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Mark Zuckerberg took the stand last week to testify in a lawsuit brought by grieving parents who believe their children were harmed by engagement with Meta’s social media platforms. Zuckerberg arrived at the courthouse still looking much like a teenage boy with his mop of curly brown hair. He seemed out of place in his grown-up clothes, a suit and tie. I watched this sober-faced man-boy, and I was reminded of images of young college-aged men on trial for the deaths of their fraternity brothers after a night of drunken hazing. Zuckerberg did have a good idea while he was still in college. Back in 2003, he seemed to understand the social needs of college students to connect, to be seen, heard, and liked. It wasn’t long before he realized that all people have these same social needs, and Facebook for the masses was launched. For most of us, connection remains the main reason we continue to use social media all of these years later. Zuckerberg launched his career at Facebook with the motto: Move fast and break things, a motto that has dominated the tech world. In 2014 he updated the motto to “Move fast with a stable infrastructure,” whatever that means. In any event, maybe it was too little too late. Move fast and break things was too deep in the DNA of the entire industry. And not just the tech industry, the contagion spread and created a pandemic that is apparent everywhere including our politics. These folks seem to have grown up with the belief that “We’re cool because we’re careless.” Think Facebook and the genocide in Myanmar, or Musk and DOGE. Move fast and break things is what a child freeing himself from the restraint and security of his mother’s arms might be thinking. Move fast and break things might be the motto of a wrecking crew not a builder, a jewel thief not the jeweler. Move fast and break things sounds like fun until it is time to clean up the debris field or until you cut off your own hands. When every norm is broken, lives can be destroyed, and they are not so easily put back together as the grieving parents who filed these lawsuits complain. It is not the first time Zuckerberg has been called to account. Many books have been written. Members of the press have confronted him. He has been called before Congress. Perhaps Zuckerberg feels too big to fail and so he has not heeded the warnings. Perhaps, like many powerful men, he believes the rules do not apply to him, or he deludes himself by believing that things are as he says they are because he says so. Or maybe he is incapable of empathy and through his social media empire, he destroys empathy in others. A business that is built on a model of scandalizing its patrons and promoting outrage will eventually become self-destructive. When you see the scale of the damage influenced or caused by social media, you realize the depravity. This model is not just breaking the rules of business; it is breaking people, breaking peace and order, breaking elections and democracy, breaking civilizations. A strong footing in reality is the foundation of mental health. Social media has stolen reality in order to sell advertising. Half of the country gets its news from social media where reporting is not balanced, fair or complete, where it is deliberately manipulated and sensationalized through disinformation in order to foster outrage, clicks, and sharing. It normalizes political fear and hatred and increases suspiciousness. It amplifies the demand for immediate answers which doesn’t allow experts time to do their work. This furthers misinformation and loss of confidence in science, truth, and expertise. Social media company owners cry “freedom,” to keep their malignant operations running, but what does that word “freedom" even mean when words are manipulated in such a predatory fashion? Research shows how easily our minds can be influenced and our choices and behavior swayed. All of this is well studied and applied by social media companies and marketers of every stripe. Social media is programmed to appeal to our reptilian brains—brains that react without concern for their young or for others. It makes people self-absorbed. Technology is causing children to be confused about what it means to be alive, to be a human being. It has changed the way we engage with others and work in groups. It amplifies our primal instincts of fear and aggression. As our machines get smarter and faster, we lose the higher functions of the mind like insight and empathy, functions that make us fully human and give us the capacity to anticipate and care about the consequences of our actions. There are many industries in which moving fast is critical: think EMTs, firefighters, ER doctors and surgeons, people who repair our power lines and sewer pipes in the midst of storms…It is possible to think fast, act quickly and still maintain the structure and safety of individuals and society. What most of us want is to live in a world filled with compassion not hate and conflict. We all want to feel inspired and optimistic not beaten and suspicious. We need hope not despair. We all want to be seen and heard, but the only way for society to survive is with shared truth based on facts and history. It is all coming to a head, Mark Zuckerberg, the speed, the greed, and the misdeeds. No kid goes off to college thinking he will kill a fellow student at a frat party. And that brilliant kid sitting in his dorm room at Harvard who came up with the idea to connect us surely didn’t start out with the intention to push teenagers to suicide or countries to genocide. You can do better than this. Our parents never encouraged us to move fast and break things, but they did often remind us to be careful of the company we keep.
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… the more confusing technology becomes, the more comfortable I am with death. Because when I’m dead, it won’t matter that I can’t turn on the TV. –Kristin van Ogtrop Technology has gotten so far ahead of me that it is not remotely possible that I will catch up. I think the last major innovation in technology that I truly understood and still know how to use is the Post-It note. When I was young, “remote” meant that something was far away like the moon or that something was improbable like becoming a rock star. But now much of our daily lives is remote. We have remote controls, remote access, remote learning, remote health care, and remote work. Remote is here, there, and everywhere. Ironically, connectivity is making us more remote. It seems that everywhere can be accessed from a person’s living room. The couch, which once symbolized the examination of one’s interior life, is the new symbol of the remote world. I find all of this confusing in theory as well as in practice. My remote devices are covered with buttons and apps that operate who-knows-what. I press the “on” button and algorithms get busy making choices for me. Technology has gotten inside my brain, spies on my activities, tracks my location, and listens to my conversations in order to recommend videos, music, movies, and most of all—advertisements. My phone auto-corrects my text messages so that I am never really sure that the message I sent was what I intended to express. All of this adds to my self-doubt and frustration. Recently, I received an automatic text message from my doctor’s office asking, “Have you arrived yet?” What?! I was still in the shower! When I did arrive, there were new signs posted that parking was no longer free and must be paid for with an app. I had no idea what to do next. I turned to the only remote relationship I have ever trusted: prayer. But that didn’t seem to be working. I wondered if I was behind the times on that too. Is God on Facebook now? Can I still reach him if I am not on Facebook? And if I am not on Facebook, can he still like me? And what are his statistics? How many friends does he have? And is he still the influencer he used to be? It was not a helpful flow of thought for dealing with a parking crisis. Even as I feared that I might die in the parking lot trying to figure out how to pay for my space, it occurred to me that my phone may have lured me to the remotest place possible. As I circled the block chanting the F-word, I had to accept that this was not just a parking dilemma but an existential crisis: God may no longer be in charge. And so I did the most technologically advanced thing I could think to do. I screamed into my phone: “Hey, Google! Am I in hell?” Most days the news that greets me sets my hair on fire. What?!! is my new greeting. Let me sum up the state of the world we live in with a recent example. After years of strange and tragic mishaps aboard their airplanes and the resulting loss of hundreds of lives, Boeing, once the greatest name in aviation, admitted that maybe there were some problems in the manufacturing plant and within the corporate culture…BUT that didn’t stop them from launching two astronauts into space in a questionably-functioning spaceship for an eight-day trip. Well, guess what? HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM! Since NASA and Boeing couldn’t agree on the risk assessment, Boeing could not bring the astronauts back to earth aboard its Starliner. Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were left behind to float around in the International Space Station awaiting a celestial savior. No one seems troubled. Except me. With all of the political outrage about minor things like the energy efficiency of refrigerators and EVs, this aerospace situation does not seem to be ruffling a feather. The attitude seems to be a yawn, and a “so what?” or “Are they still out there?” Maybe I am too much of a pessimist. Maybe I am too out of touch with the miracles of technology. Who knows? Maybe an ingenious and determined Uber driver will reach those astronauts before the planned February rescue by Elon Musk’s Space-X. In any case, I remain INCREDULOUS. While the culture at Boeing that led to all of this does not surprise me, anyone who has held a job in the last 10 years could see what was happening to corporate culture and the workplace, but what sets the match to my hair is that even with knowing all of this…THE ASTRONAUTS WENT! When most other employees are refusing to come into the office or work overtime, these astronauts went into O-U-T-E-R S-P-A-C-E. And they did so WILLINGLY. It seems we live in a time when people jump into the deep end whistling, “Don’t worry; be happy.” (Except for the ones who are asked to come into the office that is.) I have actually heard people say, while they are JAYWALKING, “If I get hit by a car, I’ll just sue.” The assumption is that I can do what I want and someone else will pay. At the very least, I can get even. Forget the part about being maimed or dead. Of course, should the Starliner astronauts be lost in space forever, the tragedy will become the subject of such notoriety that it will earn itself some additional Congressional hearings to embarrass as many people as possible under the guise of weeding out those responsible. Will it be the left? The right? The woke? Or, maybe in this case, whoever was asleep at the launch pad? I grew up in a time when it wasn’t just the Boy Scouts who had the motto: “Be prepared.” We all did. We were taught to think things through. Do what is right. That went along with wear clean underwear just in case. Which leads me to wonder, what are those astronauts, who expected to be in space for 8 days, doing for clean underwear 180 days later? Maybe I was so preoccupied with the basic life and death issues that I missed the grand opening of the first Lunar Target. Perhaps Williams and Wilmore are just so happy to be free of post-election politics that they would rather be in outer space. Maybe I would too. Hopefully, Elon Musk will stay in Donald Trump’s good graces long enough to get the astronauts home because I heard the incoming president is conducting deportations of immigrants who get on his nerves. My words of wisdom to you are this: if someone offers you a once in a lifetime opportunity, think long and hard…because it just might be. I am here to warn you: if you are having trouble sleeping, do not turn on late-night television. I repeat: DO NOT TURN ON LATE-NIGHT TV. You will be transported to hell and will spend the night circling all nine rings. You will wish you had pulled your left kidney out through your navel with a fork instead of picking up the remote. The heat you generate will not be from tossing and turning. It will be the actual flames of hell. I have the burns to prove it. When we were young, our parents warned us that nothing good happens after dark. I will add an adult corollary: There is nothing good on TV after 12:30 AM. As a matter of fact, the FTC should require an automatic warning beginning at that hour: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. The anguished screams you hear will be your own.” Once you turn on late-night TV you will be tormented by commercials for identity protection services. Don’t bother changing channels. The same ads will be on every station. These infomercials will remind you how right now, at this very moment, bad guys are stealing the deed to your home and trading national secrets with foreign despots using your passport. What else? These monsters may even be stealing your butt prints as you lay on your sheets, prints they will use in some future diabolical scheme to pretend that they are you as they back out of a lead vault with a briefcase full of nuclear codes. And do not stare, because the bad guys may take an iris scan as you watch… By the time these infomercials are through with you, you will have visited all nine rings of hell, and you will be regretting your life. All of it. You will regret not accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior, having pre-marital sex, helping yourself to seconds at Thanksgiving dinner every year, squandering precious allowance money on baseball cards when you were 10, screaming at that scam caller who tried to get your Medicare number, refusing to buy a flower from the Hare Krishnas at the airport in 1965, voting for a questionable politician one too many times, and being a rude host at that professional convention back in 1990 when the hall was packed and the air conditioner broke down. No Minotaur will need to eat your flesh. You will have bitten your nails to the quick. This nighttime experience will add to your daytime hypervigilance. You will be reminded that scammers are stealing your voice by calling you on your phone and waiting for you to say “Hello,” and that your image has been stolen from your g-mail profile picture and now your head is on dozens of indecent photos that are going viral on some dangerous porn site where they are sure to ruin your future except now you don’t have one. The pervasiveness of these identity threats will haunt you and rob you of your faith in humanity and in your higher power. Will there be anything left of your identity to show at the Pearly Gates? You wonder: “What if someone already took my spot?” It’s possible. Let’s face it--Santa has already been scammed by identity thieves. We all know some very naughty people who have gotten some mighty fine presents. Now I understand why. If you unwittingly do turn on late-night television some sleepless night, I strongly suggest that you do not open your email the next morning because you can be sure another ring of fire awaits you due to the internet’s Lucifer having heard of your vulnerability by spying on your smart TV. An automatic subscription renewal notice will be waiting. It could be for some add-on to the identity theft package you purchased in your middle-of-the-night-panic or one of those “free trials” and “one-time purchases” you made because you believed them when they said “free” and did not see the fine print that said what they really meant by “free” was “you will be billed forever.” No matter how desperate you feel the morning after, don’t think you can call the authorities to report this violent mind-rape. It will be deemed your own darn fault for being up in the middle of the night and inviting these strangers into your home by turning on the TV. And weren’t you already in bed? In your pajamas? Well, then, you were just asking for it. And forget a morning-after pill to calm your frazzled nerves. They have disappeared from the shelves because, after all, two wrongs don’t make a right. Unfortunately, you will not be able to leave the country because your passport has been compromised and no country wants stinking American immigrants with guns in every pocket--especially illegal ones without a passport. If your mind is already overwrought and the anguished screams you hear are your own, then late-night TV is not for you. For your own sake, ask someone who loves you: “Please! Hide the remote.”  Such is the magic of Christmas in childhood… that a single gift can provide one with endless hours of adventure while not even requiring one to leave one’s house. Amor Towles in A Gentleman in Moscow With so much attention on the November election and its potential aftermath, it is hard to believe that the holiday season is not far away. I am doing some light research in case the Christmas miracle is that we do have Christmas this year. What launched my study was a mailing from a large chain store. I received its holiday gift guide, a slender 35-page catalog that I found in a flimsy roll in my four-inch-wide-apartment-sized mailbox. My inner child scoffed at the sight. Talk about shrinkflation! I grew up with the Sears catalog, a compendium of anywhere from 322 to 1,000 pages. I am going to guess that it weighed about half of whatever I did, and it required two hands and a baby brother to lift it into my lap. While it felt disrespectful to Sears and to Christmas wishing, in general, to even consider the flyer a Christmas catalog, I took it to my apartment and smoothed it out on my desktop. I studied the cover. Festive holiday colors formed the backdrop while the featured cover items were some of the classics that have stood the test of time: Barbie dolls, Transformers, and fisher-price Little People. The child in me forced my hand, and I turned the pages. The first page featured gifts “under $10.” There were only nine items in this price category including a Play-Doh Swirln’ Smoothies Toy Blender. Wow! I would have sold my sister for that. Still might. The second page featured items “under $20” and included the classic Lite-Brite. But beyond page two, there were no prices listed as I found myself at a two-page spread for Lego. Perhaps the price tags were missing because today’s parents already know they will need to apply for a mortgage and provide the bank with the credentials of the builder. Curious, I turned to Google for a price check. Most of the Lego sets were priced at $99.99 or more, some topping $499.00. When I was growing up, I could have purchased my first car with that amount of dough and it would have come assembled. Flabbergasted, I moved on to the next pages where my beloved Barbie had been given a two-page spread with similar displays for Disney and fisher-price. Deeper into the catalog, I smiled at the pages of familiar board games many of which still line my closet shelves. The classics still in my possession are also still in the game of games: Clue, Life, Monopoly, Operation, Sorry, Trouble, and the ancient Battleship. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but Nerf had an entire page devoted to its guns. They have gotten much larger and more varied. Nerf now makes a machine-gun named the X-shot Insanity Motorized Rage Fire Blaster. Just keeping up with the times…Rage and insanity, the name says it all. After that bit of discouragement, I rejoiced to find that the arts have not gone out of style. There were pages of craft kits with more Play-Doh items, Crayola products, and the ancient Spirograph. Even a few books were featured on page 27. I was all the way to page 29 of the 35 pages before holiday tech made an appearance: lots of dull-looking headphones, controllers, and keyboards. All-in-all this slim catalog didn’t stink, but it sure did shrink. It made me wonder what has happened to the magnitude of our wishes and the enormity of our gratitude. When I was a child we wished hard and expected little. We hoped something special would arrive by sleigh. We marked just about everything in the book in hopes of getting one item that we prized. Our minds got a workout just by looking and imagining. I closed the catalog filled with mixed emotions: the old joy I felt as a child along with the sadness of wondering what has happened to childhood and imagination in the age of technology and AI. I saw into a future in which the human mind becomes as flabby and diabetic as our bodies did in the age of conveniences. I don’t think I ever realized how much our young minds grew just from imagining what we could do, what we would do. And then, after the present arrived, what we did do: all of those hours of Barbie dramas, Erector sets, coloring books, Play-Doh, improvisation, playing games, learning rules, taking turns, it all amounted to something. Now, at this stage of my life, the thing I prize most is my mind, the one that grew from all of that wishing, imagining and playing. But then came the October surprise. About a week after receiving the catalog, a coworker reported that her nine-year-old daughter watched an old-time detective show on television. The child was fascinated by the lack of technology and the way the investigators used their minds to solve the case. “I want to do that!” she said in awe. Awe and ah! A Christmas miracle in October! I plan to give her the Christmas catalog and show her how it’s done.  I finally bowed to the g force and got a new phone, but no matter how beautiful or capable the phone it does not change what’s on the menu. I had my fresh and fancy 5g phone on board the day I passed a man who had pulled his car into the center lane of a busy four lane highway. He was on the ground next to his vehicle and appeared to be looking underneath, perhaps to identify a problem or to fix one. “Good, Lord,” I said and began praying out loud as it seemed probable that the man would be killed or cause a terrible accident in this very busy high-speed, high-access zone. I pulled over at the first opportunity and dialed the non-emergency number of the nearest police station to see if assistance or safety could be offered to the man with the disabled vehicle. To my surprise and consternation, I discovered that the rascals who invented the phone menu had infiltrated the police department. A lengthy menu of dialing options was offered. After about ten minutes, I gave up on getting help, but curious, I pressed 4 to complete my peace officer training while I waited. When I realized the amount of time that had passed, I figured the man on the road had likely gotten on his way or was dead at the scene. Either way, my Good Samaritan efforts were pointless, and I had had enough time to reconsider a second career in law enforcement. I hung up just before the exam. I now feel the need to swallow some nitroglycerin every time I hear the words: “Please listen carefully to the following as our menu options have recently changed.” Those words offend my moral senses. It should be against the law to lie to the public so flagrantly and so frequently. Do they take the dialing public for fools? I want to call them out on this and scream into the phone, “Liars!” I know the menu has not changed. They are just trying to prevent people from immediately dialing 0 or saying “speak to a representative” or getting any satisfaction whatsoever. By now, we all know there is no representative, no one is listening, no one cares, and the strategy is to discourage people and keep them from calling. The phone number itself is a ruse. Here’s what the truth might sound like:
What’s on the phone menu? Frustration and despair seasoned by outrage. I don’t care much for the entrées, but please may I see the whine list?  “…many of us have internalized the message that our bodies are some kind of burden that must be subdued and transcended.” From Goddesses Never Age Once upon a time there were no exercise classes, no gym memberships. There were no leggings or sports bras, no water bottles or heart rate monitors, no power bars or protein shakes. Daily life was the treadmill. People stepped on when they awoke and off when they fell into bed at night. They moved to the rhythms of life and the changes of the seasons. Out on the farms, in the suburbs, or on the manufacturing floors it was called “work” or “chores.” Out in the yards, in the neighborhoods, or on the school grounds, it was called “play.” Somehow people managed to get motivated and get moving without a throbbing musical beat in their ears. But the war-weary people were vulnerable, and they fell under the spell of the Gods of Progress. The Pharmaceutical Giants gave the people vaccines and antibiotics adding years to their lives and giving the people a false sense of health. The Wizard of Madison Avenue began to speak to the people from a new device called television infiltrating their minds and hearts with yearnings. Everyone began talking about an abundance of cheap, magical, labor-saving devices and convenience foods. The Wizard told the people what they should want, what they deserved, and after a taste, the people agreed. They began to seek entertainment in their homes from their laid-back positions in reclining chairs called La-Z-Boys. And after they finished their TV dinners the people puffed on burning rolls of tobacco that the Tobacco Giants said were healthy and tasted good like cigarettes should. Tik Tok, time passed. Soon the people became spectators to life. And as they watched other people do stuff, the people grew in size along with their sectional sofas and flat screen TVs. They no longer needed to walk upright. Their hand held phones became smarter than the people themselves. With a gentle tap of a single finger, the people worked. They paid their bills, ordered food to be delivered, did their Christmas shopping, wrote to friends, and asked an invisible woman named Alexa to answer the door while a robot vacuumed the floor. And still, the Gods of Progress wanted more, and so they teamed up with the Wizard of Madison Avenue who had already corrupted the Gods of the Metaverse. Together, they hatched a plan to sell more ads while stealing the minds of the people and replacing them with artificial intelligence. “We’ll create a device more addictive than tobacco. It will be so addictive and so distracting that it will rob people of their free will, the ability to think for themselves, the desire to work, or the capacity to love one another. They won’t need to do a thing ever again.” But the Gods were so full of themselves that they forgot that intelligent life still existed where it first began--outside the Metaverse. They overlooked people like Dr. James Levine who were warning that, “Sitting is the new smoking.” People began to repeat this new mantra which angered some of the Gods. They still weren’t happy with the former Surgeon General who exposed their claims about tobacco and nicotine. But ever opportunistic, the diabolical Wizard of Madison Avenue saw a way to turn natural bodily movement into a new product, and he called it “exercise,” and a multi-billion dollar industry was created to press people into buying something the Wizard had already taught them to hate. “Ah, the power of ambivalence,” said The Wizard. “And if we teach people to hate themselves, we shall have it both ways!” As expected people flocked to the gyms and purchased the memberships, the trainers’ time, sports wardrobes, and special shoes. Cinderella looked down on the scene from her throne in the happily ever after. Not a doctor, a god, a wizard, or even Jane Fonda, Cinderella always knew that it was the hard work of life that kept her mentally and physically fit to pursue her dreams, to dare to attend a ball, to climb in and out of a pumpkin carriage, to race up and down the stairs, and to dance all night. She still resents that her fairy godmother was given so much credit for a dress and a pair of ill-fitting shoes. |
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March 2026
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