The privacy siege has begun. This was inevitable, could have been predicted from a mile away and you will lose. We all will.
And it’s our fault. We all wanted to be famous, yet we weren’t willing to accept the consequences. We wanted our promised 15 minutes of fame and instead became famous to 15 people and now we’re pissed.
Mark Zuckerberg told us this would happen. While he certainly had a vested interest in making sure it happened, he isn’t the one to blame. We all are.
Don’t try to tell me that Zuckerberg and Facebook have gone rogue. That’s a bullshit cop out. We, you and me, asked for this the second we started becoming friends with people online that we either didn’t know or had no real interest in. We let these unfriends into our lives and reveled in it.
Everyday happenings are now revered. People sit around and reward self-deprecating wannabe wordsmiths. We made going to work, the store and home a social function. Mommy bloggers became famous for sharing their fairly normal, usually gross and nearly always irrelevant personal stories. We all wanted a piece of that fame, and most of us did not get it.
And now the pundits are quitting. Well, not deleting, but deactivating, their Facebook accounts. Those MOST responsible for the privacy war are bailing out once they FINALLY realize they never had control in the first place.
We saw it coming. Now you, me and the entire world is addicted. Sure, it may not be as bad for us as meth, but it’s an addiction all the same. We’re addicted to being connected. We’re addicted to attention and we’re addicted to information.
Those of us who live our digital lives the same way we live our analog ones don’t care about any of this. We didn’t censor, we didn’t put up pictures from keg parties and we didn’t create a persona. We were real, and the ones who are quitting were not.
To all of those people, all the fakers, I say good riddance. Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.
