Happy New Year! While you were celebrating more friends appeared on Facebook
Welcome to the Saturday edition of Two Thursday Tidbits. A Quickbyte and FTW on IRL
I know that it is not Thursday as I have been spending a lot of time with the Substack plumbing to create a new and better experience (hopefully) for me and for you. Unfortunately, sprang a few leaks and I have been up to my knees in digital water. But I have mostly prevailed. There will continue to be changes in look and feel over the next month. I will try and keep the disruptions to a minimum. Brand new website that isn’t quite up to snuff yet at www.techtonic.news.
Stop complaining that your Facebook account being hacked
It’s just Meta adding AI friends for everyone
Perhaps you saw the news - as it is getting increasing mainstream coverage - that Meta announced on the eve of New Year’s Eve that it was going to be adding thousands of AI users for you to interact with. They are putting a very positive spin on this. Evidently in experiments on Instagram some of these AI agents have gotten loose (nothing good is going to come from the word agent or agentic). They are in there frolicking with all the bots.
This announcement finally puts in perspective the frequent friend messages you get saying, words to the effect, “evidently I have been hacked so ignore any new friend requests from me”. These, of course, are not real hacks. In all my time on FaceBook, only one friend - sorry Gordon - has ever been hacked (using it in the right terminology not the FTW type like a parenting hack which evidently is stealing other people’s kids and holding them for ransom). Someone actually took control of Gordon’s real account and locked him out, posting as him in odd ways.
No the hacks the rest of you refer to are simple Meta setting up AI characters based on your pictures and your life history. You didn’t find the way to opt out of your data being ingested into Meta’s AI engine in the convoluted labyrinth of its settings, did you?1 This isn’t a duplicate of you. This a brand new character, based on AI training of all your FB data. FaceBook loves you and so is recreating you as one of just thousands of new friends for us to play with.
Reality is more difficult than ever to discern.
Which brings us to:
FTW - IRL
You know that the digital virtual world is now reigning supreme when we have to have an acronym for “In Real Life”. Like it is some burden that weighs heavy on us that we have to leave social platforms, or Youtube / TikTok / endless reeling, or Twitch and multiplayer games, or important messaging, or any of the other wonderful digital treasures, to tend to real life. Like an intrusive phone call. Or a crying child.
This acronym reduces real life and takes the absolute beauty of it away. It converts the deep meaning and resonance of living to a mere label. But here is the thing. If you are so good at working in the digital world you wouldn’t need an acronym to “save time”typing it out . You’d be using voice to text or a keyboard shortcut to correctly say, “In Real Life”
Because despite all the addictive digital distractions, real life is all we really have.
See you Monday with the Morning Tonic. Love for you to share or comment as I try to build up steam in 2025
Long clip and pasted posts saying that Meta is not permitted to access my data due to privacy laws are hilarious misguided and just plain wrong. What do you expect using a product that is free? How many times do we have to say “You are the product”. That is your data going to another great use for Meta to make more money.