Reflections on my lost Social Media accounts and the state of digital impermanence

On 7th July last month, my Facebook and Instagram accounts were suddenly disabled by Meta. It took me by complete surprise. I have had Facebook since 2008 and all my memories and pictures were wiped out in an instant; my Instagram account documenting my growth as a young adult morphing into a not-so-young adult and my trips - gone, consigned to the wastebin of discarded digital memories. To say I'm distraught would be an understatement. I am enraged. At Meta, and myself. I am enraged at Meta for how opaque their processes are and the blatant lack of transparency behind whatever they are doing. I am also outraged by the sheer injustice of it all. Meta accused me of violating community standards but offered no evidence behind their allegations. The worst part of it all: Meta does not offer any proper avenue for recourse; simply put - there is no human person in Meta's office to talk to about this or to appeal to.

From what I've read online, this phenomenon, known as the "Meta banwave", has been silently operating in the background since last year, but of course it's been kept largely quiet because the masses only ever use Facebook and Instagram for their media consumption these days and why would such news be published on these platforms when its operators are precisely the perpetrators of this entire debacle. I found similar complaints on Reddit, all pointing to the likely cause - Meta's deployment of AI to combat unruly accounts and spammers and bots. Apparently the AI system has gone rogue and started banning accounts on a massive scale. I think this one reddit post by u/yukiakira269 captures the most likely and plausible scenario:

"According to a friend of mine, a Meta dev, the moderation AI is completely insane right now. So the story is that Facebook is deploy its usual ban waves that target scammers and burners, these happen a lot without us noticing because tbh they don't really seem to work. However, for that exact reason, the AI's algo was updated, he claimed it was updated a few months ago and was launched into full effect for this particular ban wave, and boi it immediately went rogue banning people left and right. The Meta team is actually working their a$$ off trying to rectify its errors, but the AI is outpacing by leaps and bounds (if you see a suspended account reinstated, then suspended, then reinstated, that's the Meta team doing MMA with the AI) But yeah, so until they disable the dang thing, this looks like it will continue until the end of the month."

Replacing humans with AI to scour social media platforms and flag so-called dangerous content is a ridiculous thing to do. Obviously this AI system is flagging thousands of "False Positives" and absolutely incapable of exercising common sense or any form of judicious analysis to weed out the truly problematic accounts from the innocent ones. But hey, it saves on costs right? Who cares about the thousands of accounts that get falsely banned if the ultimate goal is to save on costs. It's all a P&L game for these fuckers.

I am even more angry at myself for relying so much on these social media digital platforms as repositories of my life's events. I didn't even realise how reliant I had become until I lost these accounts, and along with it - my mood and appetite for the first couple of days. Thankfully while ruminating on this incident in the shower roughly a week after, I had an epiphany - perhaps this disruption was something that I needed after all.

While in the shower I thought about one of the happier times of my life. I call it my "white pill period" which lasted roughly from 2020-2023 when I was still trying to figure out how to navigate my life around the loss of my Mother and I vividly remember immersing myself in an entire ecosystem of obscure blogs, reading books voraciously, and pasting stickers of Apu the frog on every personal object I owned. I learnt so much during this period (mainly discovering heterodox ideas and old authors) and genuinely enjoyed my time pursuing knowledge and intellectual endeavours. I feel like I kind of lost that part of myself a bit recently. I had let myself drown in the mediocrity of mainstream media and found myself scrolling mindlessly through reels and wasting literal hours a day doing that. I was compromised but I was too far down this hole. Meta banning me is a major inconvenience, but perhaps it's also the disruption I never knew I needed. Lately I have been detoxing and reading blogs again and my mind is beginning to feel much healthier once more. There's a silver lining in everything, as they say.

This incident also made me reflect on the importance of tangibility. One thing I'm glad I did several years ago was printing some of Mom's pictures after she passed away and keeping them in a photo album. Perhaps, it stemmed from my deep-seated distrust of technology, and how I knew on a subconscious level that I could not rely on the permanence of the digital world. Granted, I have the core memories of Mom in pictures on my Cloud, but even then - you never know what could happen. What if I didn't want to pay the exorbitant subscription fee every month or the servers were hacked in a cyberattack? This new digital world we live in is cold and unpredictable. Let this also be a stark reminder to myself and to my dear readers - to keep physical items and objects; go buy physical copies of books that are significant to you, because the books you think belong to you when you download them may get banned and subsequently erased from your digital library. Books out there are already starting to be re-written to align with politically-correct narratives.

The impermanence of everything today through the provision of services via an unreliable 3rd party company is insidious and sadly the state of the world that we live in now. Most, if not all, forms of media consumption today happens through a subscription-based service where you don't actually own any content, just the license to have access to said content. Furthermore, you are very frequently bound by egregious lop-sided Terms and Conditions. Gone are the glory days of collecting physical media and the immensely gratifying labour of growing a tangible collection of items that you adore and can proudly proclaim as yours; gone forever - sacrificed at the altar of convenience and minimalism.

Book Review: 'The Ancient City' by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges

'The Ancient City' is a book that deserves to be read over and over again.

It is, in sum, a historical biography of the ancient cities of Athens and Rome (and to some extent, Sparta), and traces the origins of extant western institutions and laws to pagan Indo-Aryan religious practices and rituals. For instance, did you know that the western concept of Property Rights is derived - not from Enlightenment-era philosophy expounded by the likes of Montesquieu as we were taught to believe in school - but in fact from ancestor worship and the sacred fire each family held in its domestic hearth?

It also behooves me to liken this book to a time portal. Fustel de Coulanges paints ancient practices and lifestyles so vividly that you feel fully immersed in that time period. On top of that, the author then goes on to explain - in intricate detail - the rise and fall of such societies and how & why revolutions occur.

The author ends the book with an autopsy on the ancient city, analysing the decline of municipal domination and the rise of the nation-state in its place. This gem is truly a treasure trove of timeless information and lessons that are still very much applicable to us moderns, and we ought to heed the lessons contained within this work.

5/5.

Some brief thoughts on 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich'

Very rarely does a book shake me up so much that I needed a stiff drink upon finishing it. This book did just that. Reading it has also re-wired my entire thought process on what it means to live well.

The plot surrounds Ivan Ilyich who leads the ultimate bourgeois normie life - achieving accolade after accolade; his sole purpose to obtain as much respectability and power as he possibly can. He takes great pride in his social status and finds pleasure in his peers' envy of his success.

He is later stricken with terminal illness and the bulk of the story shifts to cover his thoughts upon facing impending death. He regrets the life he has led for he now sees that it has all been for naught. His wife, and especially his spoilt daughter, have - over the years - become materialistic and self-centered, and his daughter appears somewhat unconcerned with his declining health.

Tolstoy thus explores what it means to truly live a good life through Ivan Ilyich's reflections; that living authentically (reflected through Ivan Ilyich's peasant servant, Gerasim) and cultivating genuine relationships with those around you constitutes a life well-lived, not material success or social achievements.

A loose Japanese adaptation of the Death of Ivan Ilyich titled 'Ikiru' was released in 1952. It's directed by Akira Kurosawa and commonly ranked among the greatest films ever made. This adaptation strikes a more optimistic tone as the protagonist, upon learning he has only a few months to live, goes out of his way to live the last days of his life as purposefully and meaningfully as possible.

This particular scene hit me hard.

Something to think about, for sure. Life is brief and fleeting, yet we spend so much of it focusing on trivialities.

On Irony

Irony is derived from the Greek word, Eirōneía, which means 'feigned ignorance'. Per Wikipedia, 'Verbal Irony' is "a statement in which the meaning that a speaker employs is sharply different from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed." Henry Watson Fowler, in 'The King's English', stated, "any definition of irony—though hundreds might be given, and very few of them would be accepted—must include this, that the surface meaning and the underlying meaning of what is said are not the same."

I would define this kind of irony as insincerely or indirectly making a point via humour. It's my favourite kind of humour as it's incredibly layered, kind of like a bulbous onion. Norm MacDonald was a true master of irony; he would intentionally look and sound ignorant in most his acts even though his content possessed depth and meaning. One example was the roasting of Bob Saget in which his entire set revolved around a collection of old-timey and incredibly lame 1950's style jokes. It was deliberately meant to be unfunny (because of how much he despised the concept of roasting) that it was funny.



Another great example is this clip of Norm MacDonald on The View talking about a conspiracy theory regarding the Clinton Family's dubious connections to dead staffers and their opponents. However, he presents this case in such a silly and absurd manner that his hosts are unable to pin him down as someone on "the Right" or a Republican tin foil-hat wearing loony. Norm wears a shit-eating grin on his face the whole time, deliberately looks ignorant and silly, and succeeds in annoying the hosts - the intended outcome. Norm achieves 2 Ws here, namely - that he brings up a conspiracy theory that the mainstream media has been doing its utmost best to suppress up till that point, and secondly, he exposes and unmasks the mainstream media for the turgid puritans that they are. The hosts end up looking idiotic, taking themselves way too seriously, and talking down to Norm like schoolmasters.



In fiction, irony is frequently employed as a motif. Pvt. Joker in Full Metal Jacket has "Born To Kill" scrawled on his helmet but wears a peace symbol button on his vest to make a point by highlighting the duality of man, and particularly the shadow archetype - or in Joker’s own words, "the Jungian thing, sir". Prima facie, wearing a peace button and having a violent statement on one’s person doesn’t make sense and is wholly absurd & incongruous. But there's a deeper meaning behind it.



Leo Strauss too recognized the value of irony being employed in the intellectual arena.

Per Wikipedia:

"In 1952 he published Persecution and the Art of Writing, arguing that serious writers write esoterically, that is, with multiple or layered meanings, often disguised within irony or paradox, obscure references, even deliberate self-contradiction. Esoteric writing serves several purposes: protecting the philosopher from the retribution of the regime, and protecting the regime from the corrosion of philosophy; it attracts the right kind of reader and repels the wrong kind; and ferreting out the interior message is in itself an exercise of philosophic reasoning."

In an era of a new kind of woke persecution (read cancel culture) where the pen is mightier than the sword...or rather, the keyboard mightier than the gavel, where your words will be used against you in the kangaroo court of public opinion, it is important to harness irony as a tool. A tool to separate the wheat from the chaff; a tool to distinguish friend from foe, for any potential friends - your real target audience - would be able to read through the irony and reach out to you. This is how you sustain yourself in this new era of ridonkulousness.

Netflix and the Media Monoculture

Netflix executives are probably shitting themselves right now.

As per The Guardian:

"Netflix reported on Tuesday that it had lost subscribers for the first time in more than a decade. The announcement spooked Wall Street and sent shares plummeting more than 35%, erasing more than $50bn in market capitalization from a company whose stock was already down more than 40% on the year."

The cause of this is apparently two-fold: (1) the pandemic is finally abating which means people are socialising again; (2) many are put off by the Netflix Board's recent plans to block access to accounts with users from multiple locations.

Needless to say, I won't be disappointed if Netflix becomes irrelevant. What Netflix has done to online culture has been immeasurably harmful, having had a stranglehold over content consumption for the past decade. One can only hope its grip is finally loosening so that the media monoculture (as coined by Lindyman AKA Paul Skallas) can die the death it deserves.

With Netflix at the helm of modern-day media consumption, culture has become alarmingly monolithic and uniform. To quote Gerry Spence, we are an "amorphous glob of sameness". Everyone only ever talks about what’s on Netflix or Disney+ these days - content carefully curated by our corporate overlords for the median NPC. The powers-that-be get to decide what to stream and what to cancel, and this inevitably has the top-down effect of influencing our collective subconscious. This is the reason why "politically agnostic" people lean left without even realizing it; as Marshall McClulan once articulated - "Does a fish know it's wet?".

The media monoculture wasn't as pronounced when I was growing up as a teenager because we had to find creative ways to consume content back then. The problem is accessibility. Back then, finding good films and music was difficult; less accessibility = increased effort to find good content. This lack of accessibility allowed people to discover all sorts of new weird shit (brought on by the need to conduct independent self-research) and that’s how different subcultures sprung up and individuals had more distinctive identities in the past.

To the person reading this: Give up SaaS, take the P2P pill.

Book Review: 'Mine Were of Trouble' by Peter Kemp

Peter Kemp's 'Mine Were of Trouble' is a gripping real-life account of the Spanish Civil War from a Nationalist perspective. Fresh out of law school, a young and starry-eyed Kemp decides to join the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 on the side of Francisco Franco's forces as a means of experiencing both adventure and purpose; Kemp was particularly alarmed by the growing Communist influence in Europe at the time and wanted to have a part to play in halting its encroachment in the rest of the continent.

A true master of prose, Kemp writes in such an engaging manner that you almost feel like you're there with him every step of the way (his description of what it's like to be bombarded is particularly nightmare-inducing). His first-hand account of all the horrors of the war - staring death in the face, a troubling execution he had to oversee personally, and the numerous injuries he sustained - cuts deep in a primal way.

Thankfully he dilutes the grimmer aspects of war with an introspective chronicle on the joy and growth that he experiences throughout his time as a Nationalist soldier (first as a Requetés officer and subsequently a Legionnaire), writing about the beauty of the Spanish countryside, the hospitality of the villagers he meets along the way, getting to know some of the bravest and most courageous men whom he had the honour of calling his friends, the generosity and self-sacrifice demonstrated by his brothers-in-arms, and the incredibly inspiring tenacity of the forces he fought alongside with which doubtlessly helped to stymie Republican victory.

By the end of the book, the once naive adventurer metamorphoses into a confident, disciplined and battle-hardened soldier with renewed respect for his fellow man - particularly the man willing to fight evil at all costs.

5/5

Atop the Slab

Atop the slab you stand,
Watching the world go by,
Gust of wind you feel
Through the crevices in your skin,
Eyes locked on the birds -
that soar through the open skies,
undertaking perilous flight.

Safe and sound you are atop the slab,
Sun begins to shine,
People walk by - nobility and peasantry alike,
Atop the slab you stand,
A showpiece for all to see,
Children play catch around you,
and pigeons defecate at your feet

Envy the life of the bird in the skies
Oh, but decorative marble was all you ever wanted to be.