And now for the main distraction

In attempt to distract myself from my distress over, well, what I last posted, I was reading a Spiegel interview with a sci-fi author Daniel Saurez. His depiction in the thriller Daemon of a very near future in which a murderous "bot" network controls humanity, is (so the article said) one eerily close to home, given the massive amounts of data voluntarily shared by millions every day via social networks Twitter and Facebook, data which is already being scanned and researched by "bots" in order to more effectively sell us things, and/or otherwise manipulate our soft little brainies.

At the mention of Facebook, I had to take a quick FB break. Great news awaited me! I had been tagged in quite a nice photo. Which had already been commented on once. Mmm, warm, narcissistic fuzzy. Could such a fuzzy ever really cause harm?? It just doesn't seem right...like a radioactive teddy bear.

Could it's soft edge cut you, as Rilo Kiley once warned  in the song "A man/me/then Jim?" (Of course, Jenny Lewis was singing about what she called the "slow fade of love" in that song, but the lyric does have more than one, for lack of  a better word, application.)

Anyway, it's kind of gross, but I feel like I have to admit that

1. I have come to regard people who don't use Facebook as sort of saintly figures I respect but couldn't hope to emulate.
2. I have twice dreamt about getting new FB notifications, or, as German Facebook calls them, neue Facebook-Benachrichtigungen.

I also realized it's a little bit disgusting that I had been reading to distract myself, then got distracted away from my main distraction. So I went back to my article, in which Suarez signed off with the words,

"A very small group of powerful people is deciding what's going to happen with your data, and they're using bots to help implement what they want to do. That has nothing to do with democracy. It's all about efficiency. And that's the really scary thing about it. I'd prefer we don't take that trip. Otherwise, this could really end up being a hellish world."