Social

 

At home in private you pursue a life of various, as distinct from vicarious, interests. You decide it’s the hour to take early computer time and catch up with friends on social media. One friend has launched on a tantrum rant with Hydra-like complaints that spring up double each time other friends lop off the head of a previous grievance. Another friend posts unfunny cartoons intended to cheer your day, leaving you disconsolate with questions about is the human race heading in the right direction. Another has discovered an infatuation for red pandas, sharing this infatuation by disseminating most available pictures of red pandas, whether restricted by copyright or not. So cute, to the max. Routine rubbish ads and demands to sign petitions for obscure causes drive you to go outside for a walk, where the familiar shapes of streets and trees restore a sense of normality. It is understandable why you long for the age of servants. One or two servants whose daily chores primarily entail handling the overload of your social media posts, is a proposition with merit. Their job description includes deletion of all multimillionaire politicians, garish gambling enticements, and chocolate wrapper wordles, before you have opened your accounts for the day. You have slept at night knowing you also have a diplomatic corps on regular shifts, fobbing off transparent scams, sending a curt yes or no to nosy parkers with trick questions, discerning the non-troll from the troll and dispatching the latter to a Moldavian salt mine using a mix of outrageous decoys and fey non sequiturs. As you stroll along your street enjoying the layout of native gardens and smiling at locals rushing to work, you further construct this editorial entourage, there to resolve what has become asocial media. Employment of psychologists will enhance your day by figuring out warm friends from stormy friends, fair weather friends from false friends. Your day can be spared of despair, or simple dismay, by sensible advice from your psychologists about who to respond to in the present state of upheaval, and who to treat with circumspection, for now. A couple of espionage agents would be useful on your books, employees able to distinguish the blessed from the dodgy. They can send troublemakers off the scent by posting ludicrously nonsensical answers to posts intended to ascertain your age, your favourite form of clothing, and other targeted advertising ploys. Their main job is to scramble your algorithm. Instead of sitting alone being all of these people at once, after employing them you may enjoy daily conversations over tea and cinnamon biscuits, the kind of sociability that took centuries of socialising to perfect, the purported purpose of your morning hour of social media.