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The other day Facebook went down for hours, and the worldwide roar it generated woke me from the sleep of the righteous. I then remembered the afternoon in May 2007 when a friend told me for the first time about a place on the Internet where I could find Fulanita de tal, a friend of a friend who had admired me since I met her at a party of birthday, and to which I did not dare to cross two words live. So I registered on that site, I found Fulanita, and in that anaerobic and impalpable space I was able to admire her, find out her tastes, touch her interest, and even convince her to take a walk with me. And right there they found me childhood friends, remote relatives, greeted strangers, and endless shadows of my past that made me understand that that program was not only my new disco or my town square, but that it was also a machine of the time and a festival of myself where people came to look at my profile to see my life without being seen, and in which I could do the same with them.
It was called, you know, Facebook, and I won’t lie if I say that to my generation (millenials, last dinosaurs grown without a computer) kicked us into the 21st century and transformed the meaning of the phrase “I’m connected.” From then on, we did it for many hours. The Internet stopped being the exotic bookstore where you consulted some oddity, or a magic cloud where you downloaded your favorite songs for free, and became the most funky bar in your dining room, where you met people, gossiped, discussed topics , you flirted, you felt. And you did it without paying a penny and because you wanted to.
I spent several years feeding that guardian dog of my loneliness, with images of my travels, my parties, and my kisses, until one fine day someone had the idea of setting up a dinner for alumni gathered by the power of Facebook, and after a The evening in which they told me about my recent people and my latest whereabouts as if they knew them, and in which I tried without luck to qualify some embarrassing memories that all of them kept of my punishments and my suspensions, I realized immediately but terribly late that he had created a monster. That he had a double call like me out there, in network. That I was beginning to be more true or better remembered than myself. And that every human being who aspired to a decent life had the right to be forgotten.
I left Facebook. I haven’t been there in years, I rarely think about him, and only the recent collapse made me look back.
Facebook has not yet explained what happened the other day. It could be a human fault. According to my programmer friends, it could be that an employee entered a wrong code repeated millions of times and that was enough to collapse everything. Maybe that employee could hear what Frances Hugen recounted in front of the United States Senate the day before the world crash. Hugen worked as a manager at Facebook and left in 2021. He did so out of doubts and regrets. Hugen keeps documents. Hugen told the senators that the company was dedicated to making money without caring about people’s safety, without proper control of hate messages, without a real interest in cutting hoaxes, without credible care of personal data, and without taking into account the insane impact that this public square of comments, pujas, and stoning has on the self-esteem of millions of adolescents. When you bring your hand too close to a flame, you get burned. It took decades to denounce loud and clear what could happen when smoking, because when you took a drag, nothing seemed to happen. Personal data, digital photos, self-esteem, or the truth do not smell, do not weigh, have no taste. And that’s why when you lose them at first you don’t notice it. But we are smoking Facebook.
The laughing days of 2007 are over. It seems the right time to take action, to tie Facebook and company short, to legislate seriously. Another lawyer friend tells me that there are cracks in the contracts we accept with Facebook, that they are making millions at the cost of something from you without you taking your share.
He tells me that such a cause supported by 10,000 signatures could bring about a change. But it is not only a matter of law or governments, but to find those 10,000 people who have begun to notice the virtual smoke in their lungs. Because Facebook is already 60% of the world’s population. And this Facebook Frankenstein we have assembled with our photos, our data, our life. You and I.
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