The Day Facebook Died

I had decided to let TV sail off without me when the switch to digital came in 2009; I did not buy a new set or converter. The last program I watched was the inauguration of President Obama.

I had believed that over the previous 25 years American television news had abandoned its priorities.

“We really don’t know very much about how this war is being waged,” ABC’s Forrest Sawyer casually told viewers in January 1991 at the start of the U.S. involvement of the Persian Gulf War. It was hardly a protest by Sawyer, but more of a disclaimer followed by weeks of dutiful digesting of Pentagon-supplied factoids and videos. Contrast this compliant tone with what happened eight years earlier when NBC’s Tom Pettit testified before Congress, condemning the Reagan Administration’s iron-fisted blockage of reporter access to the Granada invasion, the same policy that now in the Persian Gulf made PR people -- willing ones at that -- out of Sawyer and others in the one-time journalism profession.

At home, TV is uncritically passing on to us the lies that somebody got rich because McDonald’s coffee was too hot, and that racism is over.

The digital switch, a hassle for most Americans, was a gift to me – a way to get this nightly stress and these feelings of abandonment by the once watchdog profession of news out from in front of me.

Though I didn’t plan it this way, social media came calling in about a year. The same friends who had gotten me acclimated to e-mail in the mid-1990s explained why this thing called Facebook was all the rage.  Like so many other users, I started a profile for reasons of, “what-the-heck, why not?” then after a pause for an illness, I was by late 2010 an up-and-running Facebooker into more threads than my Grandma had kept in her sewing box.

Facebook could be a roller coaster ride. There were those nasty nighttime street fight threads over right wing zealots’ nonsensical claims. There were often nice, but sometimes disappointing reconnections with old childhood chums. There was the chance or two to tell a schoolmate of my crush on them decades ago, and to enjoy the long-deferred hearing of their flattered pleasant reactions.

What I loved most about Facebook, however, were not flashbacks to my past, but stumbling upon people with whom I seemed instantly in synch. It was as though I’d known them for decades.

And forming connections and group ties with them reduced my longtime stress problems, perhaps because their intelligence and moral honesty gave me refuge from a society where birtherism and other corporate money driven disinformation had derailed the national discourse.

And one of those collections of smart, eclectic, outlandish and never fooled people formed as an official Facebook group that was created as “secret,” rather than “private,” meaning that all comments and other interactions are visible only to other members. The group’s existence became known only upon the founder inviting someone to join.

And the founder was the coolest. So were the other most active members.

The group’s theme was of an “underground club” or “salon” of respectful yet daring conversation. Not an “anything goes” free for all; we knew that raunchy self-indulgence is a cover for the patriarchal orthodoxy. We abided by real  freedom.

We were from all over the continent, and some were beyond it. The vast majority would never meet, of course. But a few did – two even got romantically involved, traveling about a thousand miles to meet and surprise us with snuggle pics.

I was just out of a long period of social isolation, and whereas I may not have been skilled enough yet to socialize face-to-face with such confident, experienced people, this group was the best preparation. Such wonderful undeluded cynicism, everybody holding each other up.

At a 2011 book signing,

my comfort meant more

 than book sales. 

A picture of me taken in 2011 (which happens to be my Pluspora pic right now) summarizes my feelings in that period. That easy smile was a long time in coming. The pic shows me at a book signing. (My self-publishing of books was just marginally successful. But who needed professional success, when you were doing so vastly better as a person?)

I was learning not to be ruled by demons. Negativity and perpetual images of doom that had intruded on my perceptions for decades were being evicted from my awareness. I was grasping that although life included potential horrors, it could be good, and because of that potential for good, I was allowed to focus on the positive. Bad didn’t define everything, and there were attractions to people based on good and nurturing.

And god, I loved the club. As said, it facilitated my real-life social development, and one weekend afternoon in 2013 -- a Sunday as I recall – I had driven home from an overnight get-together out of town with some friends (real life ones). I went through the usual routine of settling back in -- coat off, leftovers in fridge, and of course, computer on.

What I immediately saw was the result of events I still cannot fully explain. First, I had an invitation to join a new  secret Facebook group, named funkily in honor of the founder’s favorite childhood TV cartoon. That’s fine, but the person who sent this invite was one of the top posting and most colorful members of that “underground club.” Why would she hastily have formed this group? And why were a few other active members of the club now in it?

I went back into the original group and found that these people had left it. Members still in were un-characteristically straightforward and terse, all talking back and forth in complex and somewhat vague terms about whether some member had gotten a raw deal, or had deserved what he received. Yep, a lot had transpired in my 36-hour absence. Some sort of massive blow up had wiped out the lively verve of the underground club.

It was as though I went to my favorite place, only to find it a smoldering pile of ruins.

Over the next hour or so of puzzled examining of the posts in my old club, and this new place, I steadily pieced together what had ripped everything -- and everyone – apart with such brutal swiftness.

One member, a woman who lived in the southern U.S., had demanded that a male member be expelled for posting something so awful that – well, I still do not know what he actually posted, but I sure do know the topic: rape.

The founder of our underground club, a woman who lived in the northeastern part of the country, had declined to remove him. Like her southern counterpart, the founder was a strong feminist and unafraid to verbally blast patriarchy, racism or anything else hateful.

To know which of them was right required knowing exactly what was posted by the man on the Friday night when our club began what logically should have been another fun and rebellious weekend. His post had been removed, as had some of the immediate reactions.

To this day, I cannot imagine what could have been at the same time horrible enough to one of these indomitable progressives to clearly require expulsion, and yet to the other not warranting such action. At first, I was frustrated that I was so in the dark from having missed the incident itself. Then, after I scrolled back through the weekend's comments and saw one member’s response to whatever that problem post had been, I decided it was better that I had been away.

This member, a woman, had blasted the man in a chant-like string of emphatic verbal attacks, some surrounding the word “rape,” as though she were attacking the term itself, as well as him. It looked to me like a bid to exorcise horrors from her own consciousness. I recognized her comments as the sort of OCD/anxiety fueled rituals from which I had long suffered. I have never been sexually assaulted, but I was accosted as a 13-year-old, and years before that, I was ritualistically mentally abused by a teacher denigrating solely me in front of the rest of the class regularly for my entire 4th grade year.

I have been diagnosed as having both simple and complex PTSD, both in partial remission. That remission process started about four years prior to this “lost weekend” on Facebook. And it has continued since; things are steadily improving. But my innocence about the unmitigated good of social media to me, or the world died that afternoon.

Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA