A necessary evil

My use of social media during the formational first year of NRG has, like everything else I’ve endeavored to do with NRG, been extremely strategic. Not saying I’ve succeeded with my intent, but I have definitely proceeded intentionally.

Like an undercover agent tasked with infiltrating a crime syndicate that uses a cocaine ring to advance their malicious agenda, I knew there was no getting around it. At some point I was gonna have to do a line. I don’t mean this in a literal sense. I’ve actually never tried cocaine, but I’ve long recognized that social media has the same addictive strength.

I was a Freshman at Penn State in 2007 when Facebook first invited kids exactly like me (white upper middle class college kids) to try a line. I never could have fantasized that 15 years later this website would grow to become a $1T corporation capable of literally precipitating revolutions in foreign lands and helping to orchestrate the near toppling of our democracy.

15 years is not a very long time, and I find it helpful to periodically remember that we are truly living in the fantasy world I would have been insane to envision back in 2007. It is just as fantastical now, manifested in reality, as it would have been in 2007 as a figment of a delusional mind.

Your phone is a very small part of the world.

When you witness with open eyes how terribly bad things almost got or how terribly bad things already are, it makes it difficult to avert your gaze in good conscience. You can’t even spell “conscience” without the word “science,” yet our society has deteriorated to a point where some have grown skeptical of science. We accept “Fake News” as just another barrage of senseless information on our tiny glass digital windows to the “outside world". Too infrequently do we look out the windows of our homes or cars and truly see the real outside world, let alone spend time immersed in it and connected to it. Instead, we mistake a shrink-wrapped version of life and a pre-paid version of reality for The Real Deal. You won’t find the “outside world” in the News or in your News Feed. You’ll find it, perhaps surprisingly, to be simply outside.

So please, go outside. I don’t mean get in your car and drive to Point B. I mean go outside. Believe me, it is much much harder to do than it might sound. But it will improve both your health and the health of our society. Remember, we are not just people. In fact, even a corporation is a person! Did you know that? No, we are far more than just people. We are also members of the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens - modern humans. We evolved to spend most of our lives outside and our outsized brains endowed us with a responsibility to steward the delicate food chain below us. Sadly, we now do neither. And we appear to be almost wholly unaware of this as a problem.

Sure, the symptoms of that problem are becoming undeniable now, quite quickly and quite dramatically. It’s relatively easy for us to justify & dismiss these symptoms as new & distinct problems that simply require solutions from our outsized brains. All of our efforts, past & present, to adequately solve the existential crises before us have utterly failed to even acknowledge the root cause. Subsequently, we have thus far been relegated to an escalating game of whack-a-mole that we appear content to play until the very end.

So, back to my younger days and the nascent stage of social media. Since childhood, I have been a proficient & passionate writer, and an enthusiastic philosophizer, though I’ve found most people to have a pretty low tolerance for this side of my nature. I latched onto Xanga during the early pre-blog days, and AIM was a way to “hang out” with friends long past bedtime. I loved MySpace, but mostly just because indie bands posted songs on there to sample for free. I immediately embraced Facebook as a means of connecting people, as a sort of “digital Rolodex” - an augmented version of “exchanging numbers.” But even in those early days, the threats of “Facebook stalking” and “brag posting” and “scroll addiction” were very clear to me. I first rejected the “Wall” which established the stickiness of early Facebook, and instead only had a “Profile” for years. Later, I mostly used Facebook as an “Online Photo Album” to easily share pictures with friends & family.

Other than that, I pretty much ignored Facebook. And I watched it dominate the world over the years, spreading like a virus beyond the University and out further and further towards the Universe. I didn’t use Facebook on my phone, but I never felt any reason to deactivate my account. It has simply never offered much appeal to me personally.

I remember during initial formulation of NRG, when I was cognizant of the importance of social media to communicate with the community, I remember desperately wishing that someone else would do it for me. My friend Cassie Blom, on the NRG Advisory Board for Marketing Communications, would have been excellent at this but definitely had nowhere near the time to do it. No, I knew that if I was serious about this NRG thing that I would have to infiltrate the local drug ring myself. And so I held my breath and jumped into the cold, dangerous, muddy waters of Facebook in an effort to spread the word. Nextdoor? I couldn’t even.

I fully intend to continue using Facebook as a means of communicating with the NRG community. But the real NRG community is not on Facebook. It is not behind the windshields of the people alone at the wheel on their way from Point A to Point B. No.

The real NRG community is in the bike lane and on the sidewalk, on the shoulder of the blind curve, pushing the stroller around a pothole, picking up a candy wrapper at the base of a redwood, enjoying an ice cream cone in the Village Green, and sitting on a bench overlooking the majestic Monterey Bay.

The real NRG community is right there, outside, just waiting for you to join them.