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Facebook Schizophrenia – or Paranoia?

By Clark Nida

I’ve been running two Facebook accounts. I’ve not tried to hide the fact, indeed I am “Facebook friends” with my alter ego in both accounts, and declare in my profile that Clark Nida is the pen name of Ian Clark.

The upshot has been two overlapping sets of friends. A terribly bad idea, as it has turned out to be.

The original intention was to spare my social friends a raft of promotional stuff concerning my books. But it has also meant accidentally concealing from them some of the issues I feel most passionately about. I don’t bother with books, either to read them or write them, unless I am passionate about the issues involved.

Accordingly I’m going to try closing my “Clark Nida” account at some time in the future. The letterbox in my profile picture will gradually close, and when it becomes completely black then I will deactivate the account. In the intervening period I invite all friends of Clark Nida to request friiendship from “Ian Clark, Whitby”.

Not a lot of people know this: it is impossible to leave Facebook. It arrogates to itself powers which not even the British police have: of holding on to your information indefinitely, even if you ask them not to. Yes, you can deactivate your account. But if in the future you reactivate it, or try to create another in the same name, you’ll find all the information is still there. Moreover your deactivated account can still be seen on Facebook, and people can make friend requests of you. I have tried it, and this is what happens.

Consequently I’m going to try deleting all the information in my “Clark Nida” account before I deactivate it, and I shall publish my experience of doing so and whether it has been effective.

There is a website: http://seppukoo.com which at one time enabled you to commit Facebook suicide in spectacular fashion. Unfortunately (as you can see from their site) Facebook mounted a legal challenge to stop them offering this necessary and valuable service, and have taken digital measures to prevent accounts being deactivated from the seppukoo.com website. If seppukoo.com can bounce back in time, then I shall consider using it. I recommend you take a look at this interesting website and ponder accordingly.

In today’s world your virtual identity is becoming even more important than your real identity. Large corporations based in foreign and often hostile countries are in the habit of inviting you to part with much essential information about yourself. They would have you believe that this information is of no value – and they never offer you any payment for it.

Now I remember a time when nobody would have allowed this to happen. If a shop gave you a carrier bag with their name on it, you used to turn the bag inside out to avoid giving them a free advert. Clothing defiantly did not have writing on it: not T-shirts, not footwear. Nobody except sailors tattooed themselves, among whom the practice was ancient and venerable. Not least because it enabled washed-up remains to be identified (and the gold earring in one ear would pay for a decent burial). The habit of stamping the back of your hand with a rubber stamp at musical events would have meant serious punishment for the perpetrators. Sandwich board men were universally despised, because they sold their own bodies for advertisement hoardings. People who neglected to remove all the labels from their clothing and footwear were likewise despised and called sandwich board men.

But in those days one used to see people with numbers tattooed on their arms, from a spell in a German concentration camp. I myself have seen many examples of this in my time. The memory was fresh of the yellow badge that certain ethnic groups were forced by law to wear in occupied countries. Of the Gestapo, which assiduously collected information about everyone it could, using that information to the extreme detriment of the individual concerned.

And not just the Gestapo!

Over my lifetime, a practice that was once abhorrent, namely allowing people to stick labels on you, has become “cool”.

Why should that be? It’s hard to say. The dangers have not gone away. If anything they are far greater than they ever were in the 1930s or 1940s. You are still at risk from your ethnicity, your political or religious convictions, even your sexual orientation (as if that is anybody’s business but your own). The menace of some government, corporation, secret society or gang accumulating harmful information about you has not lessened in the least. The tools to do so have got better and better. Whatever will happen when all our computers have direct cerebral or ocular interfaces (which even today are possible, and have been since the 1960s) – and can read our unconscious thoughts?

It’s remarkable that such a simple matter as the difficulty of deleting a surplus Facebook account is raising such sombre shadows in my mind.

But do you know what I believe is going on? A virtual death cult has taken hold, with everybody in wholesale denial about what is happening to them. For now the main use of all the information being collected about you is to tailor the adverts brought before your eyes. But this may change – with little warning. Sebastian Haffner in his posthumously published book Defying Hitler records the shock of sitting in the library of the German Law School in 1931 when a thug in uniform walked in and started asking everyone in turn “Are you Aryan?” As it happened he could truthfully answer “yes”. But did he sink back into relief and gratitude? Far from it. He wrote that from that moment on, the Law School ceased to exist.

In the 14th century, at the time of the Black Death, the awful peril which nobody could escape, or feasibly go into denial about, led to bizarre death cults springing up. The same thing is happening today. Nobody dare nod their head in case it falls off. People are dead but they won’t lie down. The most popular books we read are about vampires and zombies. Facebook to me is a sort of cyber zombie death cult: a digital dance of death. Like sailors from time immemorial, we want to believe that if disaster washes us away, something of us will remain to enable identification, to make it less likely that we will vanish from the face of the earth as if we’d never been.