Alexander the Great would have looked at all the lands his father Phillip had conquered and said, "I am saddened that he has conquered so much, for it leaves less to be conquered by some deserving person, whoever that person might be." Then he would have changed his name to Alexander Who's Just Lucky to Be Here. 

It would have impacted Muhammad Ali's poetry: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, in that bees die after they sting something, and so I vow to stay humble about my stinging abilities, and recognize the limits of my offensive powers." 

Jay-Z's raps might be less compelling: "Allow me to reintroduce myself, because I humbly realize, what with all the rappers out there, you might have forgotten my name, my name is Shawn Carter, a quotidian name for a humble fellow." 

Humbly yours, 

Reilly

My friend The Genius wrote the following about the unbelievably stupid Facebook ad:

After watching the Facebook ad I had to write a letter to it.

This is my first letter to an advertisement. After I saw you I felt a strong urge to write and point out a few things about you.

I hate Facebook.

Hate, hater, hatest. 

I have trouble expressing why I hate Facebook so much, but others have put their hands on some of why it's so terrible, and before I forget I wanted to collect a few of the links and quotes.

First, smart people have known that the whole concept of social networks like Facebook was bullcrap ever since the days of all the proto-Facebooks, MySpace and Friendster. (Facebook being slicker, dumber, blander versions of those two.)

Here's the great Chuck Klosterman on why Friendster sucked. Back then, it was just an annoying novelty, not the soul-crushing force for oppression it is today. He thought it was a fad: 

I can't believe I'm writing about Friendster.com. In fact, I can't believe I'm on Friendster.com. Every single time I think about it, it seems even stupider than the last time I considered its existence. ... Here is the experience most people have with Friendster: For a few weeks, they hear their colleagues discussing something that seems to make no sense. They hear sardonic buzzwords bandied about in the bathroom and around the Xerox machine. They start getting e-mails that seem like spam, except the messages mention acquaintances by name. And then people start incessantly asking them if they are on Friendster. "I'm not retarded," they inevitably respond. "Why would I waste my time with that shit?" They vow never to join. Everyone does this (at least for a while).

But while Klosterman doesn't get why Friendster is "sticky" -- he thinks it's the name -- he groks some of the fundamental reasons why these sites suck. For instance, they allow us -- or force us -- to create essentially uninteresting versions of ourselves. 

It allows us to build two-dimensional personalities in which we can eradicate the things that matter to others (our looks, our sincerity, our intelligence, et cetera) while accentuating the things that matter only to us (whether or not we can quote Glengarry Glen Ross, whether or not we can communicate telepathically with our cat, whether or not we want to pretend that we read Finnegans Wake, et cetera). Our entire corporeality is dictated by what we think is interesting about ourselves.

Basically, everybody is lying all the time on social networks to try and make themselves look cooler and more bangable than they really are. 

All of these people will be fabricating every sentiment they emote, and our entire cybertopia will be one massive lie. 

The lies come fast and thick on Facebook, the essential lie being that everybody's lives are unending successions gorgeous weddings and beautiful children. Reading Facebook is like the anti-matter version of a Tolstoy novel. 

But Jaron Lanier, in his great book "You Are Not a Gadget," (my review here) picks up on a point that Klosterman grasped but couldn't see the full extent of, because it hadn't yet happened. The point is that Facebook -- and a lot of the Internet -- forces us to flatten ourselves, to box ourselves into square holes designed by some geek with Aspergers named Zuckerberg. You are either "in a relationship" or not (choosing "it's complicated," which was only added later, makes you sound like a polygamist), you either "like" something or you don't, you're either in a group or you're not, all of it wrapped in a monotonous blue color scheme, a color scheme chosen by Zuckerberg because he is red-green color blind. In other words, we're trapped in a world that is limited in many of the ways in which Zuckerberg himself is limited. If interviews with him are any indication, the man whose life mission was supposedly to help us "connect" and "communicate" sure seems to struggle with connecting and communicating. His failure to grasp or appreciate the subtleties and complications of actual human relationships seem apparent in the rigid design of Facebook. 

Here's what I said in my review of Lanier's book: 

[Lanier] wants us to be aware of the ways in which technology shortchanges us, because it under-represents reality. Compare Facebook, the Internet's dominant site, to the early "personal home pages" of the web. Those Earthlink or AOL sites were personal, quirky, highly customizable. You got a sense of who the person was. On FB, everyone begins to look the same, the same quick links on the same blue background. Facebook smoothes over differences, it doesn't celebrate them. How can we live in an online world in which there is only "like," no "dislike"? How can we let ourselves get boxed into an Instagram world of square, boxy photos with the same nostalgic tint? Why do we spend most of our online time in a space where it's impossible to tell the difference between people and products?

All of this was expressed most thoughtfully and powerfully by Zadie Smith, in this amazing essay from the New York Review of Books, discussing both Lanier's book and "The Social Network." It's among the best pieces of writing on the digital world. She says: 

the software currently shaping [the younger] generation is unworthy of them. They are more interesting than it is. They deserve better.

Facebook allows for easy, instant, immortal communication and connection. But what kind of connection, Smith asks: 

The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the “Why” of Facebook. He uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the site helps everyone connect with people and share information with the people they want to stay connected with….” Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits—none of this is important. 

It's difficult to have a quality connection on Facebook, and it's nearly impossible to have different kinds of friends -- work friends, school friends, family friends. Facebook tries to make this happen, by having you categorize your friends into "close friends" "family" and "acquaintances," but in reality nobody does that, and anyway that's not nearly enough categories, and in real life people rise from being acquaintances to being close friends, and naturally fall away, and Faceook has no way to account for this natural progression. Everyone is your "friend," forever and ever, and there is essentially only one level of friendship. 

This makes living an authentic life impossible. In real life you tell a certain version of a story to your close friends and another to your mom. This is normal, healthy. You don't want your mom to know about all the kegstands, and she doesn't want to know. On Facebook, you can only give one account, and that inevitably turns out to be boring. Here's Smith again: 

What’s striking about Zuckerberg’s vision of an open Internet is the very blandness it requires to function, as Facebook members discovered when the site changed their privacy settings, allowing more things to become more public, with the (unintended?) consequence that your Aunt Dora could suddenly find out you joined the group Queer Nation last Tuesday. Gay kids became un-gay, partiers took down their party photos, political firebrands put out their fires. In real life we can be all these people on our own terms, in our own way, with whom we choose. 

On Facebook, we all have to become a universally palatable version of ourselves. Smith worries that, with the ubiquity of Facebook, "maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous." 

Here she summarizes Lanier: 

Lanier is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. “Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” 

Long quote now (again, Zadie Smith on Jaron Lanier): 

We know the consequences of this instinctively; we feel them. We know that having two thousand Facebook friends is not what it looks like. We know that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others. We know what we are doing “in” the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is it possible that what is communicated between people online “eventually becomes their truth”? What Lanier, a software expert, reveals to me, a software idiot, is what must be obvious (to software experts): software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible.

Lanier asks us to consider, for example, the humble file, or rather, to consider a world without “files.” (The first iteration of the Macintosh, which never shipped, didn’t have files.) I confess this thought experiment stumped me about as much as if I’d been asked to consider persisting in a world without “time.” And then consider further that these designs, so often taken up in a slap-dash, last-minute fashion, become “locked in,” and, because they are software, used by millions, too often become impossible to adapt, or change. MIDI, an inflexible, early-1980s digital music protocol for connecting different musical components, such as a keyboard and a computer, takes no account of, say, the fluid line of a soprano’s coloratura; it is still the basis of most of the tinny music we hear every day—in our phones, in the charts, in elevators—simply because it became, in software terms, too big to fail, too big to change.

Lanier wants us to be attentive to the software into which we are “locked in.” Is it really fulfilling our needs? Or are we reducing the needs we feel in order to convince ourselves that the software isn’t limited? 

And more (she's so so good): 

When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.... If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

Zadie Smith describes all us Facebookers as "500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." 

I recently read Nicholas Carr's book "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains," and I wrote a review of it that I apparently didn't publish anywhere. Since this is my blog and nobody cares, here's the bulk of the review (I gave the book a 4.4). The book is about the whole Internet, not just Facebook, but anyway, here's what I said:

Does everyone do this? Read books although they know that they already agree with everything in the book? I think they must. This must be the reason that people watch Fox news and MSNBC read the New York Post and the New York Times -- those things are so pleasurable because you already know what the general narrative is going to be all you can be surprised by are the specifics.

In his cogent discussion what the Internet is doing to our brain–it is not at all a screed–Nicholas Carr lays out some beautiful specifics about why the Internet is ruining our brains. 

If you don't both love and hate the Internet, then you are not a thinking person. The benefits of the net are so immediate and all pervasive that it's difficult to remember the downside. How did I ever figure out how to drive around Detroit before the Internet existed? And forget about porn.

But the things that I hate about the Internet I'm not smart enough to put my finger on. 

Nicholas Carr is.

So, that was my review of Carr's book. The last thing I want to say about Facebook is to note a great piece by Carr on Facebook's TV commercials (who knew they had some? and why does Facebook need to advertise? who doesn't know about it?). Its ads are shockingly bad. As Carr writes, "If Terrence Malick were given a lobotomy, forced to smoke seven joints in rapid succession, and ordered to make the worst TV advertisement the world has ever seen, this is the ad he would have produced." 

Here's the awful ad: 

But, most importantly, Carr says Facebook's new ads help us recognize the bullcrap at the core of Facebook. 

What we learn from this is not just that Zuckerberg is a bullshit artist who’s most insincere when he’s sounding most sincere — we already knew that — but that for Zuckerberg, and for Facebook, “sincere” and “insincere” are equally meaningless terms. Everything is bullshit. A chair levitating in a forest and a ballerina dancing on a dinner table are equally fake. They’re fabrications, as are the emotions that they conjure up in us. It’s all advertising. 

Facebook is fake from beginning to end. Its correlation with reality is low. Your friends don't look like that, they don't sound like that. You don't, either. Log off and have a look at the real world. 

I'm going to go check Facebook one more time and then go to bed. I'll quit Facebook/Friendster/MySpace tomorrow. I can't wait 'til their import in our lives is less.

Until then, please, if we're going to share every inane moment of our lives with strangers, can't we at least get onto Google Plus? Google is a force for good in the world. It mapped the planet, it's digitizing old books, it's going to teach our cars to drive themselves. What has Facebook ever done for you, besides poke you?  

Only the l is svelte. 

Colorado's letters are rounder than any other state's letters, with the possible exception of Oregon. 

The defense contractor General Dynamics builds weapons like these:

The company is led by a man named Osborn as their chair. 

Meanwhile, OsCorp, a subsidiary of Stark Industries, a powerful defense contractor, is also led by a a man named Osborn. 

Could these two Osborns actually be the same person?

I'm not saying, I'm just saying. But has anyone checked whether the new chair of General Dynamics spends his nights dressed like this:

And yet the Senate wastes all its time filibustering Chuck Hagel, instead of investigating the REAL issues. 

To deny him the fame he sought, his name was outlawed. Speaking his name would result in death.

It didn't work. In his book, the writer Theopompus disclosed his name -- Herostratus. He got the fame he sought. 

You may not know his name, but you know these: Eric Harris, Seung-Hui Cho, and James Holmes. And the name of this Sandy Hook shooter. You'll never not know them. 

And you feel sympathy with those who tried to outlaw the speaking of the name of Herostratus. 

These are the facts: crime is going down, shootings are down, the world is safer than it has ever been. 

Fame seekers or insane gunman don't deserve to be remembered. 

Let the name of this Sandy Hook shooter die along with him. 

The back-alley weed dealer. 

You've seen him. You know him. He tends to be some uber-douche in a backward ball cap and facial hair that resembles a topiary.

He only exists in otherwise uninhabitable places, like the dive bar you wanted to leave already, but your buddy wants some green for this other buddy who doesn't have a hookup. So you're waiting for this turd of a drug dealer to pause his pointless conversation. You or your buddy would never otherwise talk to this guy, except he has weed. 

Then the nod of the head, a condescending look at your buddy -- "You ready?" -- and you know he's deigned to do business, then the duck out to the dark street, to a shadowy spot where, with a few whispered words, those old shibboleths -- "quarter?" "Naw, eighth" -- and a few folded bills that no one ever counts are traded for a bag full of plants, and the illegal deal is done. 

I felt privlidged to see him, this weed-dealing twerp. He might be the last one I ever see. His days are numbered, boy. 

Soon enough there will be no more illegal deals done down darks alleys. Colorado -- legalized. 

I once saw so many deals go down. Joints passed between desks in high school, smoked illicitly in Subarus at lunch time, I saw deals in bars I saw deals in cars I saw in boxes I saw deals on blockses. There was BC Bud and Mexi Stash but nobody really knew where it came from and nobody really liked the dude that you bought from. 

Which is part of why he's endangered. 

I imagine that if the Republians get into power they'll try to save this dying breed. But for now he's a goner, at least in my town. 

I won't mourn his death. I won't miss him. But it should be noted. Attention should be paid. 

- First 140 characters of Michael Paternitti's beautiful National Geographic story about a city in flux.

- Keats