again – aspiration should always be encouraged. This is Fuck's vision for his creation, and it is feasible, even for myself. At least his public persona – however valid or invalid it may be – is making a huge effort to have positive consequence, even if his idiocy is imbuing itself within all of humanity.

Fuck is too powerful to be exempted from responsibility for what Fuckbook's done to the Western psyche over the past decade, but – like the Christian god – perhaps all we need require is his repentance.

I Refuse to Die Clicking

#media