FACEBOOK HERE TOGETHER

In its recent video, “Facebook Here Together,” the Menlo Park demiurge pledges to do more to rescue its users from the online social hellscape it played no small part in creating.

For years, Facebook has been mediating reality, monetizing human interaction, and surveilling the moves we make in its ersatz virtual world. “But then something happened,” the video explains. While Facebook was building its omnipresent, omnicommercial, and omniscient machine, things went unexpectedly awry. “We had to deal with spam, click-bait, fake news, data misuse.”

Thankfully, Facebook is now aware of these problems and taking active steps to solve them. “From now on, Facebook will do more to keep you safe and protect your privacy, so we can all get back to what made Facebook good in the first place: friends.” Who couldn’t use more friends, right?

Facebook’s assurances to combat spam, etc., are great news for internet-using malcontents like you and me. The last few months have been difficult, because it is easy to become demoralized by the displacement of traditional human relations by technology. But be encouraged: Facebook is here to protect us from the pervasive techno-dystopian anomie its own services produce.