Signing Our Lives Away.

 I'm considering starting my own social network, called e-Harangue.

 You and all your friends can sign up to it and then constantly beg, badger and cajole one another into signing an endless string of petitions and voting on things you honestly couldn't give a fuck about.

 I'm kidding, of course, as we're all already signed up to that exact service, by its original name.

 For those who are slow on the uptake, I'm talking about Facebook, and the fact that most people use it as either a gaming platform, political soapbox or desperate attempt to make acquaintances envious. Sometimes all three.

 I'm probably as guilty as anyone - although my facebook posts tend to be sarcastic observations about my day, or surreal thoughts that I can't voice to anyone while I'm alone, I've also become a fan of a Boggle-type game that relentlessly posts updates about my scores to my timeline without my asking it to. I'm not going to name the game because of this, as I'm already doing enough free advertising without consent.

 There used to at least be the option to keep your scores to yourself, and I did, because I'm aware that nobody except me gives a fuck what my highest score is.* In the same vein, I get at least one request a week from a family member asking me to play some other game or another. I'm not going to. Ever. On principle.

 There is at least some consolation to be had from the thought that a lot of these games post the updates automatically and that it's therefore possible that my family aren't really this annoying. The same can't be said for what feels like the most recent of the endless waves of Facebook requests, the petitions.

 "Click here and add your name to this petition, calling on the government to end child poverty/cancel third world debt/reform the entire lineup of S Club 7," as though the government was capable of doing any of those things at the drop of a hat and had only neglected them so far out of some sort of collective amnesia or ignorance. "Oh, people DON'T like fracking?! We shall stop it immediately and to hell with the vast sums of money it lines our pockets with," said no politician in the history of anything, ever.

 By far the most offensive for me are the campaigns asking people to comment "Amen" under a picture of something terrible. I saw one the other day asking Jesus - as though Jesus spends his time on fucking Facebook - to heal children with skin conditions, accompanied by a picture of an infant with horribly blistered skin.

 It's not the head-thumpingly dumb hypocrisy of religion that gets me so wound up in these cases ("Dear God, please cure people of the terrible blights that you've inflicted on them for - we can only assume - your own amusement") but the absolutely stunning level of narcissism evidenced by the people who post them in the first place. It's bad enough that a lot of people are still blinkered enough to think there's a God at all, or even that, most perverse of all, such a being is benevolent, but vanishingly few people can seriously be stupid enough to think that God pays attention to Facebook. This means that whoever is posting these things is almost certainly only doing it to see how many comments they can generate, in the process exploiting the stupid using the less fortunate as a shield. It's downright sociopathic.

 The people commenting, meanwhile, are so dumb or deluded that they think they're influencing anything in reality by typing "Amen" under a digital photograph. This is the basic problem with religion. It's reserved for the stupid, cowardly or lazy. The only reasons to believe in a god are that you're a) afraid to face your own mortality, b) too lazy to do anything for yourself and think prayer is an acceptable substitute for effort, or c) you've never thought about literally any of the implications of a being so powerful it could create and maintain an unimaginably vast universe. If such a thing existed, there is mathematically no way it could give a fuck about something as small as you, in the same way that you're incapable of caring about individual neutrinos.

 The fact is, we're on our own down here. There is no god, never was, and as a result all we have is people. This, bizarrely, is the reason I often do sign the petitions that crop up on my timeline.

 God isn't going to do anything to influence anything, and although I'm always wary of signing something, I try my best to look into the background of the cause I'm being asked to support if it catches my eye, and I usually end up signing. I'm not naive enough to think it does much, but more than anything it's evidence that I existed and that I believe in something.

 So yes, the constant petitions are annoying, and no, I won't sign every single thing that people ask me to. But in five hundred years, if I sign a petition today because I genuinely believe in the cause, someone will know that I was alive, what my name was, and what I was willing to stand up and be counted for. I actually find that quite comforting.

 And now, if you'll excuse me, I have a game of Boggle to get back to.







*2,400 since you asked.