Has Facebook begun the long slide toward ruin?

Breuget's electrical telegraph machine (Cabinet of Physics, University of Coimbra)

     So another grandchild, born this week — maybe to me, maybe to somebody else. Who can say? I really shouldn’t be more specific than that.
     Certainly no word of the news, if there is any news, breathed on Facebook. I ... or, um, another person very much like myself ... would sooner sell a child to the circus than post its photos, or any identifying details, on any sort of social media. As for what the potential harm of that could be, beyond strong and immediate rebuke, I’m afraid to ask. Maybe X snatches their images and does unspeakable things with them.
     As it is my ... well, somebody’s ... adult children view Facebook the way I, when young, would look at my grandfather’s dentures falling into the soup: as an embarrassing lapse of age. Worse. It’s like yanking the dentures out of your own mouth and flinging them into the soup, with pride. Not an accident, an intention.
     Facebook is no longer hip, or the bomb, or dope, or fire, or whatever the current term for coolness might be. “Slow death” is the phrase encountered online. The young might have an account, allowing Facebook to pretend it’s reaching the sweet spot demographic. But the 20-somethings I know never use it and mock those who do. The cracks are starting to show. On May 20, Meta, the parent of Facebook, is laying off 8,000 workers — 10% of its workforce. Last week, The New York Times, in an opinion piece, declared Meta “at the start of a long, slow decline.”
     The plan is that artificial intelligence will do the jobs of the freshly fired, even thought AI is part of what’s wrecking Facebook, all those blocks of regurgitated history lite and random pop culture factoids. And that rash of ads. God forbid you buy shoes, as I have. Facebook will dangle the shoes you just bought under your nose for a month, hoping you’ll buy a second pair. And this is the super-intelligence that would rule us.
     I have to admit, I’m kind of savoring the Facebook riffs, being myself lashed to an oar in the old world, pulp-based, legacy media. It’s like when Borders went bankrupt in 2011. I winked at the Book Bin and other independent bookstores which survived the era when giant bookstores roamed the earth, hardy voles, gazing out from their safe nooks, watching the dinosaurs bellow and die.

To continue reading, click here.