Fakebook (20 page)

She laughed. “Interesting.”

“Oh, I get it now. This is a negotiation,” I said. “I can go as high as fifth cheapest—final offer.”

She laughed again and gave me a little push on the shoulder. “How dare you, sir!”

There was a pause, and we stared at each other for just a moment. There was something intoxicating about this girl, especially when she returned my gaze with those piercing blue eyes. She was so beautiful and smart. She had true confidence, the kind that never flirted with arrogance. It simply felt good to be around her.

But there was something else, too. I can't overstate what it meant to me, within the context of my tangled lives, to have an uncomplicated night out with someone new. Because while I had two lives, I only lived one of them. And I lived that life in secret—locked away within a shrinking prison of caution. It wasn't until that night, when the burden was momentarily lifted, that I truly felt the weight of social media surveillance.

Because of Fakebook, I didn't have acquaintances or casual friendships anymore. They were all potential whistleblowers, each with the power to unravel my work. I lived with a constant fear of being spotted—or of having an unthinking coworker act out of habit and casually expose me with an errant post. Stadiums, concerts, holidays, or even the smallest of parties were no longer part of my life. My world had contracted to all but the closest of relationships in guarded environments.

That night, however, I didn't fear news accidentally rippling across the complicated network of everyone I'd ever known. The only mutual acquaintance between Dhara and me was each other—it could not go further than the two of us there, holding each other's gaze.

For the first time in months, my life didn't shrink. It grew, if by just one person for just one night.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“I'm a little embarrassed to say.”

She looked at me suspiciously.

I gathered up the nerve to risk revealing my inner goof to this stunning, cosmopolitan woman. “I want to take you ice skating.”

“Wait, you want to take me ice skating?” she said. “That's adorable.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I kind of have the dating sensibility of a fourteen-year-old girl.”

She smiled. “Me, too.”

“Congrats!” I heard as I walked into the graphics bullpen Monday morning. My boss was leaning against the open doorway to her office, with Joe standing just behind her.

“Huh?” I said. “I didn't tell you about my weekend yet.”

“What?” she said with a laugh. “No! The client approved your superhero design.”

A wave of simultaneous excitement and panic swept over me.

Joe looked at me. “So don't fuck it up.”

I'm not a great cook, but I can follow instructions. I had the oven preheated to 350 degrees and my ingredients all laid out. I was halfway to a finished Broccoli Bake.

It was a recipe I'd pulled from the Amish cookbook that arrived in the mail today, part of a care package from my secret foil that included the “Deceitful Dave” mix, now playing through my CD radio/alarm clock speakers.

Based on the nature of these pranks, I began to suspect this person was actually a husband and wife. The whole thing just reeked of a “couples activity.” I could almost see them walking through the aisles of Bed Bath & Beyond and stumbling onto the cookbook. “Oh my gosh, honey,” the wife would say. “We just have to buy this for Dave!”

I smirked at the thought of how domestic I imagined my personal supervillain team to be—and how domestic I was, as I continued to chop broccoli while listening to adult contemporary.

My weird appreciation for this creative torture had grown. I admired them—and that initial sense of danger had ebbed a bit. It was clear, at this point, that they didn't want to destroy Fakebook. They enjoyed it too much.

Then a few lines from “In the Air Tonight” caught my ear.

I've seen your face before, my friend, but I don't know if you know who I am.

Well, I was there and I saw what you did. I saw it with my own two eyes.

Damn, I thought to myself, that's so on the nose. Whoever this person was, they'd pulled it off. They'd put together a mix tape that actually expressed how they felt.

Then, all at once, the sheer absurdity of this relationship snuck up on me, and I laughed out loud—right on cue for the killer drum break.

“That Phil Collins track,” I texted to my secret foil. “Brilliant.”

I put my bake in the oven and sat down on my couch, grabbing my laptop.

“Ha! Yeah, I'm proud of that one,” he texted back. “It's nice to be noticed.”

His reply made me feel even more in sync with this guy. We both loved attention.

The song switched to Elton John's “Rocket Man,” and I began to prepare the posts for the next few beats of my Fakebook story.

It was time to move things forward. I no longer needed to worry about keeping things calm for Dhara's sake. She was in on the joke, even if she didn't really get it.

Admittedly, the fact that she didn't get it initially tarnished things for me a bit. I recalled how she'd said, “They're just people's profiles. I can't say it upsets me.” It upset me that it didn't upset her. Our four-year gap didn't seem like a lot, but when I thought of all the rapid change in those four years, the gap seemed like a gulf.

Facebook emerged as I was finishing college. She was still in high school. This is a huge difference. I found it jarring to be reconnected with people I'd lost touch with. If she graduated from high school with a profile, then she'd never lost touch with anyone…ever. So what was new to me was normal to her.

I mean, how would she respond if I sent her a mix tape? Had she ever even made one? I have no idea. Mix tapes…they were just a thing that wasn't going to be a thing anymore. They were barely a thing when I was growing up—downloading music on Napster arrived early in my high school career. By the time we were in college, mixes became playlists and tapes became links. Just describing how I used to listen to music—Columbia House Record Club, Napster, Kazaa, LimeWire, Pirate Bay—I was speaking a dead language. It's a weird concept to wrap your brain around: having grown up in a context that no longer exists. I felt an impulse to talk to someone who I thought would understand, who'd see things the way I do.

“Hey,” I texted to my secret foil. “You're about my age, right?”

“I'll never tell!”

“No,” I texted back. “I'm serious. I know you must be, or older. No one younger would ever think to send a mix tape.”

There was a longer wait than was normal for the rhythm of our exchange. I got the sense that he was processing what I'd said or trying to figure out what my angle was.

“Is that true?” my phone chimed back.

“I think so,” I texted. “Let me get real with you for a second. I just went out with this girl who is twenty-two. She didn't get Fakebook at all. Facebook is completely normal to her.”

“That's kind of scary,” he wrote back.

“Yeah,” I wrote. “I know.”

“You should stick with the Amish,” he said. “This wouldn't be an issue.”

Then a strange thing happened between me and my anonymous “pen pal.” We went on to shed the cat-and-mouse pretense and had a genuine conversation.

Things were, of course, not even. He knew who I was and a lot about me. I knew nothing of him, other than an area code and his sense of humor. Yet, in a moment, none of that mattered. I needed someone to relate to, and I knew there'd be no better person—whoever he was.

We touched on definitive experiences, reviving them in our memory for just a moment. We talked about searching for out-of-print albums or back-issue comics before there was an eBay, an Amazon, a Netflix, or an iTunes—or being reluctant to go to a Blockbuster on a Friday night because of the crowds. We joked about how AIM was the planning center of our early social lives, and how going onto MySpace was like an archaeological dig. We referenced using pay phones to make a collect call, such as “Mom, pick me up,” before affordable cell phones emerged and we were still tethered to set times and places.

I felt too young to be thinking like this, but clearly we had grown up in a world that no longer existed. Not only that, our entire upbringing was just a flicker—a brief transition period between the analog world of the generations before us and digital world of the generations after.

We matured along with the information revolution. When I was ten years old, the cutting edge of information technology was typing text commands into a thirty-pound monitor plugged into a thirty-pound gray box plugged into a wall, and car phones were toys of the rich.

Sixteen years later, I casually tossed a five-ounce, buttonless glass sculpture onto my coffee table, where it looked perfectly natural resting with my wallet and house keys. Just then, it delivered a message—through a trillion dollars' worth of infrastructure, over land, sea, air, and space—with a friendly chime. I expected it to be another text from my secret foil and strange new confidant. Instead it was a Facebook notification. I had a new friend request. It was from Dhara. Her profile picture was her ice skating—a public image with a personal meaning between us.

Social media: The term may be new, but the concept isn't. From screen names to cell phones—hell, even mix tapes before that—media have always been social.

As I laced up my skates, I received a text message. “Good luck with Dhara,” it said.

It was a message from my secret foil. He must have seen that I'd accepted a new friend request and pieced together that it came from the girl I had told him about. He was perceptive, that one.

“Thanks,” I texted back. “I'm out with her now.” I put my phone away for the rest of my night and stepped out onto the rink.

If you can't see the appeal of stepping out onto white ice set against the silhouette of Central Park under the stars and skyline, as Frankie Valli sings the main refrain of “I Can't Take My Eyes Off You” through a tinny PA system…well, you've just never been a fourteen-year-old girl.

I loved everything about the ice-skating date—helping a girl with her balance, holding hands, getting hot chocolate during a break as it began to flurry. It was so damn endearing—like living a Zales commercial. Based on the way Dhara pretended to wobble—allowing me to right her—I know she felt the same way.

We were loose. We joked. We attempted to outdo each other in some truly awful displays of figure-skating prowess. There wasn't a single lull or an awkward pause. We only stopped when ABBA's misunderstood “Take a Chance on Me” was interrupted by the ice cleaning announcement.

We grabbed our hot chocolates with marshmallows and ducked out of the main waiting area. We sat on the stairs of the stone patio overlooking the rink and found ourselves a quiet moment.

That night, like the night before, I felt free of Fakebook and was able to enjoy being in the moment. Unlike the night before, however, there were no plans hanging over Dhara. It was just me and this beautiful girl—with the whole night in front of us, and very little winter air between.

The next day, I get a text from my secret foil and strange new confidant. “I have to ask…How'd it go?”

An odd thought occurred to me: He literally did “have to ask,” didn't he? How else could he know? There were no status updates and no photos posted on my Facebook wall. It was a night without a record—just a private memory belonging exclusively to Dhara and me.

It struck me that “having to ask” was soon going to join ranks of the mix tapes and “Be kind, rewind”—a relic of another time. How rare is it now that we have to ask? Facebook, in its simple grayed-out text, does the asking for us every time we log in:

“What's on your mind?”

It's such a simple question and so effective. With no other prompting or incentive, we answer volumes. We're a billion voices speaking at once, contributing to a thorough autobiography of our times and writing it in the moment. We're constantly reporting on ourselves and others—what we like, where we are, who we are with, how we feel. In short, we answer Facebook's question.

And Facebook catalogs every answer. Each post and every photo is stamped with a time, a place, and an ID. I mean…we “tag” each other in our photos, for Christ's sake. We make sure no detail goes unrecorded.

The scale of this gave me pause and frightened me a little. It still does.

Who could have guessed that all it takes to learn someone's secrets is to simply ask? I mean, George Orwell accurately imagined a world with more cameras than people, but he never imagined that we'd be our own photographers. If he wrote
1984
today, would he replace the ominous threat of “Big Brother Is Watching” with a friendly “What's on Your Mind?”

It's tempting to cast Facebook as Big Brother—and trust me, when you're trying to hide from the world, the comparison feels apt—but it's not quite right. What's compelling isn't simply that Facebook enabled us to be our own Big Brother; what's compelling is how we jumped at the chance. We were given a choice, and we rejected privacy.