Accidental Social Capital and Status
I was made aware recently that I have accidentally acquired some interesting social status: I'm not on Facebook. Apparently, it isn't just that I'm not on Facebook, its that I've never had a Facebook account. I've also never had accounts with:
MySpace
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Pinterest
Snapchat
Reddit
Parler
The list goes on and on.
I am fairly active on LinkedIn and for a brief time had a Gab account after it first launched. The latter looked like another cesspool in the making so I deleted the account and moved on.
Acquiring this status wasn't entirely accidental, even if it wasn't by design. It was clear early on that the only way to win the race to the bottom of the social-on-line game was to not play at all. I’d seen this movie before. I had some experience with this environment in the pre-world-wide-web days of USENET newsgroups so it was pretty easy to see where this was heading. Thought I'd seen some epic flame wars on USENET but USENET newsgroups are to 21st century social media as camp fires are to nuclear explosions, as head colds are to social diseases.
I'm not so naive to think just because I don't participate in the vast majority of social media that others haven’t contributed data about me without my knowledge or consent nor that I'm immune to the effects of social media. It's that nuclear explosion thing. I can't help but be aware of the blast and getting caught in the blast zone, even being targeted for the epicenter are known risks. While zillions of people are blithely working to feed The Beast's insatiable need for data in exchange for nano hits of dopamine, my efforts are focused on how to avoid the growing tar pit that oozes from The Beast. I study how others have inadvertently been lured into the hot mess and, even more valuable, those few who have successfully wrestled themselves free.
Neither do I think social media is devoid of value or purpose. This is where LinkedIn (so far) seems to rise above the base rabble. There is a modicum of professionalism and elevated expectation of how one behaves on LinkedIn. (Although, I see signs of this eroding at an accelerated pace.)
As I see it, there is no way I can reliably cash in on this newly acquired social capital and status. It's value is dubious. A small-talk starter at parties. A novelty. A non-thing that's interesting like not having purple hair, tattoos, and a pierced face is interesting. To really leverage it, I'd have to jump into the social media quagmire, thereby emptying the account or, more likely, go into serious debt. In the end, carefully curated piles of garbage are still garbage.
So there it sits. A helluva thing, maybe valuable only as a note on my headstone.
Here rests Gregory Engel.
@nothing, @nowhere
He lived in the real world.