Why is Facebook so Vapid?

I've just been reading some articles (well, calling them that's a backhanded compliment) about how to write good headlines. These articles don't tend to focus on ones that read "New Weapon Dropped on Major City in Japan"; rather more like grabbers like "Why You Look 20 Years Older Than You Really Are."

Is there some sort of headline school for this? I recently went through the ordeal of trying to use Google's AdWords. You know, those close-to-annoying-but-not-quite column ads that seem to appear like kudzu after a summer shower on every Web page you visit these days. I was trying to sell my DVDs of old classic cult flicks and was talking to this Google flack (who was a very nice guy, mind you) how to phrase my ad in the most concise and attention-grabbing form. Well, apparently this is an art.


I guess it goes back to those snake-oil days, when "Elvira's Elixir" elixated all kinds of nasty diseases that everyone used to have, like giant bezoars residing in your guts and yellow-bile inflimflammatory melancholicks and you need a short, snappy yell-out that snapped the throngs out of their paregoric hallucinalia.

Facebook as sketched during preliminary concept work, c. 1998

And I don't really know how this affected what I'm writing now, but somehow the Facebook headline immediately popped into my mind, so I thought perhaps it was demanding an article to go along with it, even though I could could just leave the headline and it would be a standalone -- an article that simultaneously answers its own rhetorical question, has a middle and an ending, intrigues yet repulses, and is only five words long! 


Unfortunately, when you're a poor schlub that gets paid by the word (an absurd concept -- no really, think about it! You could make the whole article about YOU, so you'd get to use "I" over and over! And keep the rest of the words really short! Like "I had no idea what I was writing, but I was sure that I had come across a new form of expression, one in which "I" became the main thema (toss a strange word in to prove you're somewhat artier than the reader) opposing the non "I-ness" of the reader, of whom I knew little, if anything, but I was so taken with this novel prosaic (toss in a word that hardly ANYONE understands, just for good measure) wordsmithing that I felt that I had indeed performed a good day's work. I could therefore relax with my customary strawberry martini."


Uhh . . . oh yeah, where was I? Why IS Facebook so vapid, and why am I sure that it's going to be Geocities or MySpace within ten years as sure as AOL went to A-Oh-Hell.


Well, because it's a stitched-together, shambling few-celled protozoa of an application which, having reached its zenith, its apogee, its ne-plus-ultra (see, my vocab drills have been paying off!!) its absolute pinnacle of vapidity, its complete Failure to Launch, has only one place to go! Yes! That would be a 45-degree angle, and one in which gravity holds sway!


Thus, what you get with such a development is a mad scramble to try to "tweak" its doddering Frankensteinian drooling, mumbling corpse by first, continuing to do what has been done ever since its abortion of a birth, namely desperately trying to patch all the faults that tend to manifest themselves when you start with a half-assembled prototype to begin with, and now, having half-finished with that, are trying to prop up the rotting corpse with "enhancements", like pretty much every single Microsoft product ever produced.


Allowing us to learn that Facebook's creator, Mark Dickerburg, is "enhancing" his own billionaireness with the truly disturbing announcement that in order to eat meat he must kill it first (I mean, come on. This is beyond even zany billionaireness. Cattle ranchers aren't on hand to wield the knife that takes their Hereford's life -- where the fuck does this total PROLAPSED ANUS get off on not only doing it, but broadcasting it to the world? Fuck, it's like saying "I embalm ALL MY DEAD RELATIVES PERSONALLY so I know that they've been lovingly dealt with before they start pushing up daisies."


But I digress! Facebook was born with no limbs and early-onset autism, for which we all know there is no cure, so no matter how many stitches and prosthetic limb "enhancements" they glue on, to borrow a naval expression, IT'S goin' DOWN, DUUUUDE!


There now. That was one of the most satisfying posts I've made since the blog's inception. Maybe I'll kill the folks at Blogger to truly get all the appreciation I feel for their creation at this moment.