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We Can Be Friends — Just Not on Facebook

Early on in my social media experience, I was often paranoid about being unfriended on Facebook. I worried endlessly about what I did to offend.

I eventually stopped caring and even took delight when someone deleted me. In my mind, it meant I had successfully gotten on the nerves of someone who deserved it.

Amid political divisiveness that has turned social media into a sewer, my thinking about online friendships — especially on Facebook — has evolved. In the process, I’ve gone on an unfriending spree of my own.

Mood Music:

I often see people announcing that they’re trimming their friends lists as if those they delete are unworthy subjects, unfit to be in their kingdom. Yet I did that very thing last week:

Facebook post from Bill Brenner: One thing I’ve always valued about social media is the ability for people to have a healthy exchange of ideas and find common ground. It’s increasingly difficult to find that on Facebook. People share memes without checking to see if they are based on truth or misinformation. They talk past each other instead of to each other. Data points are distorted to fit a viewpoint. People talk down to other people and confuse the action as one of virtue. Those I speak of exist on the left and right sides of the political spectrum. I’ve begun deleting a lot of people from my friends list. I don’t have time to roll around in the dirt. Peace to you all.

Since then, the pace of my unfriending has picked up. Mostly, I’ve removed those who push conspiracy theories and see public health measures in a pandemic as an assault on liberty, which I don’t buy. I try to be the voice of reason, the guy seeking the middle ground. But when it comes to what I see as thick-headed individuals contributing to the disastrous COVID-19 surge playing out across the south and western U.S. — threatening the rest of us with further death, lockdowns and economic pain — I can’t play along any more. You can’t achieve common ground with people who aren’t willing to meet you halfway and maybe admit when they’re wrong. Since I’ve admitted when I’m wrong many times, it’s not too much to ask.

Right or wrong, that’s how I feel. I don’t think I’m better than anyone else. But by unfriending those who contribute to it, I preserve my sanity.

There’s a lesson here. Regarding those people I thought were being self-important by announcing that they were unfriending people? I was probably being overly judgmental. On further reflection, they were probably doing what they had to do and the announcement serves as a warning (or relief?) to the rest of their followers.

Some of the people I removed are long-time friends and family. If you’re among them, I haven’t necessarily lost affection for you. I just can’t keep looking at what you’re pushing. I know others have concluded the same about me, and I respect that.

If you believe the opposite of what I believe, you’re likely finding my posts to be too much. If that’s the case, for the sake of your own sanity, you should unfriend me.

Friendships can and should endure. Just not always on Facebook, where relationships are not always the same as in the offline world.

Cartoon image of a man in a suit and tie and a women in a dress passing walking down a street. The woman says: "My desire to be well-informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane." Image by David Sipress
Cartoon by David Sipress
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On Masks and Virtue Signaling

Want the economy to re-open? Hate government-mandated lockdowns? Think wearing a mask and avoiding crowds is another example of totalitarianism?

As I watch the polarized clash of feelings on social media, my observation is that people across the political divide generally agree on the first two items. The third is how we get the first and lift the second. Yet here we are, fighting about it.

Mood Music:

Amid the shouting are right-leaning friends hurling an insult they love using when they want to land a crusher: Speak up for something you believe in — like wearing a mask — and the response goes something like this: “Nice virtue signaling.”

On the surface, that phrase doesn’t seem so bad to me. You have a virtue and you are expressing it. People on the left and right do it. What’s wrong with that? When someone doesn’t practice what they preach, that’s different, but since we never completely know what someone is doing with their lives offline, where do we get off painting someone as a hypocrite, let alone an entire group of people?

You think people wearing masks are virtue signaling and telling everyone else what to do. You think wearing a mask somehow infringes on your freedoms and is another example of the state trying to control the masses.

You opine that governors and public health officials should not make mask-requirement decrees without action from state legislatures. Yet state and federal laws give governors and the president the right to do so in a health crisis. COVID-19 qualifies.

You think the government has been wrong and/or dishonest about the pandemic, painting it as more of an emergency than it truly is? There’s no evidence of that, but the government has been lying to us about many things for a long time, so I don’t blame you for thinking that.

The last few months are a perfect illustration of that, with a never-ending stream of conflicting, inconsistent guidance as we struggle to learn more about this new disease. When you can’t keep your guidance consistent, people aren’t going to believe you.

I agree about and appreciate the physical difficulty some have wearing masks. That’s where I think limiting your exposure to other people comes in. And for the record, if I’m outside taking my morning walk, I don’t wear a mask. I’m the only one out there. It’s a different story when you’re coming into close contact with other people.

But it baffles me that you complain about the tyranny of lockdowns and reject a remedy that can control infection rates and let us carry on with our lives.

We can’t stay locked down without economic devastation, a mental health crisis, or a later surge in deaths because doctors aren’t doing cancer screening and other early-detection treatments.

We’re also not going to get rid of COVID-19 anytime soon, so we have to learn to live with it in our midst.

Wearing a mask and avoiding packed crowds won’t drop transmissions to zero, but it helps significantly. The proof is in states that have been at various stages of re-opening for weeks and still have infection rates under control. My state is one of them. More of daily life has resumed, many people wear masks and our infection/death rates continue dropping.

Looking at the current surge of COVID-19 happening in the south and west, it’s clear that a big part of the problem is that people are ignoring guidelines, going to crowded bars and not putting on a mask.

Some say they shouldn’t have to wear one because they have antibodies and “can’t catch” COVID-19. Immunity isn’t certain, nor how long any immunity lasts. And wearing a mask isn’t about you: it’s about protecting others. If immunity wears off or you don’t become immune in the first place, not wearing a mask endangers others.

If you think these thoughts make me a leftist, virtue-signaling sheep, fine. I make choices for myself and do so after considering how my actions effect those around me.

Some of you keep telling me to “reject the narrative.”

I do.

Your narrative.

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Finding Reason in a World Gone Mad

I write this amid violent unrest across the nation. Angry masses are protesting police brutality after the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died after being pinned down by a White officer. That officer, Derek Chauvin, was charged with murder Friday.

With the internet full of pictures of a police station set aflame, overturned cars and rage-filled faces, I see some people on social media worrying that this is just another byproduct of a larger problem years in the making.

More than a couple people have suggested that this is a slowly unfolding civil war.

Mood Music:

The latest violence comes a few weeks after protests over the pandemic lockdowns, including a series of gatherings where armed protesters flooded the Michigan statehouse.

The civil war predictions usually show up in the comments of such threads. In more than one, I’ve voiced my own worry about it.

This thought is always in the back of my mind. In the early ’90s a lot of armed militias threatened violence. Some acted on it, the most tragic example being the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

But in the last decade, the political divide has become starker. The left and right fringes have become louder and angrier. We have a president who likes to fan the flames on Twitter. More than ever, it feels like America is imploding.

One such illustration is the Boogaloo movement, whose right-leaning anti-government members actively prepare for a second American Civil War. Another example is in the tactics of the left-leaning Antifa movement, founded as an anti-fascist entity but whose tactics have been branded as terrorism by some (Trump declared it a terrorist organization).

Are those fears justified? Time will tell, but let’s step back, take a breath and put things in perspective.

I don’t see the threat of civil warfare as out of the question. But I work in an industry whose job is to consider and plan for scenarios that seem crazy and improbable. Indeed, some crazy things have come to pass. Who would have thought, even four short months ago, that we’d be living in a world of pandemic-fueled lockdowns and an almost-complete freeze of the global economy?

One friend was warning of lockdowns and a depression-caliber economic calamity in late February and I thought he was being over the top. Yet here we are.

We should note a few things about what we see in the real world and online:

  • Everything is hyper-magnified online. When your Facebook and Twitter feeds are full of pictures of armed protesters and buildings on fire, it’s easy to feel like the world around you is truly coming apart.
  • The internet has made it easier for people at the extreme ends of the political spectrum to be heard. They are much more likely to spout off than people with more moderate views.
  • The internet has given us more access to data than we’ve ever had before, but that data never truly shows the full picture and it’s easy for us to cherry-pick the bits that fit into our preconceived views. There’s a term for that: confirmation bias.
  • We’ve always had violent civil unrest in this country. The aftermath of the MLK assassination in 1968 and the L.A. riots in 1992 are but two examples.

Other things worth remembering:

Despite all the vitriol online, there are still a lot of good people in the world who will drop everything to help those in distress, even those with whom they passionately disagree when it comes to politics. I see people who don’t agree on a lot of things stepping up to help each other, like one guy who donated to an online fundraiser to help someone he argues with all the time, after they lost their home in a fire.

Though social media makes it easy for people to say angry things, most of the people I’ve seen do it don’t act on it. It’s not crazy to suggest that the ability of some to blow off steam online has helped them stay nonviolent in reality. Of course, the same can be said for those who take their anger from social media to the real world.

What to do with all this information? I don’t know. I only know what I’ll do with it — try to continue doing the right things through my daily actions.

The world will continue to resemble a Dumpster fire for some time to come.

We can’t fix everything on our own, but there are things we can do each day to make the world a better place.

That’s an obvious thing to say. But in a world gone mad, the words need repeating.

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Conspiracy Theories Aren’t About Good vs. Evil

I recently wrote about how COVID-19 has sparked a deluge of conspiracy theories, most notably those at the center of the “Plandemic” documentary making the rounds. But as I think of my own OCD-driven behaviors over the years, I find that it’s not entirely fair to dismiss these people as cranks and villains.

Mood Music:

I came across a Vox article that drives home the point. In “I Was a Conspiracy Theorist, Too,” Dannagal G. Young, associate professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware, describes the crazed internet rabbit hole she traveled down as she desperately sought answers for why her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor. As she jumped from one potential answer to the next, she wrote:

Each time I landed on a possible culprit, my anger reenergized me. Instead of making me feel hopeless, it gave me a target and suggested there might be some action I could take. If it were from his work or from an old factory site, maybe I could file a lawsuit. Maybe I could launch an investigation or trigger some media exposé. If I could just find the right person or thing to blame, I could get some justice. Or vengeance. Or … maybe just a sense of control.

Take something like the COVID-19 pandemic and its lockdowns, with multitudes stuck at home looking for answers on how we got here and where it all might end, and you get radioactive yet fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. Lots of depressed, increasingly paranoid people with the internet at their fingertips. Lots of rabbit holes to explore.

There’s plenty of gasoline to stoke the flames. The government response has been full of contradictory advice. At the beginning of the pandemic you had the surgeon general tweeting about how masks won’t help. Then states started mandating that people wear them in public. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tells Congress one week that it would be a huge mistake to end lockdowns now, only to be quoted a week later saying continued lockdowns would cause “irreparable damage.”

Then there’s the fact that the virus began in China. Given the Chinese government’s sinister actions over the years, it’s easy to wonder if it either created Coronavirus in a lab or accidentally let it leak from a lab where it was being studied.

Isolate people, knock their normal lives off their axis, and this is what happens.

The resulting emotions remind me of what it was like when I was first diagnosed with OCD but hadn’t yet brought it under control. I was paranoid all the time, seeing conspiracy everywhere. In those cases, the paranoia usually manifested itself as the perpetual belief that people at work were conspiring against me, or, at the very least, were constantly talking about me behind my back.

In the pandemic, with my OCD under better control, I’m not given to conspiracy theories. Not that my management of the disorder has been perfect. The compulsive actions that go with it have continuously surfaced, and I’ve had to play whack-a-mole with them. Compulsiveness makes you do a lot of stupid things, and I’ve certainly questioned my sanity and self-control in these last months.

The world is full of fear and uncertainty right now. People want answers and have gotten mixed messages. Economic uncertainty, health concerns, lack of contact with friends and loved ones — all ingredients for conspiracy theories. It’s not a matter of good versus evil or even smart versus stupid. It’s simply what happens in a global environment like this.

We’re all in varying degrees of pain and our collective sanity is fragile. We need to do better looking out for one another.

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Less Talk, More Action

People continue to share opinions as scientific fact, shouting down those who question them. Liberal Democrats do it, so do conservative Republicans. Libertarians do it, as do socialists. As I said in my last post: Yelling at each other and pushing conspiracies won’t end COVID-19 any sooner.

Mood Music:

We need to figure out how to re-open society while continuing to protect as many lives as possible. The simplest solution is mass testing and contact tracing. But the nation’s testing capability is horrendously broken. So what can we do?

  • Contact tracing. This will help us identify more of those who are sick and create an environment where the healthy get out of the house and conduct the business of life while the sick and vulnerable remain sheltered. It will require strong measures to protect privacy. We also need to demand measures to curb the runaway increase in government power that comes with mass surveillance.
  • Varied levels of continued social distancing. In cities where infection rates surge, people will have to do more social distancing and sheltering in place. When cases grow somewhere, targeted lockdowns will be necessary. In areas where cases are low, restrictions can be eased. States will have different dances between opening places back up, closing them again as needed, and eventually opening again. When we return to the offices, we’ll be wearing masks. On it goes.

When I was younger, I thought the ability to opine meant I was smart. Through time and experience, I’ve learned that talk is cheap. Opinions don’t mean action.

Since the start of the pandemic, I’m done my share of talking. Now I’m thinking harder about how I can take action to help. Here’s what I have so far:

  • Doubling down within my profession. I’ll use my skills in research-gathering and writing to help information security practitioners keep their organizations’ defenses strong amid all the disruptions of the pandemic. This is a no-brainer. I’ve already been doing it. But I can always work on ways to do it better.
  • Using this blog. Not to be an armchair pundit, but to share information readers can use to take constructive action and to try and be a voice of reason. There’s a lot of fear, anxiety and depression, and someone must provide perspective. I’m not perfect at that. Far from it. But I’ve had some luck there and will continue to do my best.
  • Sharing a balanced perspective on social media. With so much disinformation circulating on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, I’ll continue to share articles I find useful and distill the takeaways to help people make sense of what’s happening.
  • Helping provide resources to my community. Along with my family, I’ll continue to do my part to ensure basic needs are met. Stepping up contributions to our parish food pantry is the biggest example right now.

A few things I’m considering:

  • Volunteering some of my time as a contact tracer. Though in my state, this is a paid position, so I’d want to leave those opportunities for folks who are unemployed.
  • Delivering groceries to those who can’t get out.
  • Volunteering more directly at the food pantry.
  • Getting involved in efforts to acquire and distribute masks, gloves and other safety gear for both hospital workers and people who don’t have the luxury of staying home.

By sharing this, I hope to inspire more of you to stop shouting, opinion-flinging and arm flailing. And I welcome your ideas as to how else I can help.

If we sit here doing nothing, our words will mean nothing.

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“Plandemic” and the Loss of Perspective

We’ve reached the toughest part of this lockdown yet. Anger and anxiety are so high that some of us no longer trust our friends and see conspiracy around every corner.

Our discourse is like a van full of clowns swerving all over the road, picking up speed and running people down along the way. There’s a sudden, steep decline in the kindness I recently wrote about. Everyone yells. Nobody listens.

Mood Music:

Conspiracy theories have gotten wilder, including the “Plandemic” video that keeps appearing, getting pulled down by social media sites, then re-appearing again.

The 26-minute “Plandemic Movie” is set up as an excerpt/preview of a larger documentary to come. It’s thesis is that COVID-19 was created so Big Pharma could rake in big profits from vaccines. It also claims sheltering in place breaks down our immune systems and masks can make people sicker. 

A couple people I respect peddled the video on their Facebook pages yesterday in what amounted to a trolling exercise. Other friends who believe the lockdowns are necessary responded with anger and name-calling. The comment threads on those continue to grow longer and more nonsensical.

This loss of perspective was inevitable. No matter how comfortable we are in our homes, several weeks of staying inside with no end in sight is going to turn us into crazed cats in cages.

I’m feeling it, too. The Facebook name-calling I mentioned above? I can’t remember for sure, but I suspect I’m guilty of contributing to some of it.

That’s the other thing with life these days: You can’t remember things you did from one day to the next, even when you’re sober and taking care of yourself.

I have no answers, but I know this: Yelling at each other and pushing conspiracies won’t get us out of our cages any sooner.

I promise to keep reminding myself that we’re all human and that kindness is crucial in these difficult days.

Hopefully, some of you will do the same.

self hatred II by ~xiaoD

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To the Self-Righteous People Who Need a Pat on the Back

Firestorm in the shape of a fist and the middle finger

I’ve mentioned before that kids today are addicted to accolades, that being told how awesome they are has become more important than actually achieving anything. It’s time to be fair to the kids and admit it’s not just them.

We adults are just as bad — maybe even worse.

Mood music:

Armed with Facebook and Twitter accounts, we adults have the power to communicate like no other time in the past. And a lot of us use them to make big, self-righteous declarations without any supporting facts and with an acute aversion to being disagreed with. Praise has become a currency craved as badly as money.

I’ll admit my own sins. I’ve gone through periods where my head has grown three sizes too large because people have told me something I wrote was awesome. I’ve had a fair share of criticism come my way, and I haven’t always taken it like a man. And self-righteousness? I’m sure if someone wanted to do an inventory of past blog posts, they’d find something fitting the criteria with my name on it.

I’ve tried hard to break myself of that in the last couple years. It’s one of the reasons I don’t post as much as I used to. The realities of life have brought me crashing to earth, too. Starting a new job and continuing to manage my father’s unfinished business has changed my priorities. When you have thousands of dollars of legal bills and six-figure building upgrade costs to worry about, your number of Twitter followers and search for praise becomes more trivial.

Delivering on work responsibilities has become more important than getting attention for a Facebook post.

So when I see someone making big statements online and having a tantrum when someone offers an alternative point of view, it strikes me as a dumb waste of time. The issues people get their undergarments in a twist over are as big as the sky: gay rights, gun-owner rights, presidential politics and a thousand other things. If you have an opinion on any of these and you slap someone down because they disagreed with you instead of patting you on the back, you might be part of the problem.

Just try to remember a few things:

  • Our critics make us smarter if we’re willing to listen to them.
  • The realities of the world are never as clear cut as we like to believe.
  • We can get heaping portions of praise online and feel good about it, but in 100 years the legacy we leave behind will be what people remember, not who thought we were awesome on Twitter in 2016.
  • Compassion and fairness travel a two-way street and it only takes one stubborn jerk to cause a traffic jam.

I know I’m not striking the perfect balance all the time, and if you disagree with anything I’ve said here, be as brutal as you like.

I might not see your criticism, though. I’m busy having a life.

Flames in the shape of a hand giving the middle finger

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Living in the Precious Present (If You Can Find It)

One of the basic traits of someone with OCD is an inability to live in the moment. Learning to do so is one of my big projects at the moment.

 

I’m better at living in the precious present than I used to be. I can remember being a kid, always daydreaming about the future: what I’d look like and how cool my life would be if I were thinner, the clothes I would wear, the girls I would date and the music I would write.

As I sat in my basement pondering such greatness, I’d be binge eating, drinking and smoking and wasting the moment.

Wasting the moment will prevent the future dreams from coming true every time. And so it was with me for a long time. It’s ironic that I did that sort of thing, because I had a nasty fear of the future that was caused by a fear of current events. I was convinced the world wouldn’t make it past 1999. That being the case, I should have embraced the present.

For whatever reason, I didn’t.

Later on, I’d daydream about what life would be like if I got a better job than the one I had at the time. I would have been better off finding ways to make the job I had and myself better day to day.

Through intense therapy for OCD and a program to control the binge eating, I’m much more able to live in the moment.

But I still struggle to keep my head in the moment, especially lately. My wife once compared some of it to my inability to see food portions in the proper perspective. I have no concept of what too much food looks like, so I have to put everything on a scale.

When the OCD runs hot I get the same way about time. I lose perspective on how long something will take or what I should be doing with the moment. I’ll go on the tear around the house doing chores, for example, when more important things are right in front of me, like spending some time with the kids.

It’s a confusing mix and it may not make much sense to you. But it is something I’m working on.

There’s plenty of things to be hopeful of and worry about concerning the future. But in the end, we can only do so much about what’s going to happen.

Better to embrace the moment then, right?

I don’t know how I’ll perfect that one, if I ever do.

For now, I’ll just be grateful that I’m better at it than I used to be.

survival-425

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Dealing With People: A Business Survival Guide

From my perch in the information security industry, I’ve seen a lot of people come and go. The best rise to the top of their companies. The worst are crushed beneath the boots of others in what can be a high-stakes, high-pressure field.

Many fall in the middle: They have had soaring success and painful setbacks. Those who manage to bounce back do so because they have learned a thing or two about dealing with people.

I consider myself part of the last category. What follows is a survival guide of sorts. It is a collection of writings I’ve done here and elsewhere about the lessons I’ve learned. May it serve as a useful tool.

Chapter 1: Be a Good Listener to Be Listened To. To expect people to be good listeners for you, it’s important that you be a good listener, too.

Chapter 2: Share the Credit. There’s a protocol that must be followed in the world of security research. If someone is involved in an important bit of research, it’s important to spread around the credit — often. Few big finds are the work of one person alone. I’ve written about countless vulnerabilities as a journalist and in my current role as part of a corporate research team. Most of the time, it’s a team effort.

Chapter 3: Be Patient. Ambition can take us to the highest heights of our careers. But ambitious people often lack patience, and that’s a recipe for disaster.

Chapter 4: Avoid a Rock Star Mentality.There’s a severe rock-star mentality in infosec, and I once fell into the trap. Please learn from my mistakes.

Chapter 5: When Jaded, Shake Things Up or Get Out of the Way.  When you’ve been dealing with the same people for too long, it’s easy to lose passion. But there are ways to refresh. These are lessons I learned about making security conference attendance worthwhile again.

Chapter 6: Burnout Can Lead to Wisdom (If You Survive). I’ve devoted several posts to combating career burnout, particularly in the information security industry. But something recently occurred to me: Burnout can be a good thing–if you survive.

Chapter 7: Be Kind Without Being Pwned. Someone once told me that being kind to others is a great weapon against depression. Be good to others and you’ll feel better yourself. There’s truth to that. But I’ve also discovered that kindness must be delivered in blunt and unpleasant forms sometimes. Especially in the workplace.

Chapter 8: Be Careful How You Use Twitter. Twitter can be a wonderful place to exchange ideas. But sometimes it can be a place where we overreach and cause needless drama. Here’s an example of what not to do.

Chapter 9: Avoid Looking Small by Avoiding Public Squabbles. How being part of public drama can wreck one’s reputation.

Chapter 10: Always Admit When You’re Wrong. This is painfully difficult to do. Not doing so can make you untrustworthy. Doing so can make you the opposite in the minds of your peers.

Man uses an ear trumpet

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When Listening Is Better Than Giving Advice

Sometimes when I’m going through a rough patch or just having a ridiculously annoying day, I need to vent. To do so productively and thus feel better, I need a good listener around.

Unfortunately, people these days don’t want to listen. They have a big megaphone that is the Internet, and they can’t bear not to use it. So they take to social media and give advice.

Mood music:

In saying that, I realize two things:

  1. To expect people to be good listeners for you, it’s important that you be a good listener in return. I often fall short there.
  2. Once in a while, whether I like it or not, I need advice to work through problems, especially when I’m being an asshole.

Even to give good advice, though, you still have to be a good listener.

Some of my friends are going through a rough time and detail their pain on Facebook and Twitter. They’ve noted that they just want someone to listen to them and that they have no interest in advice. Sometimes they need the advice and should suck it up. But more often than not, the advice-giving friends are not being helpful. In some cases they make things worse.

I get a lot of advice that is painfully obvious. I’d relax more if I meditated and prayed (I already do both). I’d have more energy if I exercised more (duh). I’d fight less with family if I simply realized that family is all that matters. (When people shell out that gem, I can’t help but wonder what planet they’re from, since all families argue.)

There are usually reasons people don’t do the obviously beneficial stuff friends and family advocate when giving advice. Sometimes a person’s stress level is so bad that there’s no strength left for a workout or meditation. And if we’re talking about addicts, there’s the fact that addicts have a compulsion to do what’s bad for them even though they’re well aware of the potential consequences. But being listened to allows the sufferer to get things off their chest, helping them to fight another day.

It’s worth remembering that next time someone wants to cry on your shoulder.

Man uses an ear trumpet