First of all, tumblr, duh. Although my first impression of it has stayed with me (An impression that was summed up well by the message left when they were hacked back in December 2012; see screenshot below), it has been obvious that it was in no danger of losing steam. And in fact, it enjoyed 218% growth between June 2010 and June 2011, and 248% growth overall since 2006. What isn’t obvious in this awesome collection of data about social media websites is the fact that of all the sites graphed, tumblr is the only one that is youth market driven. Pinterest has exploded too, but not nearly with the same volume, and not specifically with a younger demographic, and Pinterest’s user base is typically estimated to be as much as 70% women. This TechCrunch piece from yesterday explores some of what makes tumblr tick, but like any booming social network, if you ask ten actual users what it’s about, you may get ten very different answers. Like it or not, tumblr has legs, and unless Facebook acquires it, it will probably keep growing for some time.

And second? How about the “death of social” altogether? This has been my (absurdly rushed) prediction since about 2006, when your grandma got broadband and Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace. In fact, I’ve been hoping we’d push it even further, and see a bigger movement toward the “unplugged” lifestyle. But alas, the best we can do right now is unplugging from “social”. When an influencer like Chris Brogan posts a piece called I’m Not Into Social Media, you know something is up. Of course, part of what is up is that he wants to sell you the secret to the next big thing. But he also is talking a lot about actually doing things. In reality. And doing them for reasons. Crazy, right? That’s a big part of where I’m personally headed with MY “social” strategy. And I think a lot of us are headed that way. Technology in general and digital media in particular are awesomely rewarding and inspiring things, but only insofar as they enhance our lives. And a crap ton of digital media lately has become the same kind of distraction that TV has been for decades. Maybe I’ll see you IRL. I’ll welcome your interruption from probably having my nose pressed into my tablet.

Here’s what the hackers posted when they defaced tumblr back in December. Part of it kind of sums up how a lot of us felt about it, at least in its early days:

People have been asking for some time now (myself included) if Facebook is dead. A couple of years ago, an article with that title was usually a whiny piece by a socially inept nerd who probably felt just as peeved at every party they attended as they did on Facebook. But the answer to the question “is Facebook dead?” has evolved quite a bit. Some say social media is healthier than ever. But that piece was published as SEO linkbait by a marketing consultancy. Of course social media is alive, if your income is derived from telling people to use it. But the argument used in that article – that Nielsen data indicates that “more people than ever are using social media” – is one of the best arguments that it IS dying. AOL, MySpace, and just about any other previous “big thing” you can name had the largest number of users at exactly the moment they sucked the most and began their decline. If you ask people who are more interested in accurately understanding how social media actually functions rather than how to exploit it, you’ll get a different kind of answer. Like Social Media is Dead and marketers probably killed it.  Or it’s not quite dead, it just needs CPR. And if you ask people who look at the money, you get an equally unenthusiastic response, with observations about Zynga, Facebook, and Groupon’s stock performance. Remember when Groupon was valued at SIX. BILLION. DOLLARS? And while a lot has been written about Google+, that’s about the extent of it. Except for rabid Googlephiles, the place has tumbleweeds blowing through it. So what about other conduits in the social media realm? Twitter and Pinterest are noisy as hell, and provide little in the way of meaningful connection for people who speak in more than 140 characters or don’t like communicating with thumbnailed images. And Instagram, Spotify, and others? They’re fun, they’re shareable, but they’re really just part of the “entertainment system of social”. So what’s next? Who knows. That’s the whole idea behind the concept of disruption in tech or media realms. And are there alternatives to Facebook? Well, the last few options to get any buzz remain a little less-than-populated. We checked out two of them – Diaspora and SocialNumber – and have shared screen shots below to make some points. And a third called Identi.ca actually looks pretty intriguing, but you have to install software to actually participate. We may do a followup piece on it, but you can rest assured you won’t be hearing about it on cable news in the next year. So below are some quick thoughts on Diaspora and SocialNumber, but now I have to get moving and share this piece on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, like a good little social media murderer. Because our boredom isn’t killing Facebook; our marketing, spamming, and “self as brand” behaviors are.

SocialNumber.com

If you really identify with that old Bob Seger song, or if all your life you’ve been saying “You just wait and see! Someday, I’m gonna BE NOBODY”, then SocialNumber.com may be for you. It bills itself as the “First ever anonymous social network”. Which immediately begs the question: if networking is all about meeting people, why would you want to do it ANONYMOUSLY? Or, to reverse the question: if you want to be ANONYMOUS, why would you join a SOCIAL NETWORK?!? Their rationale is to “avoid the fear of negative implications when using other social networks”. Negative implications? Like what? Wasting all day arguing about politics with people you only know through FarmVille? I signed up anyway. More on that below.

Signing up for this site made me feel all cloak-and-daggery. So I figured that I should create a throwaway email for it, and after doing some quick research on webmail that helps you remain anonymous, I gave up. If you sign up for a service like RiseUp, they offer all sorts of assurances about protecting your identity, but if I were a government spook looking for sneaky people, I’d just train one of my recently arrested Anonymous hackers to exploit the servers. So I ended up just using plain old Hushmail. When I finally logged in, I was a little disappointed at the hot topics and numbers of users. Click for a larger image:

Yup, Anonymous, Atheism, and Sex. Unless I’m mistaken, I think you can find this all on Reddit. And if you really want to be an Anon, do you use a commercial website, or IRC channels and other mysterious and high-tech protocols? By the way, if you’re an Anon who DOES use SocialNumber and I’m wrong, please don’t get pissed and take my server down. I mean no offense. Anyway, this site also kept making me think of what Dr. Strangelove said about the Doomsday Device, i.e.: “Of course, zee whole point of a Doomsday Machine eeze lost, if you keep eet a SECRET! Why didn’t you tell zee world, EH?” So, moving on….

Diaspora

I was excited about Diaspora when I first heard about it, because it seemed like it had hopes of becoming everything that Facebook WAS and then abandoned in order to attempt to improve its stock valuation. Unfortunately, every time I log in, I feel even lonelier than I did BEFORE I logged in. The sparse interface is nice, but the users seem sparse too! And many of the posts seem to be about what you CAN’T do, like sharing content the way you’d like. This site got its press last year; I personally think it’s doomed. I hope they prove me wrong. But the last post in my stream yesterday was 20 days old:

Identi.ca

This is a network driven by posts that are no longer than 140 characters. Wait. Isn’t that just Twitter? Well, not really. One thing that makes this one interesting is the fact that it’s powered with open source software that you download. Which is exactly why I DIDN’T try it; I might try later, but I think most users would delay trying it for the same reason. But when Twitter inevitably goes for an IPO, this might be one of the sites to look at. They claim they’re dedicated to remaining open source, and that, in the end, is what is missing in social media at this point.

You can talk all you want about what makes social media tick, but in the end, it’s US, not all the ways someone can exploit it to market things.

Identi.ca at least has a nice clean interface:

Is social networking….

Climate Change? What Climate Change?

Hear that sound? Me neither. It’s the sound of tumbleweeds slowly rolling through your Facebook feed since election day. If you’re a Facebook user, you have no doubt noticed how damn boring it is lately. All the early adopters were tired of it two years ago, but it had become kind of like one’s “daily elimination”. Not something you especially look forward to, but you do it every day anyway. After the late adopters tired of Farmville, all that was really left was a constant stream of kitten, baby, and “look what I’m eating!” photos, and those weird motivational quotes as graphics. That’s why we all welcomed a presidential election. Suddenly, things were exciting again! Ten thousand word irrational rants about how Obama was an Islamic Socialist Illuminati out to destroy capitalism and create a global currency while making sure all our soldiers were in harms way, and Romney was a magic-underpants-wearing robber baron who was going to sell Chrysler to India and rape grandma’s social security fund to finance a holy war against Iran to save the economy. Or something like that, I forget the details. But then Obama won, and all the sane, intelligent Republicans and Democrats just kind of got quiet, and all the idiots on either side just got angrier and louder. The Republican ones exploding in rage disorders and planning their state’s secession from the Union, and the Democrats gloating obnoxiously, not realizing that in essence, they had just re-elected Ronald Reagan. The threads would fizzle quickly, presumably because aside from the fact that “who won” was a moot point, the flames of the “torches and pitchforks” crowd exhausted all the oxygen needed to generate so much hot air on these threads. But fear not! We’re here to help put the “FU” (Facebook Unfriending) back in Facebook. Here are seven topics guaranteed to put some fight back in your feed, and unmitigated gall back on your wall.

Global Warming

Hey you. Over there! Scrape that damn Al Gore 2000 bumper sticker off yer car, will ya? And you. Yeah, you. Put down that rifle, take off the “My Economics are Trickling” magic underpants, and put on that beanie with the anemometer on it. We’re gonna clear this up once and for all. The Earth is warmer than fifty years ago. The ice caps are melting, and the beaches of Tuvalu are disappearing at the rate of ten feet a year. But you know what? We also had an ice age before there was an industrial revolution, and the only people who talk more meaningless bullshit than used car salesmen and professional economists are meteorologists. I mean, these dudes can’t even predict next week’s weather accurately, and still have a job. The fact is, the science isn’t adequate to state empirically that man is causing global warming. But that doesn’t mean that spewing black poisonous clouds into the air is any less stupid than it ever was. If we stopped blackening the skies for energy and manufacturing , we have this fusion reactor in the sky raining all the energy we need on our heads every day, and it’s FREE!

Bottom line: Who cares if the Earth is getting warmer, or why? Poisoning the air is stupid either way.

Religion vs Science

Thank you Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, abusive Christian parents everywhere, and alcohol, for creating this delightful proving ground of logical fallacy and irrational debate. Let’s be fair; it’s only the wingnut fundamentalists on either side of this debate that make the debate possible at all. Hey you, Religious Fanatic! We don’t care if you DO believe that there are billions of invisible Tinkerbells flapping their wings madly to make the Earth spin, just don’t expect US to believe it. And don’t walk away, Pseudo-scientific Atheist! You can just STFU too, if you’re going to start talking about details of the origin of the universe as if there’s empirical evidence to support your claim, or claim that science can (at this point anyway) prove the non-existence of God. Jeezy creezy, Allegedly Reasoned Person, know the limits of human inductive and deductive thought, and realize that until YOU are omniscient, you are incapable of proving the non-existence of something else that is.

Bottom line: Chill out people. You’re both just humans trying to make sense of things. As long as no-one’s ramming THEIR ideas down your throat and outlawing YOURS, try a little tolerance. If you’re religious, that’s probably one of your rules anyway, and if you’re logical, well, what’s the logic in tackling topics that defy logic? Go invent anti-gravity or something.

Democrat vs Republican

This is probably the funniest of all the unwinnable debates. It’s like in a slasher movie, when the damsel in distress is walking down a country road at night in a thunderstorm, terrified because she knows a mad killer is on the loose, and gets rescued by her brother in his familiar and comforting station wagon, but doesn’t know what the audience knows, which is that HE is the killer. When the hell did poor people become such rabid Republicans? What makes a person that drinks PBR and lives in a trailer love a guy who spends more on cuff links than most people spend on their CAR? And on the other side, it’s just as funny. Give a smartypants intellectual liberal the thing they’ve dreamed of their whole life – a black president with the middle name “Hussein”, and they’re STILL not happy.

Bottom line: When did we all forget the punchline to the question “How can you tell when a politician is lying”? Lynch them all. It’s us against THEM, not us against US.

Apple vs Microsoft

Okay, this one is just plain stupid. First of all, neither of these companies would exist at this point without the other, and they were started by the same pair of nerds that became billionaires at each company’s apex anyway. It’s quite simple really. You know those old late-night commercials that said “Order before midnight. Available in bone, tan, and black”? Windows people are the ones who always ordered bone and tan. Apple people were the ones who ordered black. Although there were certainly bumps along the way (like Windows ME, Microsoft Bob, and Clippy), let’s not forget that Microsoft actually rescued Apple from certain extinction at one point. The only real difference for a long time has been hardware design, prestige, and price. Windows people are people who, when they have five grand laying around, buy a used car. When Apple people have five grand laying around, they buy a new laptop. Windows people also don’t wear turtlenecks, or drive a Honda Element. Is that so wrong??? Macs are also for people who hate grandkids. Why the hell else does grandpa call any more, unless his “Windows is broken and he can’t get on the internets”? Anyway, this is all old news. Google is the new Evil Empire, and Android sucks more than Microsoft Publisher.

Bottom line: If you’re rich and super nerdy, set up a dual-boot Mac. If you’re not, don’t.

Gay Marriage vs Straight Marriage

I can’t even believe we’re discussing this. If you actually KNOW any gay couples, you know that they’re more fun, have cooler houses, and 50% less likely to have an affair with your spouse than partners in a straight couple. They also don’t harrass you for not being married and having children, and when they get tired of their partner, instead of getting cranky and staying married like straight people, they just hit the bars and move on. Hell, let’s face it. Married straight people are the most miserable and irritating people on Earth.

Bottom line: To Hell with gay marriage. Let’s ban marriage altogether.

Taxing the Rich & Social Programs

The most mind-numbing development in modern political debate amongst people who are too ignorant to debate politics – i.e.: THE AVERAGE CITIZEN – is the bit wherein the average broke-ass working stiff now thinks they’re part of the goddamn global elite, and think unions, food stamps, and banking regulation are BAD things. That rich GOP asshole you think is God’s gift to the human race, America, and all things patriotic? He has SEVENTEEN HOUSES. And a jet. And made all his money by sending your mom and dads’ jobs overseas, and then calling their hard earned Social Security benefits “entitlements”. Seriously. Who the f*** is the “entitled” one in this situation? People like us who work our ass off every day and can still barely pay the cable bill? Or the pricks that spend $3 Billion dollars of their Swiss bank accounts convincing us they’re not assholes so we’ll vote for them?

Bottom line: You’re stupid.

STOS vs TNG

I’m not even going to waste time on this. The second in command on the latter was named after a basic bodily function, and the red shirts were in command. Also, JAMES FUCKING KIRK.’nough said.

What better symbol for America
than a pilot-less war machine?

This has been a depressing election year. No, not because my side is losing. I’m not on one. It’s too hard to tell which side of any line these clowns are standing on. Mr. Rope-a-Hope sold out to the insurance industry to force health care on all of us, and his presidency is ironically well-represented by one of the things he gets the most flak about from his own base. What better symbol for our country right now than a pilot-less machine of war? And in the end – if he wins – Moderate Mitt will probably be more like that moniker than you think. Clearly, they scraped cells off Reagan’s body back in the 80′s, and have grafted them onto Romney to create the next meat puppet president. The transmogrification was nearly complete by the first debate. If you closed your eyes whenever Mitt spoke during that debate, you would SWEAR it was Ronny up there on the podium. Romney has even perfected that weird, breathy, Reagan vocal mannerism; if he just adds that odd head bobble of Reagan’s, the effect will be complete.

But that will only endear him SLIGHTLY to a “real” Republican, and Obama has the same problem. Democrats have one of the worst collective cases of buyer remorse since Carter first donned a cardigan for a fireside chat while his redneck brother crawled from the woodwork to market Billy Beer. And that creates a problem for people like me; it’s hard to work up some decent antagonistic campaign parodies when both sides hate their OWN candidate. The most positive responses I’ve gotten when lambasting Obama have come from bleeding heart liberals, and any protest from my conservative friends when I poke fun at Romney have been like the final punches of a fighter that knows that even if there’s no way they’ll take the title, there’s NO WAY they’ll stop punching ’til they actually go down, even if their punches ARE more like the open-handed sissy slaps I got when fighting my sister in third grade. In this cannibalistic environment, where partisans are eating their own, the best we could come up with in the last couple of years were things like the Donner Party  and the Punk Party.

But you know what makes matters even worse? YOU. In case you haven’t noticed, your political posts on Facebook are the REAL joke. The level of nuance in your understanding of politics – which used to be perfectly summed up in a bumper sticker – now has an interactive publishing platform that can connect you with ONE BILLION people. In Ye Olden Days of personal political expression, the worst that was likely to happen was that you’d get flipped off in traffic for your “END OF AN ERROR” or “NOPE” bumper sticker. But now, you LOSE ACTUAL FRIENDS. But it’s okay, they were ignorant twits (i.e.: their simplistic worldview didn’t jibe with yours) anyway, right?

Early on, we thought this was going to be an easy year to cash in on parody imprinted novelty items like bumper stickers and buttons. We were excited about the idea of the Newt Swingrich campaign, and if Sarah Palin  or Wide-Eyes had run, wow. What fun we would have had. But alas, things have turned out differently, and we’re still regurgitating the Hope & Change jokes from four years ago. And Romney changes his stance so much based on marketing research that by the time you whip up a parody, no-one gets it, because he has completely reversed his position! So below, we sadly present this election cycle’s feeble stab at campaign humor. We still miss you, Sarah.

We’re actually kind of proud of this one, for being so muddled in its message. It evolved out of the “You gotta hand it to Romney. Obama sure did” joke.

The Hackneyed Hope & Change Obama “O” Theme

Romney/Ryan: Rich, White, and Dumb Themes

We’ve caught some flack for implying that Romney is racist. We’re not. It’s just that he’s so absurdly WHITE. And it’s almost the very definition of “average American” to hate rich people, right?

Here’s the basis of that theme, for those who always walk straight to the Colgate Classic or ignore graphic design entirely:

And if Romney wins, you can bet we’ll be back with some Eddie Munster and Dumbo jokes. Believe it or not, Ryan’s ears weren’t photoshopped for this:

Sadly, these seniors don’t use the internet,
so will never meet and get to know each other

You know those strange people living in that building next to yours? And those nameless children riding bikes up and down your street each day, the ones who sometimes arrive or depart on a bright yellow bus? You’ve probably wondered: who ARE these people? Do they speak English? Are they paid extras in a big movie you’re in, like Jim Carrey in The Truman Show? And the kids, are they taking field trips in your area each day? Or do they actually live here? Well finally, there’s a way to find out. Thanks to the marvels of the internet and this innovative human relationship building tool called “social networking”, those people surrounding you on all sides no longer need to be a mystery. If you thought Facebook was cool, with its amazing tools for connecting you with people you already know so you can tell them all about what you ate for lunch today, you’ll LOVE NextDoor.com, where you can get to know the people next door, without ever having to go through the drudgery of actually TALKING to them. Probably one of the most amazing things about NextDoor.com – aside from the fact that it’s real, and not an Onion.com parody – is the fact that is its existence probably IS in fact the only way some people will ever meet those possible hostiles next door. I’m sometimes perceived as a bit of a sociopath, because I say “hi” to strangers and make a point of meeting the neighbor, but the last time I recall people actually talking to neighbors on a large scale was during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. Don’t be surprised if NextDoor.com takes Groupon’s title as the next multibillion-dollar overvalueddotcom within the year. The idea is just ironic enough to work, in the same way Instagram lets you take perfectly good digital photos and make them look crappy, like you shot them twenty years ago on a Kodak Brownie.  Learn more in the introductory video below.

You ever wonder where those 3D vector graphic hypothetical people in venture capital presentations live?

Why, in the 3D vector graphic hypothetical neighborhoods of NextDoor.com, of course!

NextDoor.com – Meta-irony so profound that if it didn’t exist, the Onion would certainly have invented it.

Facebook may never actually die, but
the neighborhood sure has gone to hell.

One of the interesting things about social networking is that one of its key components – threaded discussion or comments – has been around since before the web even existed, beginning with the CBBS’s of the late 70′s. Like so many of the fine things in life though – like espresso drinks, literature, and proper grammar – once the commoner got involved, it all went to hell. I personally first noticed a serious decline in the quality of internet life around 2005. This of course was the year that MySpace first rose to prominence, but we can’t blame it all on sparkly animated unicorn graphics. It was also the year that “blog” became a household word (it was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year in 2004), the year that broadband access surpassed 50% of the US population, and the year that Google achieved near-total dominance of search, and made AdSense the most popular method of easy revenue generation on the web. This meant that at exactly the point where all the mouth breathers were finally getting on the web, they also had a readily-available way to self-publish, and two incentives to do so. First, an arrogant confidence in their ill-conceived beliefs fueled by watching Bill O’Reilly, and second, the ability to monetize their mindless rants by sticking ad content in their sites and spamming Google with SEO tricks (we’ve talked about content farms before). When you begin to look at the numbers for all the available ways to self publish – 800 million Facebook users, 200 million Twitter users, 150 million blogs (growing rapidly, by the way), and presumably another few hundred million Tumblr, LiveJournal, Flickr, and YouTube accounts – you realize that we now have as many content creators as consumers amongst the web’s 2 billion or so users. NO WONDER the whole concept of web courtesy known as netiquette has gone out the window. WE’RE ALL EXPERTS, goddamit, so SFTU LOL. Tell me you haven’t experienced one of the following things on Facebook: You share a really cool link, and your “friend” reposts it without a “via” or “hat tip” and gets more comments than you did, leaving you a little grumpy. You get engaged in a dynamic political dialogue, and suddenly find your blood boiling as it devolves down to a two or three person argument with massive paragraphs of polarized ranting. You post the coolest link that’s ever been posted on the web, and not a single person comments. Or maybe you share a link to an article about starvation in Somalia, and people “Like” it instead of commenting. These are all examples of things that I think have diminished the quality of the Facebook experience for many of us, and they all could have been easily avoided if people understood the basic principles behind the archaic concept of netiquette. And I realize that addressing “the Facebook experience” in a serious way seems almost comical, but let’s face it – millions of us check Facebook as or more often than we check email, and it’s a small but significant part of what may shape your mood in the morning. But it’s probably too late now; people more than ever are far more interested in their own thoughts than others’, and the analogy of Facebook and a civilized threaded discussion has one big weakness: good discussion boards have moderators, and the only moderators on Facebook are 400 million morons. I think I’m being kind here, I’m saying that more than half of Facebook users AREN’T morons, and I think you can agree that’s being pretty generous. So it’s probably too late for Facebook, but just in case you get sucked into the NEXT social network – assuming there is one – below are a few of the old netiquette terms and principles that might make the experience a little more enduring and enjoyable. Me, I’m boycotting Facebook until they enable sparkling animated GIF’s.

Linkjacking
Actually, I made this term up to describe the act of re-sharing someone else’s link without attribution. It’s weird that we feel a sense of “ownership” when we share a link, I mean, the web is MADE of links, but we do. Traditionally, it was considered polite to give a “hat tip” to the original poster by adding “Via” or “ht” next to their name. This was always true on blogs, but is even more meaningful on Facebook, when the friend you “stole” the link from is going to see it go down their feed anyway and think you’re an ass when you don’t credit them. This really is the lowest form of plagiarism possible; when you’re doing it you’re not only deriving ego gratification that relies on the original creator’s cleverness, you’re also showing that you’re too lazy to do any WORK to stroke your ego by finding links YOURSELF.

Flaming, Trolling, And Ad Hominem Attacks
Trolling on Facebook is just plain stupid – the person you troll doesn’t have to wait for a moderator, they can just “unfriend” you. And ad hominem attacks are all fine and dandy between two friends who get the jab, but they still fall flat when others see them and genuinely thinks someone’s being an ass. Flaming seems inevitable, but there are only two topics you have to avoid to prevent it. Religion and politics. It’s rare for people to go on 1200 word rants about funny cat videos.

RTA, RTFA, and TL;DR
If you’re not familiar with the abbreviations, they’re for “read the article”, “read the f**cking article”, and “too long; didn’t read” respectively. When someone posts a link to an article about a politician you despise, before you start spouting about how much the politician sucks, read the article. Maybe it’s about how they realized the nature of their wrongs and switched parties recently. And tl;dr should only be used by the poster of a long post to summarize, not by the commenter to pre-excuse the irrelevance of their comment

Warnock’s Dilemma & Godwin’s Law
Godwin’s Law of course is the observation made by Mike Godwin that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1″. This strangely seems to have been replaced by calling someone a socialist or referencing “entitlements” if they say anything about affordable health care being a nice idea. And Warnock’s Dilemma isn’t really a dilemma at all, it just describes the fact that a lack of comments on a post indicates nothing about other user’s INTEREST in a post. Speculation about the lack of comments on the interesting link you shared is pointless – it may just mean it was so interesting that your friend forgot to come back and comment, or that they fell prey to “wikiphilia” – but in most cases the lack of comments probably indicates that the person was “linkjacking” and didn’t want to leave any evidence behind that you’re the person they “stole” the link from.

Have more thoughts on courtesy on the web? Fee free to share in the comments. Until we disable them because your comments are so asinine.

The Borg	Facebook
The Borg is a collective of mindless drones managed by a self-directed queen.	Facebook is a collective of self-directed queens created by a drone.
The borg central base (called the “unicomplex”) is located in an unknown area of the Delta Quadrant.	The Facebook central base (called a “data center”) is located in an unknown area near Palo Alto, CA.
Individual Borg rarely speak. Instead, they repeatedly transmit an audio message to their targets stating that “resistance is futile”.	Facebook users rarely speak. Instead, they repeatedly transmit a simple data message that says “I like this”.
The Borg “unicomplex” is a patchwork-like collection of thousands of cubes, connected by assorted conduits and transportation hubs.	Facebook is a patchwork-like collection of millions of “friends”, connected by assorted apps and membership hubs.
“Assimilation” is the process by which the Borg absorb beings and cultures into their collective.	“Friend whoring” and “Liking” are the processes by which Facebook absorbs beings and subcultures into their collective.
Once assimilated, it is nearly impossible to escape the collective alive.	Once assimilated, it is nearly impossible to escape the collective alive.

Trying To De-Activate Your Facebook Account

(View as single image here)

First, they assault you with pictures of all the hot chicks you know, your best friend, and your wildest party pics, with an almost audible “But so-and-so is going to *sniff sniff* MISS YOU, *sob sob*.

Then, they freakin’ interrogate you like a goddamn used car salesman or relentless pickup artist at the bar: “But why? What did we do wrong? You’ll be back some time, right?”

And what finally got me was that I didn’t want to take the time to explain to a friend how to take over the stupid app I never really use, but is live on several of the sites I manage. Bastards.

And tell me this image from inside the Facebook data center doesn’t look like the inside of a Borg cube:

Maybe we all just need a night on the Holodeck…