since we’ve last spoken…

So, a quick update is perhaps in order…

As you may already know, my Facebook account was “disappeared” last week with zero warning and no mention of what my offending action might’ve been, and – the only means by which to appeal their decision was to upload a scan of my photo ID. At the time, I fell hard on the “oh, hell NO” side of that option, and said as much when I posted my first mention of it earlier this week.

I started poking about The Googles in the time since, and saw that apparently, this is a thing Facebook has done on a pretty regular basis, with regard to FB asking for identification of some sort during this appeal process…and someone suggested the notion of redacting the information on my license and uploading it with the photo intact.

That struck me as – at the very least, a nice middle finger to the process – so I black-lined everything on my license except my name and my photo and uploaded it via the provided link, and…within minutes, I had already gotten the notification that my account was disabled and the decision was final.

So, that being said, I’m not sure where that leaves my eleven year old Facebook account with over 3,000 friends and countless photos and diatribes and the like.

Now, just for the record – every photo I’ve ever posted on Facebook still lives in digital form on my fledgling home network server here, so the photos aren’t the loss that they might be for other folks who aren’t as meticulous about hoarding their data as I’ve been over the years…and honestly, I’m not so vain as to feel any real sense of loss that my last decades’ worth of ramblings provide any real value to social media, at large.

It’s the principle of the thing, though.

So I’m still examining my options, but I’ve largely resigned myself to the notion that the old FB account is gone.

Now, I have created a pseudonym account, and some of you know this already…I’ve been taking very tiny steps, as I don’t want to wave a giant red flag by “re-friending” everyone all at once or anything of that nature – and I’m not sure that I’ll bother to engage with FB that much, moving forward – save for managing the band’s Instagram and FB group.

I’ve largely been “over” the Facebook platform for some time, and I don’t think I’m alone…I’ve watched a lot of friends evaporate from the platform over the past year or so, and many of us who continued to use it for interaction purposes did so while holding our nose.

So in a sense, I suppose they’ve done me a favor – I have a book to finish, recording projects to focus on, interviews to film, plenty of shit to invest my time in, and less and less time to devote to them.

In the meantime, if you get a friend request from the guitar player from a fictitious band out of a Cameron Crowe movie, know that it’s not a total stranger…