That Sink In Feeling.

 Yeah, so, like, social media. 

I'm weaning myself off it. The diminishing returns are diminishing me. 

I went and looked through the "memories" function on my Facebook page. It tells you what you were saying on Facebook last year and the year before, and the decade before that. I was pretty funny. Lots of laughs, lots of likes. People engaging, commenting, having a bit of fun. And my online voice has barely changed: Hancockesque flights of fancy: all preening vanity and intellectual peacockery, offset by self deprecation and tongue-in-cheek rants about minor inconveniences, always with the certainty that people knew I wasn't being serious, a certainty regularly crushed by people telling me these tiresome complaints were "first world problems", as if I didn't know. Even in Northern Ireland, my address is still, just about, the first world. 

I look at these "memories" and think: where are all these people now? Where are all the comments? Some people, a few, actually, have died. But a lot have just disappeared. They've just gone, like yesterday's selection box. Maybe I wasn't as amusing as I thought. 

No. I was. 

Others are at fault. 

My experience of Facebook is just misery now. I have friends who post exclusively about the ongoing excesses of Donald Trump, a couple of them posting fifty times a day, his Space Hopper face bouncing off the walls of our shared echo chamber, changing nothing, never reaching the people they should be reaching, achieving nothing except making the site unusable. Something you might say Zuckerberg has already done, given his recent alignment to the "values of the Dark Enlightenment*", and the peculiarities of his algorithmic shade. People tell me they never see my posts. It's entirely possible, as I never see their posts, my feed being entirely choked with shrill black and yellow descriptions of the president's latest outrage. "Let that sink in!" they advise, as though I wasn't quite getting it, as though I were a bit slow on the uptake. No, when you say the bad man done a bad thing, I understand he did a bad thing. He is, to use his own terminology, "nasty". 

Telling me to "Let that sink in" - my tired old brain as thick and gloopy as quicksand - is not helpful, not to me, nor to anyone else you know. Because we all think pretty much the same thing, don't we? One of the things I used to like about Facebook was it was a little club for like minded people. You had your friends, and you had their friends of friends and, if they were cool, they could be your friends too. And people who proved to be utter pricks could be disappeared. Not in a Trump's police state sort of way - it is starting to happen - you could just unfriend them, unfollow them or block them. You could preserve the sanctity of your friend group, and continue blithely chatting about shared nonsense: horror films, Satanism, no-context vintage comics panels, Can, and whatever book I'm currently trying to pimp. Of course, while you were doing this, there would be other friendship groups talking about what they enjoy: not liking vaccines, immigrants, rules, wokeness, red tape, listening, and spelling, but really liking flags, conspiracy theories, and the old school British comedy they wilfully misunderstand. Zuckerberg doesn't care - he'll take anyone's time, money and I.P. 

It's why twice in the past week I've seen Facebook mentioned on TV as being for "old people". It's the only social media platform that really lets you talk about yourself. It craves indulgence. There's no word limit. Its not a visual site in the same way Insta is. It's not set up for pithy atrocities like X. And it's not about doing a little dance, though you could do all of these if you fancied. It's about going on about yourself and encouraging others to do likewise. Gen X and the Elder Millennials then: it's for them. They're the people who want to talk about themselves, historically. My generation were bloggers. We had Myspace. We spent the last twenty years trying to show people how cool we were: look at my exquisite taste. Yes, I do like cool stuff and yes I have heard and seen all the brilliant things, and would you, perhaps, like to discuss them at unnecessary length? 

But so much. Not any more. Maybe everyone's bored, or over-tired, or not interested in displaying thir aceness anymore. And not interested in me. This is the environment I'm trying to release books into, a world where everyone is exhausted all the time by all the terrible things. It's interesting to me that the people filling my social media pages with endless outrages, and it is all shockingly bad and shockingly relentless, are all older. They're boomers. They seem to have a lot more energy than me. One of them, an American, engages with Trump fans. He argues with them, at length, every day, for hours. They have nothing really to say, beyond "You lost. Suck it up." and they don't listen to anything he says, and it all breaks down into name-calling, but every day he's there, Canute with his wellies on, or a lone Spartan fending off a nation of waddling, illiterate Persians with baseball caps and ass-cracks winking from their cargo-pants. 

I haven't the energy for that. And if people offend me, or try to argue with my views, I get rid of them. I'm not here to "debate" them. It's not my job. And it's nobody else's job. We're all so bored of each other. No one is posting those data farming quizzes any more, because we all know everything about everyone else, and we all know that volunteering the name of your first pet is just some bastard trying to steal all your passwords. Maybe we're all just exhausted. The world is terrible, and Trump and his cronies - I've been reading about Curtis Yarvin today, because some one posted about him and it sounded like a demented conspiracy theory, but no, he's real, and is yet another architect of America's decline, so that's great - want us to be passive, to just sit there and take it. So, I guess, I'll have to not take it, somehow. I'll have to resist this monstrous world destroying tide of sociopathic coders. Just not on Facebook. 

Let that sink in. 

Also, the only thing I see are twats writing novels in the "urban fantasy" genre. Every fucking sponsored ad is some idiot going back in time, or a vampire detective. or a time traveling vampire detective. Or a private detective going back in the past. Or a bride coming back to the future with a perforated neck. 

I wrote one of these sorts of things once. But it's good. It's not about a bloke going back in time so he can join Oasis, and yes, that book does exist. 

*If you were writing something about an evil, Tech Brofication of how the world works you would never, ever call it the Dark Enlightenment because a) its an obvious contradiction b) it sounds like something the writers of a League of Supervillains comic in the 60s would throw out because it sounds a bit shit. People of the future - if there are any - will not believe just how stupid Armageddon sounded.