After Meta

Meta, in Greek, means "after."  Which now, I am.   I bailed on Meta today, which feels a little odd.

It was the last of my social media presences to go, and it was the hardest.  X was first, right after it went full fascist, and it was like having a bad tooth pulled.  Good riddance.  Ditching Bluesky was like snapping my fingers.  Poof.  It was just lefty primal Twitter, and I loathed lefty primal Twitter, petty and shallow and mobby.  Don't miss it.  Never liked it.  Mastodon?  The fediverse always felt a little incoherent, and I never found anything there to hold me.  LinkedIn?  I have no idea why I started on LinkedIn in the first place.   I don't have a career, or an interest in having a career.  That's not how vocation works.

But Meta?  And Facebook in particular?

I had a whole bunch of folks I actually know as human beings there...old friends and family and interesting human beings I've met online.  As Facebook has taken to reminding me regularly, I go back two decades there.  Hey, remember this day in 2005, it'll whisper, and I'll marvel that so much time has passed. 

But Meta is awful.  Threads is a howling mess of partisan posturing, like all microblogging.  Insta is just Tiktok, shallow and trivial and designed to compulsively distract.  And Facebook?  Facebook is nothing like it once was. 

Remember how back in the day it was inspired by the concept of the yearbook?  Facebook was, when it began, pitched as a dynamic and updating yearbook, where you could K.I.T. in real time.  It was a brilliant business model, and it worked.

If that was the vision, Meta's lost the lede.  Imagine a yearbook on which the pictures of your friends were crowded out by advertisements.  And where they weren't sorted alphabetically, but randomly scattered throughout the ads.  Who would want such a warped monstrosity, even if it was offered up for free?  If Facebook had been as it is now when it launched, it would have failed miserably.  But it's amazing what we'll tolerate when we're slowly and systematically conditioned to tolerate it.

I found myself increasingly and actively disliking the experience, every time I engaged with it.  Sometimes, I'd encounter something delightful and meaningful.  But mostly, every sustained encounter made me angrier and shallower, more trivial and more reactive.  I felt lessened.  I felt my time wasted, and my attention scattered.

I also felt, honestly, a little imposed upon.  I was obligated to post, not just within the Meta ecosystem and the miscellaneous other platforms where I had a presence.  My writing...here on this blog, and in the books I've written...required it.  Because if you're not a social media presence with followers in the thousands and tens of thousands, publishers aren't interested.  Authors these days need to bring their own followers, and to do that, you need to be constantly on, always posting, always engaging in Sisyphean self-promotion.  You also need to be ideologically consistent and monomaniacally on brand, which I am not. 

If you don't do this, you will not succeed as an author.  Or so we're led to understand.

Yet social media also sabotaged my writing, cut away the sustained focus necessary to create, and supplanted it with distractions.  But it went deeper than that.  It seemed, every time I considered it, antithetical to my faith.  It's not a neutral medium, after all.  It has a purpose, and that purpose is Mammon.  More, more, more, it howls, because it needs me to want more, always more, if it is to profit from my commodified attention.  

Which now, it won't.  

A Pandemonium of Parrots

It was a lovely afternoon, warmer than one would expect for the early Fall, and I was face to face with a pandemonium of parrots.

Earlier that week, I'd been invited to pay a visit to a Tibetan Buddhist temple by one of the congenial Buddhists who pray and meditate there.  They've been a vital partner in my congregation's efforts to feed the hungry in our little town.  One Sunday while helping unload a van-full of donated food for our Little Free Pantry, I remembered that I'd not been out to visit their community for nearly a decade.  So I got the invite, and puttered out to the temple on my scooter.

Kunzang Palyul Choling, which we just call KPC, is a rather more complicated and symbolically rich ritual space than our simple, soft sanctuary, and its bright flags and sacred iconography rest on acres and acres of land in the agricultural land around Poolesville.  In addition to a visually lush central worship space, they've got all manner of delightful gracenote accretions on their property.  Hiking and meditation trails.  Stupas and statues.  A large, productive garden.  Burbling ponds filled with slowly circling and brilliantly colored koi.  Pettable goats and pigs, all of whom are undoubtedly grateful for Buddhist vegetarianism.

In the thick of it all, there's also a parrot sanctuary.

Parrots are remarkable birds, justifiably known for their intelligence, sociability, and their capacity to mimic the human voice.  They also live for a very, very, very long time, with lifespans approaching that of human beings.  Meaning, they often outlive their owners, and family isn't there to offer a new home.  Or their jungle-born voices prove more voluble than apartment dwellers realize.  Those birds need somewhere to be, and so there they are.

As I approached their large outdoor enclosure with the monk who was kindly showing me around the temple grounds, I thought to myself: 

My gracious.  I don't think I've ever seen quite so many parrots.  

I stepped nearer to the space.  "Do they talk?"  I was assured that they did.  So after my host affirmed it'd be fine, I said hello.  How does one start parrots talking?  You start talking.

"Hi!" I said, in a squawky parrotish voice, which for some reason also came out sounding faintly Australian.

The parrots replied in a cacophanic chorus.  "Hi!"  "HI!"  "HI!"  The human words cascaded out of their beaks, along with squawks and shrieks that pierced the air.  

"Hello," I returned, and a few of them said "Hello" right back, while the remainder continued with their sharp, avian "HI!"  To my left, in the middle of the cage, a single older macaw sat hunched over itself, grumbling inaudibly, for all the world sounding like a disgruntled older man mumbling quietly to himself in eternal irritation.

They kept at it for a while, croaking out greetings and salutations and muttery grumblings, as my initial "Hi!" echoed from parrot to parrot, ricocheting from one psittacine voice to another.  

It felt paradoxically both like communication and not like communication, as their parrotish utterances reflected nothing of their true and inscrutable internal mindstate.  It was just an endless reflective imitation, as they screamed exactly what they heard around them back into their surroundings.

"This is a lot like Facebook," I thought.

Facebook and Religious Freedom

Back during the pandemic, my little church scrambled for a way to stay connected to one another.

Worship is the beating heart of congregational life, the place of shared experience that engages, sends forth, and re-engages.   It's an experience that is at its best incarnate, but that can be shared through media if distance or plague so demands.   As generally speaking the goal of my little church is not to send our worshippers to meet Jesus face-to-face before their time, that meant COVID forced our hand.  We had to livestream, and had to scale up to meet that need.

Our choice, for its ubiquity, was Facebook.  As we reasoned it back in 2020, Facebooks' depth of engagement and relative ease of use made it an good medium for streaming.  It allowed the sharing of invitation across our personal networks, which meant it was open to those who might wish to visit, and wasn't delimited to invited members.

It's worked for that purpose, more or less, but lately it's become...well...worse.  

Our worship is traditional, meaning the hymns we sing are...more often than not...reflective of this pastor's strong preference for sturdy old Gospel standards.  

They're meatier theologically than most Christian contemporary music, but they also rise to meet the vocal capacities of a little church.  They're lovely and totally singable if you can sing, which my fellowship can.  And if you can't, there's something about old gospel standards that brings beauty and grace to the heartfelt caterwaulings of even the most vocally challenged faithful.  

Almost every week, we're hit with copyright claims, as Facebook's avaricious algorithms flag the hymns we sing as violations of copyright.  

The latest ding was for singing a beautiful mid-nineteenth-century standard, Abide with Me.  "This is our music," said a subsentient fragment of code slaved to Warner/Chappell Music USA.  "It belongs to us. We demand our cut of ad revenues from this video."

To which I say, advisedly and with purpose, the hell it is.  

The music dates from 1861, so far out of copyright that it's utterly preposterous to even suggest ownership.  It's sacred music for a sacred purpose, one that goes deep back down into the evangelical tradition, back to the time of the founding of my humble historic church.  We're singing it from a hymnal, copies of which were purchased for use in public worship.

Our "ad revenue" is, of course, zero, as corporate sponsorship of worship isn't something we do.  These claims don't impact our worship...not yet.  But the needling annoyance of these mammonist machines seems a marker of a shift in our culture, as the crass profit-maximization of our increasingly false and decadent society stakes its claim.

Does this impact our religious freedom?  No.  Not really.

Facebook is not a public space.  It is an owned space, a place of radical venality, where we and our relationships are bought and sold like chattel, and where even our most sacred time is commodified.

Let me suggest, Mark, that reminding us of this on the regular is remarkably foolish.

Google+ and the Integrated Person

I had a short exchange on Google+ today, with someone who'd suggested in a comment that a recent blog post of mine was "manufactured" and "irresponsible."  It was interesting, in that it represented the first time I've ever had any sort of interaction on that new-ish social network.

About two months ago, I plopped into Google+, along with everyone else.  This was, in the event you've forgotten, supposed to be a very big deal.  Here, finally, was a threat to Facebook's total dominance of the social network marketplace.   The "pitch" for this new network was that it would revolutionize social media.  Now, finally, there was a way to insure that your mom wasn't going to see you tagged in that picture backin' up and/or gettin' freaky on that skeeve while clubbing at 2:32 am Sunday morning.   

"But honey, didn't you say you couldn't make it to church because you had the flu?"

Having been kept outside with the rest of the rabble by the virtual bouncers at the gate as the hip and the powerful were admitted, I expected something different.  When I arrived on Google+, I expected to experience the humming chatter of eager first-adopters, as the net-elite filled the new network with their radiant, connected savvy.   

Instead, it was like going back and visiting my MySpace page.  It was dead as a doornail, as stale as canned laughter.   There was nothing going on.  

So I got to wondering why.

Part of it, I'm sure, is social network fatigue.  Those friends on Facebook haven't all migrated over, nor has everyone who follows you on Twitter.  Managing all of it is undoubtedly too much, and once you're invested in several online communities, you're probably at your saturation point.   There's only so scattered we can get, after all.

But I did wonder if perhaps...perhaps...the whole "Circles" thing is part of the reason that Google+ has proven so anticlimactic.  I've never seen any reason to break my online presence out into discrete and separate demographic groups.  It becomes yet another thing to manage, and Lord knows we don't need that.

There's something else, though.  Something more important.  If I post something on Facebook, or write something here, I don't care who sees it.  If you're an evangelical Christian or an atheist, a friend or a troll or my mom, you're welcome to see what I put out there.  

Rule of thumb, in the online world?  Never write or say anything that you're not willing to have everyone see.  That includes your aforementioned mother and the gentle-spirited eight year old child of the person whose web-site you're trolling.  Think and try to be discerning before you hit return or click post.

It's not a bad rule in life, actually.  For despite the unreflective self-indulgent me-ness of this era, self-editing is not dishonest.  It's the hallmark of both wisdom and personal integrity.  So what I say all represents me.

Well, not entirely all.  There's stuff I do and think that I don't put online.  There are things in my life that are intimate, and things in my life that I occasionally struggle with, that I'm not going to disclose in a long rambly post or a TMI moment on Facebook.

For those things, I talk to other people.  Face to face.  Person to person.  There, I don't really need another circle, nor do I need a mediating structure to help me connect with it.  That circle already exists, and is woven out of the flesh and faces of friends and family.

Maybe Google+ will survive.  But does it need to?  I don't think I'd even notice if it was gone.

Tweeting Tribalism

In an interesting crosspost over at Presbymergent and at his blog A Wee Blether, Adam Copeland pitches out a defense of social media as a means by which church can better be church.  By blogging and tweeting and...um..."facebooking," Copeland argues that we establish a profound and authentically spiritual connection to others and increase our awareness of others who share our faith.

There's real truth in that.  New media connects us to people we'd never have otherwise experienced.  There are folks I've known only online, and known for years, from whom I've been connected to writers and thinkers and music that have profoundly enriched my faith.  The ability to share and converse can be a serious blessing, and can enrich our ability to love God and neighbor.   It can be a powerful tool for grace.

As can a gesture.  As can the spoken word.  As can ink and paper.  The reach and immediacy of social media are different, though.  It has the immediacy of conversation, and the potential reach of mass media.

The spiritual challenge in social media is that it makes it easy for us to become tribal.  And we all want to be tribal.  It is our nature.   We like to be an "us."  We like to surround ourselves with sameness and the comfortable and the known.  In our global culture, there there are so many different voices.  Media can serve up the baffling and frightening reality that we don't necessarily hold Truth with a capital "T" quite as firmly as we might like.  We are not the center of things.  That shakes us.

So what social media offers us is a choice.  If we so choose, we can surround ourselves with sameness.  We can follow only those who interest us and agree with us.  We can fill our ears and lay our eyeballs only across those voices and words that reaffirm what we already know.   We can amass a vast array of witnesses who affirm our common knowledge, as our facebook friends, those we feed and those we follow all shout the same songs, and say the same things.  We can live our lives in the echo chamber din of the Daily Kos, or in Townhall.

In the relentlessly refreshing wave of tweets and status updates, we can become so lost in the ceaseless chorus of our own cyberclan that we lose the ability to see those different from us as anything other than our trollish enemy.  Yes, we yearn for the intimacy and comfort of the tribe.  But tribes, while great at being community, have a tendency to do a really for-crap job of being beloved community. 

There lies our other social media choice.  If we so choose, we can use social media to open ourselves up to the other.  Yes, we listen particularly to those who are called to openness, both to those called to be constantly reforming and to those called to hold on to what is good.   But we also listen to those with whom we disagree.  We follow those who are different.  We rss feed those who are supposed to be our enemies.   That doesn't mean we acquiesce.  We're allowed to still disagree.  But in listening, in understanding, we mindfully use social media to stir in ourselves both grace and compassion towards even our most implacable trolls.

When that becomes our habit of being in the strange virtual half-light, then and only then do we start moving towards a twitter theology, towards living through social media in a way that can be called authentically Christian.

Howdy, Stranger!

As you're reading this post, you have most likely just arrived from Facebook after clicking on the FB ad my church has been running.

So, hi! I'm David, and I'll be your blogger for today! I'm also the pastor of a little church in Bethesda, Maryland. We're Trinity Presbyterian Church, and we're an interesting blend of folks trying to muddle our way through what it means to follow Jesus.

What that means for me as a pastor really isn't very different from what it means for the rest of the folks who together form my church. It means that we find the stories that Jesus told and the reality of his life personally transforming. It means that we're convinced that there was something powerful and important and relevant about this person, even if he did live in a backwater province of a now-long-dead empire. The core Christian ethic of non-judgmental love towards others is a powerful, powerful thing...and we're convinced that finding ways to live a life governed by that love would make the world a better place.

Being a minister and all, I tend to think about faith, and write more about faith. Being human, I think about other stuff as well. Like, say, philosophy. Cosmology. Family. Politics. Beer. The important things. Those mostly-coherent musings are disgorged right here on this blog.

If you've had some bad experiences with Christianity, or if even the idea of faith seems alien to you, don't expect anything other than a sympathetic ear. Christianity has wandered far from the teachings of Jesus, into a place where the faith is either a front for a particular brand of politics or a form of magic that'll get us all the consumer products we so dearly desire. If you've struggled with this, I have too. Some thoughts on those subjects can be found here. Starting with the "Jesus" button over to your right is probably not a bad place, but if you're the sort of person who doesn't like to be fenced in, just search the blog. Can't find what you're interested in or what you're personally struggling with? Well, you can ask, if you'd like. Just drop me a comment.

Once you've gotten to know me a bit, feel free to drop by on a Sunday. You can learn more about us at the website. You know, directions and times and stuff. Or, if Sunday seems a bit formal and intimidatingly churchy, we've got other opportunities throughout the week. Can't bring yourself to do that? Well..stick around here for a while. Snag the feed for this blog, and join in on the conversation.

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[update 2023]  This ancient post was an invite to a congregation that no longer exists.  We'd pitched it out in an effort to attract folks via Facebook advertising, and discovered that the clicks from that site somehow never registered here.  So we stopped. 

Sometimes people read this still, or so my stats tell me, so, well, it's worth updating.

Did I believe all of these things?  Yes.  Did my congregation?  No.  

So I left.  And then that church withered away to nothing, because they had no vision of who they were or what they wanted to be.  So it goes.

I'm still just as Jesus focused, although I don't have a "Jesus button" on the blog.  Search for a while.   Or read the books I wrote, once I finally found a Christian community that shared/tolerated my thoughts.