The Social Net-Working Rat Race

http://www.henrymakow.com/get_a_life_commit_virtual_suic.html

I had my very quick facebook page for about a month and mostly used it to play bejeweled blitz when i needed a break from reading. I decided to just close mine and play internet checkers instead when I needed a break. I know many people use it and some here that spread the message or critical thinking (good thing) but most dont and I think the article highlights it very well.

Bleak, Shallow and Repetitive
Virtual life seems increasingly less worth living.
by Irene Angelopoulos

Adbusters Letters

(Editor's Note: I'd like to hear from readers who have insight into the Facebook/MySpace phenomenon. Do you agree with what Irene is saying? I know people who have shut their Facebook accounts because they were addicted to the social caresses. )

Now that the thrill of our hyper-connected existence is gone, virtual life has become a depressing daily grind. We toil late into the night, unleashing an endless stream of status updates and tweets in a desperate attempt to keep ourselves relevant, desirable and in.

There's an ominous irony in FarmVille, a Facebook application that enables users to build and maintain a virtual farm. It's more than a game: It's an allegory. Virtual existence is feudalism for the modern age. Those who hold the information are kings and those of us toiling in the virtual fields are the servile peasantry: selling our souls for the mind-numbing comfort of an online existence.

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) promise limitless, boundless friendship - a phenomenon that should make us happier than ever. But our optimism over connectivity has gradually morphed into cynicism and resentment. It turns out virtual life is less about connectivity than self-branding.

SNSs entice us to divulge and update, stroking our fragile egos with filtered ads that utilize our personal information to reap huge profits, as our hundreds of "friends" perpetually rate our online popularity.

Paranoid about how we'll be perceived, we spend hour after hour trying to avoid the virtual consequences of being deemed uncool. We have more to worry about than our online acquaintances deleting us after we're tagged in an unflattering photo.

Sites like Lamebook, devoted to reposting cliché status updates and socially awkward wall exchanges, humiliate those virtual personas who are unfamiliar with the web's mores and codes.

Bleak, shallow and repetitive, virtual life seems increasingly less worth living. Users are beginning to realize that it's not leisure, it's work that borders on servitude.

But there's a resistance growing among those tired of their virtual subjugation. In response to the electronic world's rising indignation, virtual suicide sites like seppukoo.com and suicidemachine.org have started a countermovement, provoking users to kill their online selves and reclaim their real lives.

These programs assist our virtual deaths by hacking into our profiles, completely annihilating our online personas and leaving no trace of our former selves behind.

It's social revolt for the online age: a mass uprising that will shatter the virtual hierarchy and restore order to our actual lives.

Great article, thanks!

I play chess on-line - it's mucho fun.

Sorry about the formatting errors. I can build websites and all but coding inside a coded coding box has me all confused!!!
fixed.

Max Keiser called the virtual feudalism aspect of Farmville a couple months ago in a podcast. Pretty valid.

Stop and look at the dialectic that is being created in this article: Virtual Life is Bleak, Shallow and Repetitive, so lets Commit Virtual Suicide.

Do you see what's going on here? They create the problem, and then look at the solution they give us: suicidemachine.org

Let's not redesign the virtual reality that we've created for ourselves, instead, lets kill ourselves in order to maintain the status quo of the system. This is what Neo did in the final scene of the Matrix trilogy: sacrifice for the good of the system.

As a warning to anyone contemplating 'suicide',
On suicidemachine.org under FAQ:

Quote :

We only save your profile picture, your name and your last words

On http://www.seppukoo.com/privacy:

Quote :

The only contents we save from your Facebook profile are your name, your
main picture and your friends list

StuckInALegChair wrote:

As a warning to anyone contemplating 'suicide',
On suicidemachine.org under FAQ:

Quote :

We only save your profile picture, your name and your last words

On http://www.seppukoo.com/privacy:

Quote :

The only contents we save from your Facebook profile are your name, your
main picture and your friends list

That must be all they need to generate egregious media attention.