2012 CANNOT COME SOON ENOUGH

by anthony on February 23rd, 2009

Reposted with permission. Thank you, and enjoy.

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always as they seem. Douglas Adams. Its less-popular inverse is of no less import: that some things are exactly as they seem. The human masses, for example. Utterly dense. Not so bright. Really fantastically unintelligent. Idiots, the lot of them, but this was never so glaringly obvious before the advent of mainstream social networking. Turns out, millions of inconsequential persons feel liberated and somehow special when exposed to each other, adorned with animated backgrounds and with liberal use of sparkling text. Tom, bless him, saw a need circa 2002 and was happy to oblige. “No one needs to feel lonely,” Tom concluded, “when I can be their friend. LOLOL.”

Facebook’s birth was in large part inevitable. With a sizable chunk of the pubescent population jerking each other off on MySpace, it was only a matter of time before the more lofty crowd looked down their collective nose and concluded that they deserved the same sort of opportunity. But not with them involved, please. Cue Facebook.

And all was well with the world. The emo bands, the pre-teen females and the libidinous married men had their place, separate from the educated and far-more-mature collegiates who were totally past high-school drama. As expected, Facebook became more refined and feature-rich over time. MySpace festered. Everyone was happy.

But apparently Facebook had growth on the corporate brain, oddly enough, and in 2006 lowered the drawbridge to the leper colony where Tom reigned lord and king – thus contaminating forever the blue-blooded haut monde. One may assume that Tom was also somewhat distressed.

Some will argue until they are blue in the face (or more blue, anyway) that this was the beginning of the end. The news feed, the new layout (remember that fiasco?) and godhelpus the applications platform – every major addition to Facebook’s feature set has been simultaneously hailed as brilliant and decried as catering to the narcissistic masses. These are both largely fair assertions.

Interestingly, Facebook has in this developed a sort of trend. They create something arguably innovative, release it, observe the subsequent outcry, apologize, perform some perfunctory alterations, and – realizing that the user is an idiot – leave it in place. The once-affronted user base calms down and realizes that this actually isn’t so bad, though seriously Zuckerberg, why cant u put custom html and s*** in ur wallz.

… I should at this point apologize for digressing from my original thesis, though as it went unstated (so much for formal prose) you probably didn’t notice. The present Facebook controversy is, of course, their terms of use. With more than 175 million members actively dumping their lives into the system, Facebook’s use of said members’ information has come into question. Someone decided the ToS was due for a change, triggering the traditional wide-spread panic, an apology from Zuckerberg, and – amusingly – an invitation for user input. This is not unprecedented, and should probably be applauded as it reflects Facebook’s ostensible focus on user opinion. Thing is, this issue has gotten a nontrivial amount of syndicated attention and, consequently, it has forced its way through the skulls of a very large number of users. Providing impetus for quite a lot of idiots to spout off in public.

Which, ultimately, is all I care about. There will always be debate. Companies will continue asking their customers for their valuable opinions, while being perfectly aware that the average customer is not dissimilar to a partially-articulate simian. This is particularly true of the social networking crowd, and thanks to the miracle of Facebook, we have yet another stunning example of how badly we all suck.

All of the following (after the break), every last piece of scintillating verbiage, are taken directly from the aforementioned feedback group, where users are asked “to give input on Facebook’s terms of use”. Please, enjoy. And bear in mind that the difference between you and any one of these idiots is negligible.

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And here we are. This is a very small sampling, despite the immediately following footnote. Do go on and discover for yourself how far the bounds of human stupidity and ignorance may stretch.

… As a forewarning, I may or may not have gone overboard here. (Though, in my defense, this is a fraction of the comments I’ve saved – a veritable gallery, to be brought into the light whenever I think humanity might have a chance.) Paging through these comments is like 4chan, or bash.org. The blatant idiocy is somehow compelling.

And oh, hover for unenlightened commentary.