If I can, I avoid social media. I have deleted everything except Facebook and LinkedIn. The latter stays because every now and then I like to keep abreast of corporate-speak and its sheer ridiculousness: encountering phrases such as ‘socialise this idea’, ‘peel the onion’ and ‘boil the ocean’, which all sound to me like gibberish or, alternatively, three of Dante’s nine circles of Hell. I keep Facebook around because every now and then my grandma sends me a message, which I find equally baffling.
But Facebook also opens me up to a previously unknown world of online geriatrics and conspiracy theorists. I’ve even identified a particular kind of individual on Facebook: they’re a little uncertain about their identity, and so they reach into the past for certainty. They look at old pictures and wonder why the present is so rubbish. They go on Facebook to join groups where grainy, sepia-toned pictures of the ‘good ol’ days’ abound.
There’s a note of tragedy to this person. And melodrama: their ‘Oh, what have we become?’ is something out of a Shakespearean tragedy, only now delivered on Facebook by your auntie, who you have never seen sober in public. Don’t get me wrong, the past certainly had its moments, but isn’t the melodrama a bit overblown? And duplicitous? After all, the present is a direct consequence of the past, Aunt Tammy the Drunk. So, who’s really to blame?
I’ve always thought of a newly independent nation as a—rightfully—rebellious, petulant child who has finally gone out and killed his father. It is like some large-scale manifestation of the Oedipus complex; all we historians can do is psychoanalyse the past with the remnants of dreams. The dreams of independence. The child’s rebellion explains a number of subsequent events: the strapping exuberance of post-independence teenage years, followed by the tyranny of adulthood, also known as one-party rule. And then the comedown: the slow realisation in your middle age that you have become your parents: receding hairlines, expanding waistlines and that special brand of conservatism called experience. Heck, now that I’m 30, I am also suddenly interested in low-yielding sovereign bonds, birding and photos of the ‘good ol’ days’.
Not that Zambia nowadays resembles Proud Britannia (who’d want that?), but, like many post-independence countries, it finds itself in those years of decay when the body and mind begin to slowly disintegrate, struggling to find a stable identity to hold onto. The generation that fought for independence is mostly gone, and no one has the guts to tell grandpa all his friends are dead. He still speaks about them in his feverish dreams. Indeed, he’s stooping a bit lower and can barely hear what’s being said at the dinner table, and so he just nods along. More potatoes? Nods along. Some dessert? Nods along. Sell off national assets? Nods along.
I think it’s time we finally let grandpa onto Facebook. Let him have some fun. He and Aunt Tammy can look at pictures of the ‘good ol’ days’ when people wish him happy birthday. Perhaps that will jog his memory, give him some sense of identity. He can message his dead friends, and some AI ghost-bot will respond. Of course, we must monitor him: make sure he doesn’t fall down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, like Alice. Talking rabbits? Cheshire cats? It all sounds as ridiculous as a working government.
