Teacher’s note: Students, your mental teleresponse is due Friday, June 27, 2249.
In the year 2211 humanologists exploring the wreckage of the Walmart Towers of Manhattan (once used to manufacture plastic goods that people wanted!) uncovered an archeological treasure in the form of a silver hinged apparatus with a strange Apple insignia. The flat box was made of the same aluminum material once used to wrap fish, only less wrinkled. Was it for food? Or planting seeds? Or throwing at animals? No! The device did nothing useful for survival. But our scientific team was able to connect it to a solarelectropulse and — there! — a glowing screen appeared.
Behold! A Facebook logo!
Our scientists has found a digital record of the legendary Inter Net!
The Inter Net until that point had been a fairy tale, a dark fable used to frighten little children, similar to silly stories of carbon pollution or slave labor or the ogre Glenn Beck, except people in this case performed a mind-numbing exercise called online “surfing.” Until this discovery, humanologists were unsure if the ADHD disease that almost decimated our species had actually originated in metal boxes shipped from California. But that hinged aluminum fish-wrap material held the answer, because there — on the glowing screen — was Facebook!
Facebook, you see, was at one point the center of the Inter Net — a human throng virtualization system, empowered by silver-fish-foil Apple machines, that allowed the appearance of social behavior without anyone actually talking to anyone. We now call this behavior “lying” or “masturbation.” Historians had believed Facebook was similar to the Bible or Talmud fads, the recounting of stories that ritualized society’s hope for survival after death, but discovered upon the silver box’s “booting” that it contained an ever-flowing cascade of fictional real-time information from imaginary friends, parents, spouses and ex-girlfriends with large breasts.
Apparently this Facebook illusion had become a network insinuated deep into the bowels of the entire Inter Net, collecting data as users hit blue “Like” buttons unveiling their preferences for biased news, dancing cat videos, and pornography. (On the archived colored page of FoxNews, users could find all of these in the same location!) Researchers believe the Apple device had belonged to a marketing businesswoman who luckily documented the Facebook “Open Graph” on a blog, recounting its launch as an “application” enabler (clever software given away for free to lure consumers into sleep modes) and subsequent morphing into a vast database of consumer preferences used to create email, direct mail, television and telepathic prospect lists (See chapter on “Experian, Equifax and TransUnion: the Ironic Transition from Financial Transactions to Social Graph Unprivacy Laws”).
Facebook, students, became the nexus of all marketing information! It combined self-submitted profile data with Inter Net observations and mapped the connections between humans! It observed everyone and used that knowledge to help advertisers sell everything anywhere! (See chapter on “Terms of Service Rebellion War of 2013 and Robocalls of 2014”). And as we now know, Facebook’s launch of artificially intelligent avatars in 2019 who passed the Turing test while aiding unhappy divorced men release sexual tension led to the development of blow-up robotic companions who today keep us all warm and comfy.
Unfortunately the silver-fish-foil-wrapped Apple device froze after 47 seconds of evaluation and our scientists were unable to capture the entire history of Facebook’s world domination. The last blog post uploaded into the Telecloud recounted 7.37 billion users interfacing on mobile devices in 2023 while avoiding Google pay-per-click ads (See chapter on “Search Engine Demise: The Shift of Consumer Modality following Chatroulette”). We will never know what our ancestors really did with Farmville or their old girlfriends, or if they knew the prophet Charlene Li was right, that social media would become like polluted, acrid, unbreathable air. It is our good fortune that virtual social media congregations are now behind us and those radiation-emitting mobile phones have been banned like cigarettes. Thank goodness after the head mutations of the 2100s, we all still have our left ears.
Special credit study guide: What color was Mark Zucker Burg’s hair?
(A) Red
(B) Brown
(C) Silver-fish-foil-wrapped with Apple logo on back
Answer: (C).
—–
About Ben Kunz
Ben Kunz is director of strategic planning at Mediassociates, an advertising media planning firm. He has designed marketing campaigns for 3Com, the Centers for Disease Control, Cessna Aircraft, Gaylord Hotels, Navy Federal Credit Union, North American Savings Bank, PURE High Net Worth Insurance, Segway, SolarCity, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the United States Postal Service. Ben is also a columnist for BusinessWeek, where he covers the intersection of advertising and technology. You can read his mind at www.thoughtgadgets.com or on Twitter @benkunz.
