going dark part one

my mom and my stepdad live in a retirement community in the tampa, florida area. one of their neighbors is a married couple, both the husband and wife of whom made their careers in the federal intelligence community. the husband is still an active CIA agent who spends long periods of time in the middle east. the wife worked for the FBI but is now retired. at some point, she and my mom were discussing social media and my mom brought up having to use her friends' accounts to snoop around since my brother and i forbade her from joining facebook. her friend laughed and said we had done her a favor. when my mom asked what she meant, she replied "if you are on facebook or twitter, get off. that's all i can say."

i have been anti-facebook for a long time but not always for the same reasons. facebook appeals to the narcissist in you. if you can't admit to that, you should know that they are in the intelligence business but more in the google sense of collecting every bit of information on as many people as possible rather than only spying on 'bad guys' like the my mom's neighbors. i always considered myself the paranoid brother between matty and i but something triggered a change in him and he started making me aware of all of the different ways sites collect your information (i'll write about this in a different post). i stopped using google as a search engine in favor of duckduckgo but there was far more work to be done

back to facebook - i had quit previously but always came back, usually while drunk and powerless against my impulses to spy on someone or post something inappropriate but hilarious. since i quit drinking, this was no longer a factor and so i quit facebook and instagram months ago and haven't returned. this left twitter (which i couldn't tell you the last time that i used - probably humanafest last year), foursquare, swarm and linkedin. unlike facebook which retains your data seemingly indefinitely, twitter deletes your handle, history and all information after 30 days. i don't know why this made me hesitant but it did. i love swarm but not for any good reasons. i like being the mayor of places, especially where i work where it has always been an active competition between my coworkers. yesterday i decided that neither the public availability of my twitter history nor the prestige of mayorship were really adding anything beneficial to my life so i left facebook, swarm and twitter. linkedin is a colossal annoyance except for when you are looking for a new job or entertaining job offerings to get a feel for the market when you are negotiating your salary. if anyone from dynamit is reading this, meet me at the current median going rate of a software developer in the columbus area with thirteen years of experience and i will leave linkedin immediately and complete the circle

that's the history that led me to write this. next will be why going dark was important to me and why i take pride in having done it (with the one exception already stated)