How and Why I Use Facebook

J. K. Giih

Sometimes, when I’m taking a walk on rainy day or sitting at the pub enjoying a nice smoky stout, people come up to me and ask why it is that Nervous Horse, being a respectable and overall fairly intelligent publication, has an official secret group on Facebook. They ask me this because Facebook is widely known to be a massive surveillance engine that doesn’t respect its users’ privacy, and they feel that in letting Nervous Horse have a presence on Facebook I’m endorsing the very actions and values any decent human being should be fighting to the last breath against: abuse, repression, censorship, government, conspiracy, Zionism etc. I will explain below why this is not so.

First of all, against the official rules I only use Facebook under a nom de plume. One of my earlier accounts already got banned for this reason because someone decided I was neither a wombat nor a transvestite. My official name, the one that would be on my passport if I had one, is only known by a select few of my closest friends, and I threaten them with violence every time one of them happens to reiterate it even in a ‘private’ chat. (I do not trust ‘private’ Facebook conversations to be truly private. Even if instant copies weren’t being sent to the NSA and the CIA and various other As, they would still remain on the server to be seen at will by those with the know-how and the make-do.) I do not use the exact same name I use on Facebook on any other site. I never post photographs of any kind, and I never post any details related to the entity I define as myself. Most of what I do post is rearrangements of headlines and advertisements I see on Facebook itself. What I add to the content already on Facebook is minimal.

Some might think these measures would be enough to guarantee a fair amount of privacy. But privacy is not enough. Consider a spy infiltrating a Nazi headquarters to steal the detailed instructions Hitler and Himmler are going to need to perform a magickal homoerotic ritual that will make them invinsible and win them the war. Would the spy be satisfied walking around the headquarters, casually chatting with the officers? Certainly not! He is risking his life entering the headquarters in a forged uniform and with a French accent; simply making it back alive is not nearly enough of a reward.

What, then, is the reward I expect from using Facebook? I am fairly confident that less than half of the individuals I’m in frequent contact with are Nazis, and an even smaller percentage of them practise black magick — and besides, it’s the communists and anarchists governments are really after. So the question is, how can I help communists and anarchists by using Facebook? The answer is simple: by throwing pieces of meat at the dogs that are hunting them. On any site such as Facebook the friends list feature is a valuable tool of surveillance: once they find one communist, they can usually find a dozen more just by looking at his or her friends. (They do move in herds!) This is why we must do everything we can to slow them down when they’re searching for the first one. Every second they waste following a false lead is a small victory. This is why in every conversation we have on Facebook we will make it a priority to randomly repeat words such as ‘freedom’, ‘conspiracy’, ‘forest’, ‘Allah’, ‘jazz cigarettes’, ‘dada’, ‘vaccine’ and ‘bomb’. We will write these words on our walls and furthermore vibrate them loud and clear whenever we are talking to ourselves near a cell phone. This is why we use Facebook, this is why we talk to ourselves, and this is the end of this essay.