There's Something Bigger Than Phil
Admit it. How Did You Feel When Facebook Went Down?
I'll go first.
I always check email and social media from bed each morning. (I know. I KNOW. Don't judge.) So, before I leave my bedroom on Monday October 4 I know that something's up.
All that Instagram offers is a spinning circle. I assume It's me. Like, Yet another sign that I'm at that age where I'm about to get terribly out of touch. And Well that sucks. But I have no time for self-pity. I brush my teeth and snort my inhaler, ram my feet into my jeans, throw on a shirt, make coffee, unload the dishwasher, and head out to my mom's cottage for the hour we spend together every weekday morning. Then I go back over to my house, get dressed for real, and head over to my first meeting of the day which is at 10a.m. on Zoom.
Every chance I get, be it in the kitchen, with mom, in my bedroom, bathroom, or in my 10a.m. meeting, I peek through the cracks at Instagram. Then I switch over to Facebook where I'm doing a live event at noon. I get the same spinning wheel. Is this going to be a problem? I still think it's an issue on my end. I do what one is supposed to do. Close the apps and reopen them. Turn off the phone and turn it back on. Wait.
As the conversation on my 10a.m. call Zooms along, I venture over to Twitter and find that at 10:27a.m. old man Twitter has tweeted the news. I kick myself. I should've known that Twitter would know. Just like Twitter knows whether the jolt I just felt was like, just me, or like, an actual earthquake here in the Bay Area. But by "Twitter knows" I mean the people who use Twitter know. Today is different. This time, Twitter itself (themselves?) is tweeting. Hilarity ensues. By the time I arrive on the scene, it's a giggle-fest. (If you missed it, Google "hello literally everyone".) The only question remaining is "for how long?"
People fill their time in other ways. They write in a journal. Take a walk. Report that their day feels suddenly more open, and longer but in a good way. They call it a snow day. Revel in the time back. It's like we all just went into a forced detox, skipped right through the DTs, came out the other end and feel great. After all, FOMO is not actually the fear of missing out. It's the fear of seeing what you missed out on. So, there can be no FOMO when you know that no one is doing anything that they can post about.
As for me, the news of the outage means I am no longer worrying that either I or my phone is obsolete. Which opens me up to feel a tad of excitement. Like, hey are these big tech companies fallible after all? I conjure a memory of Mel Brooks' famous character The 2000 Year Old Man, who explains that before there was an idea of God, the people prayed to a strong mean guy in their village named Phil. But then one day, Phil got struck dead by lightning and that was the end of him. With wonder and awe in his voice The 2000 Year Old Man explains, "We looked up and said, There's something bigger than Phil."
On Monday October 4 when I watch my noon live Facebook event not happen, I have to ask myself Is there something bigger than Facebook? I start to fantasize. I picture Mark Zuckerberg tapping his keyboard wondering "Is this thing on?" and looking around with the awkwardness of an unpopular high school kid and asking, "Can you hear me now?" How strange for a company that was once the hot new thing to be reduced to the status of aging Boomer, and get nothing but an echoing silence in response. Or worse than silence, the sound of a boingdy-boingdy 56k modem. Remember? Take a listen.
But then I thought, wait. Maybe it's more. With the shutdown coming mere hours after the Facebook whistleblower was interviewed on 60 Minutes, I asked myself is this a technology-fix-thyself moment? A statement from some activists? An ultra-modern heist? Thinking on who would even be powerful enough to bring down these all-mighties, I felt a bit of wonder. A byte of awe.
But then I thought more about The 2000 Year Old Man, and Phil. I asked myself: In the year 2021, who is actually bigger than Phil? Than Facebook? A very savvy hacker having some fun? A bad actor? A very bad actor? A set of very bad actors? And for a minute I got scared. Like Sarah Connor when she sees the Terminator for the first time in Terminator 2 (1991).
Of course, the Terminator that Sarah Connor feared (Arnold Schwarzenegger) turned out not to be the bad guy anymore. Turned out the new bad guy was so much worse than Sarah's worst nightmares. And we the audience settled in for the classic But wait, there's more Hollywood mega blockbuster trope. Which a teeny piece of me worries that we're kindof doing right now.
Because... well, what did you do when the social media came back on? I mean, I hurriedly rescheduled the live Facebook event that hadn't happened due to the outage. (It's today, Wednesday Oct 6 at noon PDT on my Facebook page). Far as I can tell, we all got back to our newsfeeds. Wrote, clicked, shared, posted, posed, commented, re-shared, scrolled. The beast demands to be fed. The detox was laughably short. Or is it just me? I mean, did YOU not get back to normal?
I see that Facebook blames the outage on its "backbone routers." But is there something bigger than Facebook that is going to come for us all? And what in the hell would we do about it? I think I'll see what Twitter has to say about that. Or this Dude With Sign guy.
He just might have all the answers.
That's it for me for now. As always, please light up the platform where you're reading this with your comments in response. And, subscribe to Julie's Pod if you want more of my thoughts on how to save ourselves from ourselves and for each other.
For more on me, check out my website and, assuming there's not a social media outage, you can find me everywhere on social @jlythcotthaims. And yes I see the irony in that I am writing to you from Facebook's new platform, Bulletin. Like Sarah Connor, I am part of the resistance. I am also hoping to one day look as sexy as she did in Terminator 2.
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*Disclaimer: I am not a physician, psychologist, or counselor, nor am I licensed to offer therapy or medical advice of any kind. What you get from me is a fellow human with a lot of thoughts and opinions based solely on my lived experience. If you are having an emergency or are in crisis please call 911 or the National Suicide Prevention Line (800-273-8255) or text the Crisis Text Line at 741741.
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