Anti-social networking: a vision of your life without Facebook

Birthday party

You would — really, truly — forget your best friend’s birthday were it not for Facebook inviting you to share a picture of the two of you embracing near a birthday cake, apparently shared three years ago today. The penny drops: it is not your birthday — of this you are, at least, certain — ergo, it must be theirs.

Also, if it is your birthday and no one shares a Birthday Pusheen on your wall, is it really your birthday?

Identity report

Facebook is not just an avatar — it is a veritable pseud, helping to extract from you depths and dimensions you did not know you contained. Without Facebook, you would not know what niche Peep Show character you are most similar to, nor how your choice in condiment can predict the year you will get married?

Virtue signalling

Horror of horrors: no one will know you are running a half marathon in July, nor that you “read” that essay on blockchain technology (“this is a must-read if you’re interested in the fin-tech space”).

Phone home

You have lost your phone. Without Facebook, there is no obvious medium for your glib, self-deprecating status that implies you’re an unbridled libertine (you actually dropped it while crossing the road) but that also serves a useful public service announcement — namely to “get you on here” for “the foreseeable”.

Going out out

You would literally never be invited to a party ever again.

Super sleuth

Apart from birthdays and events, you do not really use Facebook to communicate with your real friends; that, perhaps ironically, is what WhatsApp is for. No — the people you most enjoy stalking on Facebook are people you met in a hostel in Krakow five years ago on an Interrailing trip, or erstwhile friends from primary school whose lives have taken an unexpected turn — perhaps a turn that involves sharing close-up pictures of their body contorted, grotesquely, around a pole in a grey gym hall. This, you learn, is the move they’re taking “to nationals in May”.

The ex factor

Without Facebook, it will be difficult to confirm categorically than you are having a more successful life than your ex. Indeed, you might have to harvest some data yourself — old school style, perhaps by hunting through their bins, or following them to work — in order to determine that they are, as you hoped, dating a five and nursing a paunch.

Also: unless what you discover in their bins is truly demeaning, the act of hunting may tip the balance in their favour.

Mother trouble

Your mother needs an outlet. She is at home all day; your father follows her from room to room. Aside from her daily sudoku hit, Facebook is the only other distraction that is all hers. And without your Facebook account, she would be bereft of a place to leave long, emotive messages on old photos of you from a decade ago (“I loved this haircut it always reminds me of your fifth birthday party such a happy little girl xxx mum”), or share local news articles with aghast captions, which later turn out, inevitably, to be fake news.