I Don’t Know Why You Say Ello, I Say Goodbye

There’s a hip, new social networking site sweeping the internets’ social media outlets right now called Ello. You can take a look over here, though you won’t be able to see much. As Facebook and Google Plus began, Ello is currently invite-only. Presumably, the doors will be thrown open eventually and the place will be deluged with people who yearn for the days of geocities website design and who need an outlet for their ideas. Because, you know, there aren’t enough fucking internet opportunities for that already.

Ello’s big hook is that you won’t have your feed clogged with advertisements. But what they don’t promise is that your feed won’t be clogged with pithy life-affirming quotes, desperate pleas to prove your friendship, numerous listed things of no relevance or importance, and fake news stories treated as truth. The lack of advertising sets Ello apart from Twitter and Facebook, but it’s no different in this respect to Instagram, Tumblr, Google Plus, and dozens of other social networking sites known only to those sixteen years of age or younger. The point being: we are not suffering for a lack of places where we can impart our interesting thoughts without having products hawked in the sidebar. We are suffering for a lack of interesting things to post, period.

Here’s some food for thought: if you use Facebook and other social media sites, but don’t like the format, or the advertising, or the people that also post there, or anything besides your ability to burp up random complaints and musings to uninterested parties, then perhaps what you really don’t like are social media sites. The internet was not a device conceived so you could stalk your fifth-grade crush or so you can spout your uninformed opinions into the ether. You don’t “need” social media in order to use the internet effectively. So if Twitter and Co. is pissing you off, then maybe instead of building a better mousetrap you could divest yourself from these sites completely. Go ahead, give it a shot. Because these sites are only as good as the people that use them, and every person, to a one, sucks.

Be sure to follow Reggie on Twitter at @reggiereggie and on Facebook at facebook.com/reggiereggie! Irony!

O Stalker, My Stalker

Used to be that stalking was hard work. It involved a lot of peering through high-powered binoculars and sifting through people’s garbage. You could follow someone to and from work every day for a week, and still not catch the details of their morning breakfast order from the McDonald’s drive-thru. Stalking was not for the faint of heart, or for the very sane. Mark Chapman lurked on Central Park West for three days before he saw an opportunity to shoot John Lennon. Three days of waiting, and there wasn’t even a brand new iPhone at the end of his loitering.

Nowadays, people throw the word “stalking” around like it’s harmless. And for the way it’s used today, which is to describe people who monitor others’ internet activity, perhaps it is. Because there’s no point in being stalked when you’re checking in to every location and uploading pictures of your family vacation for all to see. You’ve already done most of the work for a potential stalker. At one time, stalking burned up countless tanks of gas as creepy weirdos followed their targets incessantly to discern habitual movements. Now a stalker can sit on his fat ass munching Cheetos while you tell him and everyone else in the world what you’re doing all day long. It demeans the whole creepy voyeur community, quite frankly, and your claim to privacy rights seems a little disingenuous.

You see it about every other week, some rumor passed along facebook or twitter or what-have-you: a vague threat, cloaked in legal speak, about how the stuff you’ve posted is going to be repurposed for corporate number crunchers or outright sold to ad agencies. This is usually combined with a fake post or phony petition that will tell the dastardly powers-that-be how incensed we are to have our musings about Jersey Shore watched by White Devils. Friend, you’ve already given up the ghost. They had your number the day you registered to an e-mail address. Sure, you may be sharing your musings about rush hour traffic with your circle of approved friends, but that doesn’t exclude the people who run the freaking site. And it certainly doesn’t deter content aggregators from compiling whatever public information you do let loose for the perusal of every jilted lover and high school enemy that might do a google search for your name.

I think we’re too loose with the word “stalking.” If you’ve got an account at more than one social networking website, and you’re updating them frequently via your smartphone, then you can’t claim anyone is actually stalking you. They’re just reading the shit you’ve spewed into the ether. If you’re so paranoid that the people you’ve inconvenienced in your life and the corporations you hate are going to scrutinize your every move, then my advice is don’t fucking help them out with it. More than likely, the damage has already been done. Perhaps you should put in a little work, fake your own death and get plastic surgery so you can assume a new identity. Put in some effort like good stalkers used to do.

Weiner’s Weiner Weinered; Weiners Weiners Weiners Weiners

There’s been a lot of salacious promiscuity in the news lately. You’ve got Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s affair with his housekeeper which resulted in a baby and a divorce from the Kennedy family, you’ve got John Edwards’ screwing around on his cancerous wife with his speech writer, with whom he too had a child out of wedlock. And the hottest topic of the minute, New York Congressman Anthony Weiner admitted today that he did, in fact, tweet some women pictures of his penis, recapitulating on an earlier claim that his twitter account had been hacked. People around the country are shocked, both that these dudes are getting laid more than they do and that these news items are routinely bumped for more boring information about Iraq or whatever. (Didn’t we “win” that war already? Why the hell do soldiers keep dying? Switch over to American Idol.)

There is a misconception among people, primarily women, that powerful men are slimy, cheating dogs. This is not the case. All men are slimy, cheating dogs, regardless of their status and social standing. Oh, a man may never act on his impulses, but he’s got them all the same. And it’s not just wanting to fuck some supermodel or pop star, that can be understood and forgiven. No ladies, your man is titillated by far more nauseating fare: wondering what an octogenarian sitting on the bus looks like without her house dress, thinking about how it would feel to screw a woman in the crook of her elbow, getting a boner from watching a member of MTV’s The Real World throw up. These thoughts and many other more gross, illegal inklings appeal to the prurient interest of your lover, your father, your son. Men are sick.

I suspect that women are just as sick, but I can’t know that for sure. However women have been more socially conditioned to reject their sexual inclinations, emitting groans of disgust at the mere mention of genitalia. Men do not have this impulse, and many of our basest fantasies have been catered to since the dawn of civilization. It might not be okay to have a Bacchanalian orgy with your siblings and cousins, but that doesn’t mean dudes don’t think about it. In fact, I guarantee they think about it, during many waking hours of the day and pretty much all of the sleeping ones.

Most women I know who converse via the internet have collections of dick pics that are so large, they need to be moved to external hard drives. My female friends tell me that their craigslist ads for dates are immediately responded to with a flurry of dick pics, sometimes with no message attached. Anthony Weiner didn’t tweet dick pics because he’s a member of Congress, but because he’s a man who unfortunately happens to be a member of Congress. Millions of other men’s dick pics are floating around cyberspace, unreported and unpunished. Weiner was stupid to make such a career misstep, though. Political impunity for sending dick pics really only happens at the Executive level.