Facebook woes…
Mark “Sugar-Mountain” Zuckerberg, thinking he’s some kind of god in control of the internet, continues to annoy me, to say the least. From the moment I created my Facebook author page (the URL is https://www.facebook.com/authorStevenMMoore for those interested), I knew he and most of his minions at Facebook were greedy SOBs. Every post on my author page is followed by advice to reach out to more Facebook users by creating an ad! And anyone accessing that page is hit by ads as well (not mine). They (and Google as well) make all their money that way. Sorry, Mark, I won’t let you exploit me! I know you will bury my posts about my books, if only with other ads, and make my readers furious, because I won’t play your games. I don’t give a damn now. (Well, I do about my readers, but Zuckerberg can go to hell.)
I created that page because many pundits and a few author friends recommended it. Same for using the social media aspects of Facebook. All social media is similar to more insidious versions of PR and marketing whose gurus want to take authors’ money. Most of the those gurus pay homage to the Amazon god by exclusively playing Bezos’s game (Penny Sansevieri’s AME is a prime example.) While social media has the positive of allowing me to keep in contact with some internet friends, it’s useless for book marketing. (So is Amazon. The only thing their bots did for me was to confuse two books in “The Last Humans” series, If B&N can keep them straight, why can’t Amazon? (That’s why the links in the ad below go to B&N. You won’t see many links to Amazon here anymore.)
I’ve thought many times about completely cancelling Facebook (even for my social media). Old-fashioned email seems effective enough to maintain contact with relatives and friends, fellow authors included (spam from everyone else is treated accordingly). Election meddling aside (Facebook will take anyone’s money, including Putin’s), the whole Facebook edifice is just built on sand, volcanic black sand steaming with corporate greed. No, not sand, but quicksand. One sinks into it and disappears, burning as if you just passed across the river Styx. It’s much torturous than drowning.
And what’s this about that name change to “Meta”? Sugar-Mountain says it’s short for “Metaverse.” Now I know old Mark has no real interest in physics—he probably flunked all of high school science—so I don’t buy his reasons for the name. (I’m just happy I used the string theory term “Multiverse” instead of “Metaverse” in the title for my sci-fi rom-com, A Time Traveler’s Guide through the Multiverse). What he really means is VR, short for “virtual reality.” As much as I think Harari is a charlatan (a history prof popping off about past and future science who has no business doing so, and makes tons of mistakes doing it), he has warned us enough about VR and AI. Facebook’s current algorithms are AI—they study users and then target them with ads (which I ignore, of course)—and Meta indicates a future where Sugar-Mountain plans to turn everyone on planet Earth into a VR avatar, a conspiracy to create a worse world than the one in Neuromancer.
That famous and brave whistle-blower (I won’t mention her name, not wanting her to be attacked by crazies) has exposed a lot of Facebook’s shenanigans that I’d only suspected by observation and without solid proof that would hold up in court. The transgressions, in my opinion, are sufficient to close down Facebook and ban it for good, whatever it’s called. They’ll never learn and are too arrogant to change, especially Sugar-Mountain and his close confidents. (I’d never “lean on” one, for example; she’s luring us into that hot quicksand.)
I’ll play along with the internet’s Goebbels for a while longer until I’m so sick of Mark and his cronies that I can’t stand to use Facebook anymore. You might want to consider using my email steve@stevenmmoore.com now, though, because you never know when Facebook puts me over the edge. Or they ban me. In any case, my days there are numbered.
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Comments are welcome.
The Last Humans: A New Dawn. For a short time, the first novel in this series was the bestselling Black Opal Books’ novel on Barnes & Noble. This second novel continues Penny Castro’s adventures in a post-apocalyptic world. What remains of the US government forces Penny and her husband Alex to participate in a revenge campaign against the country that caused the apocalyptic pandemic…by kidnapping their young children! Just as thrilling as the first novel but independently readable, this Draft2Digital ebook is available wherever quality ebooks are sold (just not at Amazon, Black Opal Books, or Smashwords).
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
