Thread by @AjaRaden

The reason people are addicted to FB isn’t the social networking. There are lots of platforms for that. It’s because before there were others, we put our whole lives on it. Our conversations, photos, relationships, major life events - for 15 years our whole fucking 1/

https://twitter.com/gregolear/status/1433913849208524808

lives became digitized. They’re holding our memories hostage. That’s why people keep going back. That’s why people say delete Facebook but they don’t really delete their accounts. They keep them active but just check in on them occasionally. They can’t give them up 2/

because it was their whole 20s and 30s , Or their whole teens and 20s, or maybe they were older and it’s all of their memories with their children – you get the gist.
They’re holding our memories hostage.
that’s how they keep people chained to Facebook. Because as tough as we 3/

All talk; No one‘s willing to delete 10 to 20 years of their life. We’re just not.
And those cold blooded motherfuckers know it. That’s who they are.
How many of you innocently put your gaduation, your whole wedding on FB, & nowhere else? (digital cameras & texting, ya know?) 4/

Or how about all you kids first’s? How many of you have dead friends&loved ones whose messages, jokes & pics of you still pop up in “memories?”
that’s some cold blooded shit. And it’s how they keep us from deleting our accounts. Because none of us kept hardcopies of any of it. 4/

Not just because of the digital age, but because of Facebook. Because we didn’t need to. We stopped corresponding with each other in the same way.
We stopped writing each other letters. We stopped taking photos & having them developed. I remember the last friend 5/

that developed a roll of film & sent me copies of our pictures after a vacation together. Her name was Mercedes Chan. She sent me copies of our pictures in a paper envelope when she got back to Hong Kong, and I got back to Chicago. 6/

I kept those pictures in a plastic photo album. I still have them.
Now she posts our pics, when we see each other, on Instagram. Some people keep photos in scrapbooks. Some people keep them albums, my mom used to keep them in big cardboard boxes. But we all stopped doing that 7/

too:keeping physical *things* we stopped keeping physical journals & diaries most of us, because what did we need THOSE for - Facebook was doing it FOR us; it was our diary, it was our journal, it was our bolg, or photo album, it was our letters back-and-forth to each other. 8/

We didn’t realize it, but FB wasn’t keeping our elaborate complex records of or lives FOR us, it was keeping them FROM us.
We’d only get access to our memories if we played ball: if we let them scrape our data & analyze our personalities & feed us propaganda, lies & poison. 9/

And if we ever stopped, or complained or tried to leave, they‘d take away our memories & our property & our friends; living & dead.
That’s how they keep us there.
Because they stole 20 years of our lives and we didn’t realize it.
That’s who they are. 10/

I think the best way to get people and mass to leave Facebook is going to be to help them take all of that with them. It won’t be easy. Because it’s been pointed out that:
11/

https://twitter.com/BLaurune/status/1434115420223643649

Most people don’t know how to do this.
And if they do, what they get is dozens & dozens of boxes of confusing to meaningless printed out data.
It’s nothing like what they’re looking for. It’s not their life. It’s not even their FB account. 12/

What we need to free people from Facebook is to get them that 10 to 20 years back.
I have some ideas. In fact I have a couple of very specific ideas but I need to talk to some programmers who are familiar with Facebook, particularly how retrieving data works 13/

& how that function could be adapted. I have some thoughts on how all of those boxes & reams of data could be made into user-friendly, (old school even) personalized material, that could break people of their addiction to FB & let them start fresh in a very normal human way. 14/

If you’re a programmer, if you’re a VC, if you have any interest in this project: participating, promoting or just knowing more about it - My DM‘s are open.
Give us our lives back.
Give us our IP back. Liberate Facebook users. 16/
#FreeOurMemories.
#BreakFaceBook