New World Orter.

What's not to Like?

Ort: a scrap or remainder of food from a meal.

Seven years ago I predicted that in five years we would all look back on our Facebook days and ruefully shake our heads in disbelief that we so naively opened our private lives to billions of strangers.  I was dead wrong. It appears I fell into the trap of underestimating the stupidity of people in large groups. Like the classic rat tests at the University of Chicago in the early 1900's, Facebook doles out just enough random pleasure nuggets to keep us madly scrolling, our jaws slack, until dinner burns and our bosses hire someone else (who they found on LinkedIn).  My wife defended Facebook using the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge example (but admitted that The Dress was a low point).  I have yet to see good things come from flaunting our mindless access to water and ice (NPR reported that the beleaguered Syrian people were aghast at the waste, while they were straining rubble from their urine to make soup) by gleefully dumping tubs on the heads of pious do-gooders.  "No, No!" you cry - "It raised millions and increased awareness for Lou Gehrig's disease!" I can't argue with the millions, although it does make jerks like me want to hold off donating to the ALS Foundation until I see what they do with the treasure trove they're sitting on.  I would pause at the awareness, though; did Ice Bucket mania really furrow the brows of the tweeners gasping under the deluge, or was it simple mob-mentality; an infantile grasp at recognition - "It went VIRAL, dude!" - cloaked under a righteous cause?  Confronted with 1.4 billion Facebook competitors, sheeple will do anything to get noticed, and some of them even do - for about 2 seconds, until we scroll them up and away.  Facebook and its suckling advertisers are the real lottery winners here.  They loll at the table, gobbling up our offerings then belching, picking their teeth, and spitting us out like the orts we've become.  

Inspired by filmmaker Frank Capra, whose films, he said, "embodied the rebellious cry of the individual against being trampled into an ort by massiveness - mass production, mass thought, mass education, mass politics, mass wealth, mass conformity."