The Tyranny of Social Media Mediocrity

 

After my 3-day exile from FB as sophomoric punishment for posting one among several of the spreads from my book IS SHE AVAILABLE? featuring one of Rian Hughes’s bare breasts (ok, not exactly HIS breast but nonetheless his photograph!), I am revitalised and ready to re-enter the morally ambiguous, inconsistent fray of FB’s so-called Community Standards barred cells.

By these very standards, Facebook prefers a world where women have no nipples, only dead artists are permitted to display the human body, Nazis trump radical socialists in free speech and if anyone whines and complains loudly and long enough to the invisible authorities that hide behind our screens (and Mark’s logo), they can elicit erratic judgements on the part of our social wardens. Not social workers, social wardens!

Well, I’m not putting up with it.
Reality is too precious to be mediocratized to the lowest level of education, much less lowest common synaptic denominator.

I do get it. Children use Facebook and we can’t be exposing our children to naked nipples! They might just recall sucking on one and then where would we be? I’ll tell you: outside the confines of a gated morality where scary, unpredictable things might occur! My god, what if I were to get an erection! Is there a Community Standards Forum where I can ask what am I to do with it?

After all, Facebook lays claim not just to the moral high ground, but the moral low ground and the in-between ground as well. They act on behalf of Community Standards. Not my community, that’s for sure. My community has nipples, menstrual cycles, flatulence and those troublesome erections. Not to mention madness, depression and hallucinatory revelation. Ok, I admit I hang with a strange crowd. But need I mention that they poop and pee sometimes more than once a day? Oh, the moral horror, the humanity, the humanity, the lack of humanity!

You wouldn’t know it from following Community Standards, that’s for sure. Tell me, oh great Facebook, am I allowed to bleed? For you have cut me. Cut me off from Messaging some of my friends about politics and rendezvous, not nipples. Nipples is one of those words that if you say it enough times really fast, it loses all meaning. Try it. Just don’t post it on Facebook.

Please share with your fellow users, poopers and nipple owners. WE are the Community, not Facebook’s false authority. After all, algorithms don’t live in communities, they just exist everywhere else they can shape and conform our computational reality, far away in the bowels of the flashing lights and annoying pings. Far removed from human judgement, common sense and of course human Freedom.

The machines don’t need to take over, we’ve already surrendered and their flesh-eating servants are holding their napkins for them.Edit or delete this