Facebook's utility

“Facebook is a public utility.”

I hear this said a lot. I hear it in the warm summer breeze, in my cold air-conditioned sleep and from my exceptionally verbal, quite cool cat. And I couldn’t agree more. Facebook, an extremely engaging platform for social stimuli, is indeed a public utility. There are agitated misanthropes who insist on comparing the wisdom within its pages to mean-spirited puns written on bathroom tiles or incendiary remarks tucked onto university bulletin boards. What Facebook has given humanity is not unlike previous breakthroughs in the realm of gas, electricity and the granddaddy of them all, water. 

The Big Three are so ingrained into society that imagining a world absent any of them is as frightening as it is absurd. We need these three to live. But the truth is, you can live without gas and electricity. You can rub a few pieces of wood together for fire or light up your evening under the stars. The sun’s up for about half the day, so what are you worried about? I’d be lying if I put water in the same category. Water is our most versatile commodity. 

And Facebook is the closest thing we have to water. Quite simply, we can’t live without it. Picture a world where you couldn’t check your newsfeed or poke dear friends from the other side of the country? What would happen if you started to use the word “befriend” instead of “friend” again? What’s remarkable is how far we progressed as a civilization prior to the advent of Facebook. It’s almost as if everything that came before was leading up to the moment Zuck delivered the world from boredom.

You can’t learn from a book. They’re too long and too heavy. Learning from those in your network is a significantly simpler proposition. If we back out now and don’t allow the federal government to subsume this social media platform in a monopolistic regulatory coup, who knows what the future won’t bring. It's the only place you can truly count on for Fake News. What's the alternative? To actually read? No chance. 

The possibilities are beautiful. Here’s your ideal day in a world where Facebook is finally treated like H₂O. You wake up with a hot shower of Facebook, individually washing off your weekend regrets. At lunch, you decided to drive a few hours upstate for some white-water rafting on a Facebook tributary, with rapids of snarky comments and incoherent diatribes. This is far more dynamic than doing Facebook laps at your Y. As you wade through the sizzle, you’re thirsty. So you do what’s natural: you grab a tall glass of Facebook, throwing back a few pints to ease the pain. When you finally do get home after a long and arduous day, you draw a Facebook bath, letting the tub slowly fill up with likes and shares.  

Think of all the human beings who’ve come and gone, somehow surviving without Facebook. Are we really going to laugh in their faces, pretending as if this social media platform is just a slightly more complex version of Myspace, ignoring its true essence? A public service that’s unlike any other. One that bands of rambunctious Ramapithecus would gladly trade in for any number of tools. 

It’s dumb luck that we made it to 2005 without Facebook. The only way to ensure humanity’s survival is to codify the platform into law for all time. Otherwise, it'll be a crude joke like geocities and the message boards of yore. I don’t want to wake up in a world where I visit Facebook and instead receive a broken links with an image of a weird-looking dinosaur.

Perhaps there’s a religious aspect to it, as well. God created man to create Facebook. Sounds simple. Sounds beautiful. Sounds right. Let's not forget who we work for.