It’s not exactly breaking news that Facebook is a cesspool of bad AI, propaganda bots sourced by foreign actors, and the dregs of every generation who wave their School of Hard Knocks, University of Life diplomas around like the fish in their profile pictures.
The reasons to stay are still strong, even as the disgust with the platform, its practices, and its biggest mouthpieces becomes impossible to ignore. For a lot of us, Messenger took the place of old school chat and has co-existed as a weird hybrid of text and email for so long that it feels impossible to decouple. And while many who announced their departure stuck to it, enough of us have hemmed and hawed that there remains a critical mass of people whose life updates are, we suppose, worth wading through copypasta, clickbait AI stories cribbed from Wikipedia, and the nine-day-old Happy Birthday posts to celebrities from automated content farms.
I don’t know why I’m so morbidly fascinated with the details of the platform’s descent into enshittification. But I find myself unable to stop clicking on the comments sections of innocuous ads, knowing that behind every laugh react will be a hundred mushbrained comments about the mixed-race couple eating Cheerios or the less-than-skinny influencer tapping the toothpaste box with her fingernails. It’s a given that when I see an old person with an American flag profile picture go off on a misspelled screed about liberals or big cities in the comments, I’ll click through to see just how many weird AI Trump-with-muscles memes and glittery praise-Jesus GIFs she’s reposted.
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