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Apr 4, 2014    Uncategorized

If this post gets a million likes, can we end this trend?

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“If one million people like this page, my girlfriend will let me turn our house into a pirate ship.”

Since seeing this post a few years ago there seems to be no limit to what people will crowdsource to strangers online. I’ve seen people begging for a million likes to help them make important (and usually absurd) life decisions. I can’t say it bothers me that people are considering silly things, like naming their lily white kids TuPac. It’s not my place to judge is someone is willing to schtup someone else based on facebook thumbs up. Hell, I have friends who’ve slept with guys for the promise of concert tickets, but at least they had the good sense to keep that nonsense off facebook. It’s really hard for me to see how someone who is trying to get a million people to click like on something doesn’t have at least a handful of friends they can run these decisions by.

It seems like people are looking for the acceptance of a million strangers as justification for whatever stupid thing they’re considering doing. What they don’t seem to understand is that the world is full of stupid people. In the 70s the pet rock made $15 million in the first 6 months, strictly from stupid people who allowed marketing to make them purchase “magic beans” in the form of ordinary rocks. Are these the same idiots you want to help you decide on whether your kids can get a puppy? Way to outsource your family decision to a million people who could care less whether your kids are going to have the maturity and attention span to take care of a defenseless animal.

If a million people agree with something stupid, it’s still stupid. I get that some people are indecisive, but that’s no reason to leave your life decisions up to the same people responsible for Two and a Half Men being on the air (ahem, 28 million in it’s heyday). Perhaps this type of thing makes people feel like people care about their lives and things they have going on. But it’s so overdone it’s become the online equivalent of a “Honk if you love Something” bumper stickers; loud, annoying, and proving nothing.

What these like seekers don’t seem to keep in mind is that no one who gives them a precious like is going to be around for the aftermath of the decision. No one is going to defend young Megatron when he (or she) has to explain that his parents weren’t drug addicted hippies, but facebook addicted morons. And some people click like simply because the thought of someone doing something stupid is hilarious. When we’re down on our luck we can think, well, at least I didn’t get an Oakland Raiders tattoo on my face just because a lot of people thought it was a good idea.

At least that was the case with pirate ship guy. Of course I clicked like, not because I identified with what he was doing, or even because I like pirate stuff. I didn’t even remotely know the guy who made the post. I just thought it’d be funny and was glad I didn’t have to be the one who ruined the resale value of my house by doing it. I basically contributed in the least possible way to what I thought was a dumb idea. And it was a bad idea, evidenced by the fact that after attaining a million likes, Cap’n Facebook never went through with it. His tune changed from give me a million likes to give me a million dollars. He’s still waiting on that last one, since as a society, we’ll cheer you on to stupidity, but not if we have to pay for it.

#RCMburns

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