On being faceless

So I’ve been locked out of Facebook and Messenger, possibly forever. It started yesterday morning, when Facebook went down for the entire world. Now it’s back up for most people, but I can’t get in—neither with passwords (none of which work), nor with text messages to my phone (my phone doesn’t receive them for some reason). As a last-ditch measure, I submitted my driver’s license into a Facebook black hole from which I don’t expect to hear back.

Incidentally, this sort of thing is why, 25 years ago, I became a theoretical rather than applied computer scientist. Even before you get to any serious software engineering, the applied part of computing involves a neverending struggle to make machines do what you need them to do—get a document to print, a website to load, a software package to install—in ways that are harrowing and not the slightest bit intellectually interesting. You learn, not about the nature of reality, but only about the terrible design decisions of other people. I might as well be a 90-year-old grandpa with such things, and if I didn’t have the excuse of being a theorist, that fact would constantly humiliate me before my colleagues.

Anyway, maybe some Facebook employee will see this post and decide to let me back in. Otherwise, it feels like a large part of my life has been cut away forever—but maybe that’s good, like cutting away a malignant tumor. Maybe, even if I am let back in, I should refrain from returning, or at least severely limit the time I spend there.

The truth is that, over the past eight years or so, I let more and more of my online activity shift from this blog to Facebook. Partly that’s because (as many others have lamented) the Golden Age of Blogs came to an end, with intellectual exploration and good-faith debate replaced by trolling, sniping, impersonation, and constant attempts to dox opponents and ruin their lives. As a result, more and more ideas for new blog posts stayed in my drafts folder—they always needed just one more revision to fortify them against inevitable attack, and then that one more revision never happened. It was simply more comfortable to post my ideas on Facebook, where the feedback came from friends and colleagues using their real names, and where any mistakes I made would be contained. But, on the reflection that comes from being locked out, maybe Facebook was simply a trap. What I have neither the intellectual courage to say in public, nor the occasion to say over dinner with real-life friends and family and colleagues, maybe I should teach myself not to say at all.