The Right to Reinvention

You might wonder what this has to do with my writing, but bear with me.

The Drag Queen Debacle might be what finally cuts the Facebook cord, not just for me, but for many of my friends and acquaintances and colleagues.

I've seen five of my good friends, faraway friends that i stay in touch with only on Facebook, have their accounts suspended for pseudonymous nicks. For all of them, using their legal name is non-negotiable, not gonna happen, and they are all angry and heartbroken and scrambling for other social media outlets to stay in touch with faraway friends--email blasting their Skype nicks, quickly setting up FB pages for their pets (because FB will allow your fucking CAT to have a page that's unverified, but god forbid you function as an actual human with a stage name or an alias), reactivating Google+ or tweeting like mad now.

I read a quote from Mark Zuckerberg in which he said that using an alias on social media belied a lack of "integrity." How glorious and warm and fuzzy it must be to live in that insulated a bubble of privilege and presumed safety, to where you cannot fathom a reason for using a pseudonym other than shady behavior. (Nevermind the fact that it grosses me out for Facebook as a company to hide their actual motives--more effective datamining--by paying public lip-service to passing some kind of ethical judgement on others using aliases. Because you know, everyone on Facebook under their drivers-license names is just teeming with fucking integrity. Gimme a break.

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