Gonzo reporting on the Facebook phenomena with excerpts and inspiration from the late Hunter S. Thompson

 

by Adam Enright

 

I was reading my wall when “the fear” began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should get on and check your inbox..." when suddenly there was a terrible roar . . . and my profile filled with what appeared to be evil applications, all swooping and screeching and diving around the browser. I heard a voice screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

 

We had no real way to know what they were or where they had come from. . . . but we quickly figured out what their snapping oral cavities hungered for, they were drooling and sniveling for our information . . . and they were as desperate as a Saigon banker on the roof of the American embassy. To make matters worse, somebody was giving booze to these goddamn things! My dog growled, “Facebook is getting to me!” and pulled off his cheap Samoan sunglasses. I could tell that he had been crying. I leaned close and whispered, "We have to get out of here!" but it all came out as gibberish . . . as the floor began to fill with blood. We were soon going to need boots just to get out of the place.

 

 

Why were these unclean demons demanding to know who we were, with whom we slept and access to all sorts of other personal information? Into what foul corporate or government chasm were these beasts dragging our information once we agreed? What was this madness? My friends were fast becoming obscured, their profiles getting longer and longer, demanding more and more from me . . . forcing me to divulge my blood type, eye colour, shoe size, navel depth, condom preference, sleeping position, who was my favorite dead celebrity, what colour gerbil I wanted to be, how often my bowel movements resembled Richard Nixon . . . and how well they withstood being struck with a tennis racket . . .

 

What were we doing on here? What was the meaning of this site? I looked around for the exit, but a grinning carnival midget with a Homeland Security uniform was blocking the logout button. He threw his drink across my screen, scattering broken glass and cognac everywhere. Then, raising his tiny fists he began to squeak, "Granting access to your personal information is required. You must be willing to allow facebook to feast on your information! Even if you try to erase your profile, it will live on forever!"

 

 

I picked the evil dwarf up by his frilly collar. "You mean to tell me Facebook needs to know my date of birth, marital status and political views in order to place a bouncing testicle on my profile? Is that the kind of freedom our forefathers died for, face down in the sand, scattering reefer butts and gin bottles across a Club Med Beach?" The midget went limp. He had seen this reaction before, and company policy was clear. I was not going to get any answers from him, no matter how hard I shook.

 

The tension had grown too great . .   . I began to sweat heavily. The screen became a heavy and ugly grey. I felt myself loosing it . . . falling into a paranoid terror, with the awful spectre of a savage invitation from the Police. I realized with great dread that Joe Stalin had been bested . . . facebook is a brave new form of KGB where we voluntarily spied on ourselves and revealed every aspect of our lives to a raft of unseen handlers.

 

I saw no choice but to set fire to my computer with a can of lighter fluid. In seconds, it had burst into flames, keys flying off like popcorn and giving off a thick black smoke. As the circuits began to sizzle like bacon, I heaved the burning contraption through the bedroom window. It fell twenty stories like a flaming meteor, exploding onto the sidewalk with the force of a howitzer round. Traffic came to a screeching halt for three blocks in every direction. Parents clutched their children in fear and dove for cover. I had banished facebook from my apartment, but I knew deep in the recesses of the death star my profile would live on forever and would be used for whatever purposes that shady lot devised . . .

 

 

Facebook was not supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be like a carnivalesque romp with a beautiful gypsy queen. . . but instead it had become a rough interrogation by a meat-fisted J. Edgar Hoover in a stained cocktail dress and fuck-me pumps.  

 

Facebook was no refuge for grubby degenerates; it was a dangerous compendium of an entire generation's personal lives . . . a place where hopes and dreams were shook down, extorted and pimped out like an angry one-eyed chimp in an uptown back alley . . . and handed over to a faceless corporate horde in trench coats we will never know anything about. What they were doing with our information was anyone's guess . . . except it was likely ugly, gruesome and sick.    

  

Facebook was what the whole hip world would be doing on a Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. It was the sixth Reich online. May God have mercy on the hapless victims of those filthy degenerate Facebook swine!

 

-Fan fiction written with excerpts from the late Hunter S. Thompson's "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" and other writings.

More From Adam Enright:

The Amazing Corvids

Hockey Riots

"Blackfoot Exit"

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