another homeless man who is walking in the opposite direction, walking towards where I am with a can of something, probably a beer. The first guy, in a surprisingly deft motion, kicks the other one's hand and knocks the can out of it. The can goes flying and they start shouting at each other but I can't hear what they're saying because of my headphones. I feel bad for giving the first one a cigarette if he was going to do something like that just a few seconds later, but I realize I know nothing of their relationship to one another. The second one is one I've seen wandering around the neighborhood for years; sometimes he frightens me with his bursts of anger but mostly he just makes me sad because I think he's just crazy and needs help. So they go further down the street, arguing, and I watch. Number two gives up and returns to his original path: towards me, and he's angry and shouting, shouting, shouting. I casually get a parked car between him and me as he approaches, as he passes, and then I watch him reach into a tree pit and fill his pocket with shiny obsidian stones. Then he turns back and heads to the site of the incident, where a third man has been standing the entire time with a colorful umbrella, under the awning of the Japanese restaurant. My song ends and I put it on again. And as unexpected as the first event, number two attacks the third guy, seemingly unprovoked, and I run over. The third guy is maybe homeless too, but he does have a single white headphone in his ear, which I would normally assume means he owns an ipod, but with street people it's impossible to tell sometimes. The third guy tries to protect himself with his umbrella and the second guy has such unbridled rage that I'm afraid to get between them, and again, unsure of what their relationship is. Number two chases number three up the street, back past me again, knocking over placards as number three desperately tries to get away. They get dangerously close to traffic and I think I should cal the police but I continue to watch, and by this time, a number of other people are watching as well as the shouting is impossible to miss. Eventually number three gets away by crossing the street and the second guy starts heading back towards where this all began. I head back into Peet's, to my safe window seat, and watch as he stops at the tree in front of me, and empties his pockets, dropping the stones back into a tree pit, oblivious to the fact that he is returning them to the wrong tree, and then he passes me, passes by my window. He is nearly toothless and his dirty blond hair is slicked down by the rain, and he looks so sad, so lost, so sad.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Thanksgiving: Prelude
It's a gray and rainy day, typical for this time of year, and I've been at Peet's for a few hours, doing a bit of writing and a bit of work. I think it's time to go home soon but I go outside for a cigarette, with my hat on to protect me from the cold drizzle, my headphones replaying the same song I've listened to repeatedly for every smoke break I've taken. A homeless man stops and asks me for a cigarette, and I offer him the last of my pack, something I would not have done a decade ago, but I have another pack with me so it's not a hardship. A few doors away he encounters 
another homeless man who is walking in the opposite direction, walking towards where I am with a can of something, probably a beer. The first guy, in a surprisingly deft motion, kicks the other one's hand and knocks the can out of it. The can goes flying and they start shouting at each other but I can't hear what they're saying because of my headphones. I feel bad for giving the first one a cigarette if he was going to do something like that just a few seconds later, but I realize I know nothing of their relationship to one another. The second one is one I've seen wandering around the neighborhood for years; sometimes he frightens me with his bursts of anger but mostly he just makes me sad because I think he's just crazy and needs help. So they go further down the street, arguing, and I watch. Number two gives up and returns to his original path: towards me, and he's angry and shouting, shouting, shouting. I casually get a parked car between him and me as he approaches, as he passes, and then I watch him reach into a tree pit and fill his pocket with shiny obsidian stones. Then he turns back and heads to the site of the incident, where a third man has been standing the entire time with a colorful umbrella, under the awning of the Japanese restaurant. My song ends and I put it on again. And as unexpected as the first event, number two attacks the third guy, seemingly unprovoked, and I run over. The third guy is maybe homeless too, but he does have a single white headphone in his ear, which I would normally assume means he owns an ipod, but with street people it's impossible to tell sometimes. The third guy tries to protect himself with his umbrella and the second guy has such unbridled rage that I'm afraid to get between them, and again, unsure of what their relationship is. Number two chases number three up the street, back past me again, knocking over placards as number three desperately tries to get away. They get dangerously close to traffic and I think I should cal the police but I continue to watch, and by this time, a number of other people are watching as well as the shouting is impossible to miss. Eventually number three gets away by crossing the street and the second guy starts heading back towards where this all began. I head back into Peet's, to my safe window seat, and watch as he stops at the tree in front of me, and empties his pockets, dropping the stones back into a tree pit, oblivious to the fact that he is returning them to the wrong tree, and then he passes me, passes by my window. He is nearly toothless and his dirty blond hair is slicked down by the rain, and he looks so sad, so lost, so sad.
another homeless man who is walking in the opposite direction, walking towards where I am with a can of something, probably a beer. The first guy, in a surprisingly deft motion, kicks the other one's hand and knocks the can out of it. The can goes flying and they start shouting at each other but I can't hear what they're saying because of my headphones. I feel bad for giving the first one a cigarette if he was going to do something like that just a few seconds later, but I realize I know nothing of their relationship to one another. The second one is one I've seen wandering around the neighborhood for years; sometimes he frightens me with his bursts of anger but mostly he just makes me sad because I think he's just crazy and needs help. So they go further down the street, arguing, and I watch. Number two gives up and returns to his original path: towards me, and he's angry and shouting, shouting, shouting. I casually get a parked car between him and me as he approaches, as he passes, and then I watch him reach into a tree pit and fill his pocket with shiny obsidian stones. Then he turns back and heads to the site of the incident, where a third man has been standing the entire time with a colorful umbrella, under the awning of the Japanese restaurant. My song ends and I put it on again. And as unexpected as the first event, number two attacks the third guy, seemingly unprovoked, and I run over. The third guy is maybe homeless too, but he does have a single white headphone in his ear, which I would normally assume means he owns an ipod, but with street people it's impossible to tell sometimes. The third guy tries to protect himself with his umbrella and the second guy has such unbridled rage that I'm afraid to get between them, and again, unsure of what their relationship is. Number two chases number three up the street, back past me again, knocking over placards as number three desperately tries to get away. They get dangerously close to traffic and I think I should cal the police but I continue to watch, and by this time, a number of other people are watching as well as the shouting is impossible to miss. Eventually number three gets away by crossing the street and the second guy starts heading back towards where this all began. I head back into Peet's, to my safe window seat, and watch as he stops at the tree in front of me, and empties his pockets, dropping the stones back into a tree pit, oblivious to the fact that he is returning them to the wrong tree, and then he passes me, passes by my window. He is nearly toothless and his dirty blond hair is slicked down by the rain, and he looks so sad, so lost, so sad.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Is Maude A Real Person?
The latest:
Hello --
I am trying to get my account reactivated. My email is ctr.xxx@gmail.com. I am attaching a scan of my driver's license and passport.
Over two week ago I tried reporting a fake profile, someone who was using a picture of my friend. A few days later I received an email that the account had been disabled, but it was my account that was disabled instead. I have emailed disabled@facebook.com four times and have never gotten a response. I eventually tried using the web form to report my problem and now I am being asked to verify my identity even though my identity was never in question. Please see below for both messages I've received when using the web form, the one that started this mess and the one I just received a few moments ago. Please also note that the profile that I originally attempted to have disabled due to it being fake has remained active this entire time. This has been going on for two weeks and I would just like my account to be re-instated.
Charlie Rogers
On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 4:13 PM, Facebook Support <privacy+nvn58jg@facebook.com> wrote:
Hi Charlie,
After reviewing the reported abuse, we have removed all offending content based on our Terms of Use.
If you need to report offensive material to Facebook in the future, please write to us at privacy@facebook.com with a link to the offensive material and a description of the problem. We will then review this material and take the appropriate action. Please be assured, these reports will be kept confidential.
Thanks for contacting Facebook,
Maude
User Operations
Facebook
-----Original Message to Facebook-----
From: Charlie Rogers (ctr.xxx@gmail.com)
To: info@facebook.com
Subject: Report a Fake Profile
User id: 678092890
Profile url: http://www.facebook.com/friends/?added&ref=tn#/profile.php?id=1073472816&v=info&viewas=678092890
Violator's name: Manos Funtu
Violator's network: none
Violator's email: funtulakiskapa@hotmail.com
Steps to reproduce the problem: This person is using a picture that is not his.
Hello --
I am trying to get my account reactivated. My email is ctr.xxx@gmail.com. I am attaching a scan of my driver's license and passport.
Over two week ago I tried reporting a fake profile, someone who was using a picture of my friend. A few days later I received an email that the account had been disabled, but it was my account that was disabled instead. I have emailed disabled@facebook.com four times and have never gotten a response. I eventually tried using the web form to report my problem and now I am being asked to verify my identity even though my identity was never in question. Please see below for both messages I've received when using the web form, the one that started this mess and the one I just received a few moments ago. Please also note that the profile that I originally attempted to have disabled due to it being fake has remained active this entire time. This has been going on for two weeks and I would just like my account to be re-instated.
Charlie Rogers
- Show quoted text -
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 1:46 PM, Facebook Support <privacy+nvn58jg@facebook.com> wrote:
Hi Charlie,
Thanks for providing this information. At this time, we cannot verify the ownership of the account. Please send a scanned image of a government issued ID (e.g. driver's license) to idrequests@facebook.com in order to confirm your ownership of the account. Please black out any personal information that is not needed to verify your identity (e.g. social security number). Rest assured that we will permanently delete your ID from our servers once we have used it to verify the authenticity of your account.
Additionally, you should make sure to copy and paste all of our previous correspondence into your message when you reply. Once we have received this information, we will reevaluate the status of the account. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Thanks for contacting Facebook,
Maude
User Operations
-----Original Message to Facebook-----
From: ctr.xxx@gmail.com (ctr.xxx@gmail.com)
To: info@facebook.com (info@facebook.com)
Subject: LOGINPROBLEMS: Locked
User id: 0
Description of problem: My account has been disabled and I'm 100% certain it was a mistake but emails to disabled@facebook.com have gone unanswered for over a week now. What can I do?
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/2008102920 Firefox/3.0.4
Queue: LOGINPROBLEMS
-----End Original Message to Facebook-----
On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 4:13 PM, Facebook Support <privacy+nvn58jg@facebook.com> wrote:
Hi Charlie,
After reviewing the reported abuse, we have removed all offending content based on our Terms of Use.
If you need to report offensive material to Facebook in the future, please write to us at privacy@facebook.com with a link to the offensive material and a description of the problem. We will then review this material and take the appropriate action. Please be assured, these reports will be kept confidential.
Thanks for contacting Facebook,
Maude
User Operations
-----Original Message to Facebook-----
To: info@facebook.com
Subject: Report a Fake Profile
User id: 678092890
Profile url: http://www.facebook.com/
Violator's name: Manos Funtu
Violator's network: none
Violator's email: funtulakiskapa@hotmail.com
Steps to reproduce the problem: This person is using a picture that is not his.
I Am Still Gone
"Now I'm left like a flag atop a moon.
Precious one, you have abandoned me."
-VAST, "Thrown Away"
I've hesitated to admit how much the Facebook saga has bothered me. For those of you who skipped my last post, I'll offer a quick recap: after getting lured in by the charms of the popular social networking website, I was shut out. I had tried reporting a fake profile and found my own profile disabled, while the fake one persists.
I was leaning on Facebook more than I wanted to admit. I didn't need to remember my friend's birthdays because the website was doing it for me. I didn't need to copy email addresses into my email contact list because they were, in theory, always available just a few clicks away on Facebook, and the same is true, to a lesser degree, of phone numbers. More importantly, I felt like I was tied in to something. In theory, I spend all day at home alone while I'm looking for work, except when I go out to a coffee shop where I do the same things I can do at home, but in public, while still mostly alone. It's lonely. Facebook allowed me to share the minute details of my life with a wide group of people, some actual friends, some acquaintances, some who I've had no interaction with outside the website, and it allowed those same people to share the details of their lives with me. Through the comments people would make and the pictures they would post, I was beginning to develop a sense of the web of interconnections between the people in my periphery, and was starting to feel knotted into that web. I was making new friends. I was reconnecting with friends or classmates that I'd lost over the years. I even made a contact for a possible job.
I suppose I knew that I was spending too much time there, investing too much energy, but I justified it by listing all the above reasons, and justified it by telling myself it was at worst harmless and at best actually useful as a networking tool, and all right as long as I still got my work done and still got myself out of the house every day. Yes, I wasted time on there, but I didn't see what the damage could be. Not, that is, until two weeks ago, when my profile became disabled.
On the first day, I thought, well, it's just a mistake and they'll correct it quickly.
On the second day, I emailed them again, maybe a bit impatient, maybe already revealing myself to be addict needing his fix but not quite willing to admit it to myself.
On the third day, I thought, hopefully today.
On the fourth day, a Saturday, I knew nothing was going to move in my favor and I tried to keep calm about it. That same day I missed a major social event in town because I'd already started relying on Facebook as a way to make those sort of plans. It was the sort of thing I would have attended with acquaintances if I'd known of any who were going, but without Facebook status updates to verify this, I ended up staying home.
On the sixth day, Monday, I thought, well, it took them a few days to process my initial request to delete someone so they must be overworked. Maybe today.
Over the course of the next few days, I started to lose hope. I started to feel like the "overworked" excuse wasn't cutting it any more and the only possibility is that they were blatantly ignoring my requests. I felt powerless and if I can say this without sounding absurd, a bit violated.
Friends suggested ways I could possibly bring some attention to my situation, but nothing worked, nothing has worked and I'm not going to pretend I don't want to get back on. I want to get back on. I miss it terribly and I don't even care what their excuse will be for this mistreatment of me, I know I will forgive them for it. It's my nature to forgive, always. But I can't forgive them until I know what happened and I can't forgive them until it's made right.
On the eleventh day, I accidentally discovered something unusual. I have a Facebook application for my phone, and I clicked it, expecting to get rejected as my web browser had been doing so consistently, but no, it let me in. At first I got excited and thought my account had been reinstated as quietly as it had been shut down, but no, the browser still denied me. The good news was that my account remains intact, and once I am back on I will not need to rebuild my network or re-upload my photos. The less good news was how this limited access makes me feel. I thought it would be nice to be able to get back on, even in such a limited fashion, but it isn't. I can see what my friends are doing, can see the fun they're having without me, but I can't participate and can't use the site to contact any of them. I'm a ghost; I can look but can't interact. One of my greatest fears is to be made invisible, to be marginalized into the insignificant, and Facebook has inadvertently accomplished bringing this dread into reality.
It's the thirteenth day today. I have emailed every address I could find for them, and used their web form as well, for a total of five attempts at contact, and to date, I have not received even a whispered form letter of a response, not a word.
So why have I revisited this topic which I covered relatively successfully just a few days ago in a previous post? I was speaking with my friend Kevin tonight, and Kevin is responsible for getting me on to Facebook in the first place, and Kevin is angry that this is happening and doing everything he can to help me back on, but more importantly, Kevin got me thinking about this in a way that I hadn't before. The issue here is not with my dependence on "this year's model" of a social networking website. The issue is how this mishap has made me feel, and Facebook's utter lack of a response, and how this is a tiny, shadowboxed version of a much larger problem.
As a society we rely increasingly on technology to serve basic functions for us. There was a time when the phrase "social networking" could only possibly mean getting out of one's house and meeting other people in the flesh. There was a time when all telephones were bound by wires and a time before that with no telephones at all. The companies that provide us these technologies do so increasingly without faces, and sometimes even without voice, like Facebook, which lists no phone number, and for a person like me, only one email address as a point of contact. I have no way of knowing if my emails are even being received by a human being, if my pleas are being heard at all, or if there is any incentive at all for the Facebook employee who sees my messages to bother to help me out. A company that pushes out a paradigm shifting technology needs to also take the responsibility to support the users of that technology responsibly, and it shouldn't matter whether the service is free or the company is turning a profit. If they want to sell me on their website and how fun it is, and let it change the way I conduct my life, they had better be prepared to deal with me when they accidentally yank the rug out from under me, and apparently, they are not. It is increasingly common with web 2.0 companies to fail to provide an appropriate mechanism for their customers to interact with them, human being to human being, and this is a disturbing trend. How many science fiction stories have been written about future worlds where all people are networked into a grid of some sort, and the terrifying consequences when one person is, through whatever means, dropped from the grid? That is what is happening now, and in a smaller way, that is what is happening to me.
It makes me sad and it makes me angry. Who do they think they are, to ignore me like this? I want to scream out that I am still here, but they will not listen, and they hold all the power in the world they've created, and i can scream all I want, but now I am just a ghost, just a shadow.
Precious one, you have abandoned me."
-VAST, "Thrown Away"
I've hesitated to admit how much the Facebook saga has bothered me. For those of you who skipped my last post, I'll offer a quick recap: after getting lured in by the charms of the popular social networking website, I was shut out. I had tried reporting a fake profile and found my own profile disabled, while the fake one persists.
I was leaning on Facebook more than I wanted to admit. I didn't need to remember my friend's birthdays because the website was doing it for me. I didn't need to copy email addresses into my email contact list because they were, in theory, always available just a few clicks away on Facebook, and the same is true, to a lesser degree, of phone numbers. More importantly, I felt like I was tied in to something. In theory, I spend all day at home alone while I'm looking for work, except when I go out to a coffee shop where I do the same things I can do at home, but in public, while still mostly alone. It's lonely. Facebook allowed me to share the minute details of my life with a wide group of people, some actual friends, some acquaintances, some who I've had no interaction with outside the website, and it allowed those same people to share the details of their lives with me. Through the comments people would make and the pictures they would post, I was beginning to develop a sense of the web of interconnections between the people in my periphery, and was starting to feel knotted into that web. I was making new friends. I was reconnecting with friends or classmates that I'd lost over the years. I even made a contact for a possible job.
I suppose I knew that I was spending too much time there, investing too much energy, but I justified it by listing all the above reasons, and justified it by telling myself it was at worst harmless and at best actually useful as a networking tool, and all right as long as I still got my work done and still got myself out of the house every day. Yes, I wasted time on there, but I didn't see what the damage could be. Not, that is, until two weeks ago, when my profile became disabled.
On the first day, I thought, well, it's just a mistake and they'll correct it quickly.
On the second day, I emailed them again, maybe a bit impatient, maybe already revealing myself to be addict needing his fix but not quite willing to admit it to myself.
On the third day, I thought, hopefully today.
On the fourth day, a Saturday, I knew nothing was going to move in my favor and I tried to keep calm about it. That same day I missed a major social event in town because I'd already started relying on Facebook as a way to make those sort of plans. It was the sort of thing I would have attended with acquaintances if I'd known of any who were going, but without Facebook status updates to verify this, I ended up staying home.
On the sixth day, Monday, I thought, well, it took them a few days to process my initial request to delete someone so they must be overworked. Maybe today.
Over the course of the next few days, I started to lose hope. I started to feel like the "overworked" excuse wasn't cutting it any more and the only possibility is that they were blatantly ignoring my requests. I felt powerless and if I can say this without sounding absurd, a bit violated.
Friends suggested ways I could possibly bring some attention to my situation, but nothing worked, nothing has worked and I'm not going to pretend I don't want to get back on. I want to get back on. I miss it terribly and I don't even care what their excuse will be for this mistreatment of me, I know I will forgive them for it. It's my nature to forgive, always. But I can't forgive them until I know what happened and I can't forgive them until it's made right.
On the eleventh day, I accidentally discovered something unusual. I have a Facebook application for my phone, and I clicked it, expecting to get rejected as my web browser had been doing so consistently, but no, it let me in. At first I got excited and thought my account had been reinstated as quietly as it had been shut down, but no, the browser still denied me. The good news was that my account remains intact, and once I am back on I will not need to rebuild my network or re-upload my photos. The less good news was how this limited access makes me feel. I thought it would be nice to be able to get back on, even in such a limited fashion, but it isn't. I can see what my friends are doing, can see the fun they're having without me, but I can't participate and can't use the site to contact any of them. I'm a ghost; I can look but can't interact. One of my greatest fears is to be made invisible, to be marginalized into the insignificant, and Facebook has inadvertently accomplished bringing this dread into reality.
It's the thirteenth day today. I have emailed every address I could find for them, and used their web form as well, for a total of five attempts at contact, and to date, I have not received even a whispered form letter of a response, not a word.
So why have I revisited this topic which I covered relatively successfully just a few days ago in a previous post? I was speaking with my friend Kevin tonight, and Kevin is responsible for getting me on to Facebook in the first place, and Kevin is angry that this is happening and doing everything he can to help me back on, but more importantly, Kevin got me thinking about this in a way that I hadn't before. The issue here is not with my dependence on "this year's model" of a social networking website. The issue is how this mishap has made me feel, and Facebook's utter lack of a response, and how this is a tiny, shadowboxed version of a much larger problem.
As a society we rely increasingly on technology to serve basic functions for us. There was a time when the phrase "social networking" could only possibly mean getting out of one's house and meeting other people in the flesh. There was a time when all telephones were bound by wires and a time before that with no telephones at all. The companies that provide us these technologies do so increasingly without faces, and sometimes even without voice, like Facebook, which lists no phone number, and for a person like me, only one email address as a point of contact. I have no way of knowing if my emails are even being received by a human being, if my pleas are being heard at all, or if there is any incentive at all for the Facebook employee who sees my messages to bother to help me out. A company that pushes out a paradigm shifting technology needs to also take the responsibility to support the users of that technology responsibly, and it shouldn't matter whether the service is free or the company is turning a profit. If they want to sell me on their website and how fun it is, and let it change the way I conduct my life, they had better be prepared to deal with me when they accidentally yank the rug out from under me, and apparently, they are not. It is increasingly common with web 2.0 companies to fail to provide an appropriate mechanism for their customers to interact with them, human being to human being, and this is a disturbing trend. How many science fiction stories have been written about future worlds where all people are networked into a grid of some sort, and the terrifying consequences when one person is, through whatever means, dropped from the grid? That is what is happening now, and in a smaller way, that is what is happening to me.
It makes me sad and it makes me angry. Who do they think they are, to ignore me like this? I want to scream out that I am still here, but they will not listen, and they hold all the power in the world they've created, and i can scream all I want, but now I am just a ghost, just a shadow.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Social Not Working
I've gone, against my will, a week without Facebook.
A few months ago, a friend of mine invited me to sign up at Facebook. (Hi Kevin. This is all your fault.) I was reluctant, and understandably so, as I already have major time management problems, but I knew that Marcio had signed up a month or so earlier, and so, as is my way, I dipped a toe in, then two, and then leapt headlong. At first it seemed silly, something I would probably get over quickly as I had grown bored of both Friendster and myspace within minutes of joining, and it seemed like just another alienating example of "what the kids are doing today." But it got me in ways that I did not expect. First, and this is social networking 101, I was amused by the interconnections between otherwise unrelated people in my periphery, and fascinated to see how different people manifest themselves in such an environment. Mostly, at first, it helped me feel connected to the outside world when I sit here in my room for hours on end with no other social interaction. But then other themes began to surface. People from my high school found me, and I realized that I had never come out to a single one of them and had run away, with nothing resembling closure. I had never tried to integrate my current self with the person I was back then, and it was liberating to finally begin that process. I was able to get moral support from strangers on my painful quest for a job, and then managed to score an interview for a job through a Facebook contact. I was getting something out of it, and yes, sometimes I would drift around on the site aimlessly for long stretches of time when I could be doing more productive things, but there were other times that that hint of a social network made me feel connected to something and actually inspired me to get things done.
So what happened?
There's that cynical cliche, "No good deed goes unpunished." It's not something I believe and in fact, I tend to be wary of the sort of people who would spout this line and actually mean it. But in this case, an attempt at a good deed has cost me.
I became aware of a small but not insignificant number of people on Facebook using fake pictures, masquerading as other people. It's happened to me, that my picture's been misappropriated, and so when I see it happening to other people that I know (or sometimes people I don't know) I tend to take action. I found a profile a few weeks ago by a person going by the name of Manos Funtu, but the picture he was using was of a person that I know in Philadelphia, and that person's name is not Manos, or anything even like Manos. I added him as a facebook-friend to see his other details, to verify that it wasn't actually my acquaintance using an odd pseudonym for some reason. But once I got into the profile it was pretty apparent this guy was just stealing the pic, and maybe I wouldn't have done anything about it, but I was disturbed by all the compliments publicly posted on Funtu's profile, compliments founded on a lie. So I found a form on Facebook's help page and reported the profile as fake, offering to provide verification if necessary.
Nothing happened for days. Then on Wednesday, November 12, I received this email:
Hi Charlie,
After reviewing the reported abuse, we have removed all offending content based on our Terms of Use.
If you need to report offensive material to Facebook in the future, please write to us at privacy@facebook.com with a link to the offensive material and a description of the problem. We will then review this material and take the appropriate action. Please be assured, these reports will be kept confidential.
Thanks for contacting Facebook,
Maude
User Operations
Facebook
I went to sign in to verify that his profile was gone and received this message: "Your account has been disabled by an administrator. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here." I reviewed Facebook's terms of usage and found no rule that I as in violation of, so I emailed them politely and pointed out that there must be a mistake. Twenty-four hours later, I emailed again. This morning, I emailed a third time and I am still unable to sign in.
This morning I received yet another message from a friend (hi Kevin) asking me what happened to my Facebook profile. For some reason it set me off, not angry at my friend obviously but angry, again, at the people at Facebook. I'm sure it was an honest mistake. Maybe Maude had had a long day, maybe she lost concentration for a minute and accidentally disabled the wrong profile, and as someone who can be a bit sloppy at times, I certainly sympathize. But their failure to so much as reply to any of my emails is driving me nuts. Even if they had found me in valid violation of some rule, it would be nice to know that, but I'm left wondering if it was actually something I brought on myself, and wondering if I'll ever be allowed back on, and wondering, at this point, if I even want to participate any more. I feel toyed with.
A few months ago, a friend of mine invited me to sign up at Facebook. (Hi Kevin. This is all your fault.) I was reluctant, and understandably so, as I already have major time management problems, but I knew that Marcio had signed up a month or so earlier, and so, as is my way, I dipped a toe in, then two, and then leapt headlong. At first it seemed silly, something I would probably get over quickly as I had grown bored of both Friendster and myspace within minutes of joining, and it seemed like just another alienating example of "what the kids are doing today." But it got me in ways that I did not expect. First, and this is social networking 101, I was amused by the interconnections between otherwise unrelated people in my periphery, and fascinated to see how different people manifest themselves in such an environment. Mostly, at first, it helped me feel connected to the outside world when I sit here in my room for hours on end with no other social interaction. But then other themes began to surface. People from my high school found me, and I realized that I had never come out to a single one of them and had run away, with nothing resembling closure. I had never tried to integrate my current self with the person I was back then, and it was liberating to finally begin that process. I was able to get moral support from strangers on my painful quest for a job, and then managed to score an interview for a job through a Facebook contact. I was getting something out of it, and yes, sometimes I would drift around on the site aimlessly for long stretches of time when I could be doing more productive things, but there were other times that that hint of a social network made me feel connected to something and actually inspired me to get things done.
So what happened?
There's that cynical cliche, "No good deed goes unpunished." It's not something I believe and in fact, I tend to be wary of the sort of people who would spout this line and actually mean it. But in this case, an attempt at a good deed has cost me.
I became aware of a small but not insignificant number of people on Facebook using fake pictures, masquerading as other people. It's happened to me, that my picture's been misappropriated, and so when I see it happening to other people that I know (or sometimes people I don't know) I tend to take action. I found a profile a few weeks ago by a person going by the name of Manos Funtu, but the picture he was using was of a person that I know in Philadelphia, and that person's name is not Manos, or anything even like Manos. I added him as a facebook-friend to see his other details, to verify that it wasn't actually my acquaintance using an odd pseudonym for some reason. But once I got into the profile it was pretty apparent this guy was just stealing the pic, and maybe I wouldn't have done anything about it, but I was disturbed by all the compliments publicly posted on Funtu's profile, compliments founded on a lie. So I found a form on Facebook's help page and reported the profile as fake, offering to provide verification if necessary.
Nothing happened for days. Then on Wednesday, November 12, I received this email:
Hi Charlie,
After reviewing the reported abuse, we have removed all offending content based on our Terms of Use.
If you need to report offensive material to Facebook in the future, please write to us at privacy@facebook.com with a link to the offensive material and a description of the problem. We will then review this material and take the appropriate action. Please be assured, these reports will be kept confidential.
Thanks for contacting Facebook,
Maude
User Operations
I went to sign in to verify that his profile was gone and received this message: "Your account has been disabled by an administrator. If you have any questions or concerns, you can visit our FAQ page here." I reviewed Facebook's terms of usage and found no rule that I as in violation of, so I emailed them politely and pointed out that there must be a mistake. Twenty-four hours later, I emailed again. This morning, I emailed a third time and I am still unable to sign in.
This morning I received yet another message from a friend (hi Kevin) asking me what happened to my Facebook profile. For some reason it set me off, not angry at my friend obviously but angry, again, at the people at Facebook. I'm sure it was an honest mistake. Maybe Maude had had a long day, maybe she lost concentration for a minute and accidentally disabled the wrong profile, and as someone who can be a bit sloppy at times, I certainly sympathize. But their failure to so much as reply to any of my emails is driving me nuts. Even if they had found me in valid violation of some rule, it would be nice to know that, but I'm left wondering if it was actually something I brought on myself, and wondering if I'll ever be allowed back on, and wondering, at this point, if I even want to participate any more. I feel toyed with.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Protesting Protest
Tonight, I had finished eating dinner with my friend David in a restaurant in the Castro, and we were still there, talking, when we noticed a parade of "No on 8" protesters marching past the window down Castro Street, so we went outside to see what was going on. "Is it another protest?" David asked, as there had been a much larger protest at City Hall this morning, but as far as we knew, that was long over. "Oh, you haven't seen? They do this every day," we were informed by an employee of the restaurant who had also come outside for the commotion. "Oh, that's great," I thought to myself.
It's an interesting time we're living in. With the notable exceptions of a riot outside a bar in NYC in the late 60's, and some angry activism in the late 80s and early 90s related to the failure for anyone in any sort of power to address the AIDS epidemic, gay people have distinguished themselves with their disorganization and laziness when it comes to their own rights. Why seek real change when it's easier just to complain? Our failure to organize for our own rights has exposed the sham that is the gay "community," in that for being such a small minority, we're already splintered into so many subgroups that the word community is really a misnomer. Yearly we celebrate our very presence in a self-congratulatory and corporate sponsored manner, and most of us will devote more energy to what outfit we'll wear to a Pride parade than to considering why we have them in the first place, how far we've come or especially, how far we still have yet to go. It appears that Proposition 8 is changing this, ushering back an age of activism, and Prop 8 is historical in that there are not that many other examples that I can name where a minority group has had existing rights removed rather than just being proactively prevented from achieving those rights. And this anger, not just among gays but among clear-thinking people of all stripes, is fueling a bit of a backlash against the degree to which religious doctrine has been surreptitiously creeping into state policy, which I think is a fantastic thing. Who are these people to demand we put THEIR morals into our constitutions? Where did we get this idea that we are, or should be, a "Christian nation" when our country was, in fact, founded on the principle of the exact opposite, that our nation would not be defined by any one religious belief so we could offer a haven to believers of any faith. Maybe the egregious acts of the Mormons and Catholics and of course, the Evangelicals, will start to shift popular thinking in a new direction: hey, maybe churches are not all jesusy goodness and maybe we've been moving in the direction of intolerance and hatred at their demand. Maybe this isn't such a good thing.
So yeah, I'm all for the protests.
But David and I shortly discovered that the second wave of protesters, after marching down the street in this country most synonymous with "gay neighborhood," staged a sit-in in the middle of the intersection at 18th and Castro, which, for those who have never been here, is probably the gayest spot on earth. David and I looked at each other: why here? we asked.
There was a group of maybe fifty people sitting there, in the middle of the street, blocking traffic through, did you get this, the gayest neighborhood in the world. The crowd was mostly young, early to mid 20s, a pretty even distribution among the genders but predominantly white, and David kept commenting that they actually looked mostly straight. In the center of the protest was an overweight young man, who was certainly not straight, with a megaphone who would periodically get the crowd to chant some trite battle cry, ("What do we want?" "EQUALITY!" "When do we want it?" "NOW!") but I found him very hard to understand. I really want to support any nonviolent form of protest but I found myself becoming annoyed and angry. These people were so lazy, and maybe so afraid, that they're staging a sit-in in their own neighborhood and only harming the businesses that have supported us. Political activism as fashion statement.
It got worse. At some point their leader, or whatever he was, the guy with the megaphone, announced that some of the local businesses had asked if they could please move, if there could be a compromise because the businesses (many gay owned and almost all gay operated) were seeing a dramatic drop in customers as no one could get with a one block radius of the protest with their cars, so could the protestors move to the sidewalk maybe? It was put to a vote and the crowd, seeming insulted, chanted "NO" and then "HELL NO, WE WON'T GO" and at this point I was so disgusted I dragged David away.
Should I be proud of these people for protesting an issue I feel strongly about, when they do so at absolutely no harm to themselves, in a community where everyone already agrees with them, and at some cost to the businesses who keep our neighborhood going? Why didn't they just stage their sit-in at a popular bar or in Gold's gym? Hmmm.
I suppose if I was a different person I could have strode into that circle and grabbed the megaphone and told them all to go home and assemble tomorrow morning in front of the Evangelical or Mormon church of their choosing, or at the location of any of the dozens of businesses who are known to have donated to the cause to pass Prop 8. And I suppose my failure to do so makes me no better than them.
It's an interesting time we're living in. With the notable exceptions of a riot outside a bar in NYC in the late 60's, and some angry activism in the late 80s and early 90s related to the failure for anyone in any sort of power to address the AIDS epidemic, gay people have distinguished themselves with their disorganization and laziness when it comes to their own rights. Why seek real change when it's easier just to complain? Our failure to organize for our own rights has exposed the sham that is the gay "community," in that for being such a small minority, we're already splintered into so many subgroups that the word community is really a misnomer. Yearly we celebrate our very presence in a self-congratulatory and corporate sponsored manner, and most of us will devote more energy to what outfit we'll wear to a Pride parade than to considering why we have them in the first place, how far we've come or especially, how far we still have yet to go. It appears that Proposition 8 is changing this, ushering back an age of activism, and Prop 8 is historical in that there are not that many other examples that I can name where a minority group has had existing rights removed rather than just being proactively prevented from achieving those rights. And this anger, not just among gays but among clear-thinking people of all stripes, is fueling a bit of a backlash against the degree to which religious doctrine has been surreptitiously creeping into state policy, which I think is a fantastic thing. Who are these people to demand we put THEIR morals into our constitutions? Where did we get this idea that we are, or should be, a "Christian nation" when our country was, in fact, founded on the principle of the exact opposite, that our nation would not be defined by any one religious belief so we could offer a haven to believers of any faith. Maybe the egregious acts of the Mormons and Catholics and of course, the Evangelicals, will start to shift popular thinking in a new direction: hey, maybe churches are not all jesusy goodness and maybe we've been moving in the direction of intolerance and hatred at their demand. Maybe this isn't such a good thing.
So yeah, I'm all for the protests.
But David and I shortly discovered that the second wave of protesters, after marching down the street in this country most synonymous with "gay neighborhood," staged a sit-in in the middle of the intersection at 18th and Castro, which, for those who have never been here, is probably the gayest spot on earth. David and I looked at each other: why here? we asked.
There was a group of maybe fifty people sitting there, in the middle of the street, blocking traffic through, did you get this, the gayest neighborhood in the world. The crowd was mostly young, early to mid 20s, a pretty even distribution among the genders but predominantly white, and David kept commenting that they actually looked mostly straight. In the center of the protest was an overweight young man, who was certainly not straight, with a megaphone who would periodically get the crowd to chant some trite battle cry, ("What do we want?" "EQUALITY!" "When do we want it?" "NOW!") but I found him very hard to understand. I really want to support any nonviolent form of protest but I found myself becoming annoyed and angry. These people were so lazy, and maybe so afraid, that they're staging a sit-in in their own neighborhood and only harming the businesses that have supported us. Political activism as fashion statement.
It got worse. At some point their leader, or whatever he was, the guy with the megaphone, announced that some of the local businesses had asked if they could please move, if there could be a compromise because the businesses (many gay owned and almost all gay operated) were seeing a dramatic drop in customers as no one could get with a one block radius of the protest with their cars, so could the protestors move to the sidewalk maybe? It was put to a vote and the crowd, seeming insulted, chanted "NO" and then "HELL NO, WE WON'T GO" and at this point I was so disgusted I dragged David away.
Should I be proud of these people for protesting an issue I feel strongly about, when they do so at absolutely no harm to themselves, in a community where everyone already agrees with them, and at some cost to the businesses who keep our neighborhood going? Why didn't they just stage their sit-in at a popular bar or in Gold's gym? Hmmm.
I suppose if I was a different person I could have strode into that circle and grabbed the megaphone and told them all to go home and assemble tomorrow morning in front of the Evangelical or Mormon church of their choosing, or at the location of any of the dozens of businesses who are known to have donated to the cause to pass Prop 8. And I suppose my failure to do so makes me no better than them.
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