No, I am not suggesting that you attempt to make friends with Mark Zuckerberg, the person whose image I have pasted in above. I assume you know who he is. If you don't, please click the link to his name; that will provide you with a quick introduction. Or, you can click here to get a little commentary by Arwa Mahdawi of The Guardian.
If you have read many of my blog postings (they have been coming out, daily, for the past fifteen years), you will know that I regularly repeat the following advice, which I take quite seriously: "Find Some Friends." That is a healthy approach to both our personal and to our political situation. If you haven't read Octavia Butler's book, The Parable Of The Sower, let me recommend it to you again.
My blog posting today is to direct you to a newspaper article that appeared in The Wall Street Journal on May 8, 2025. In that article, Mr. Zuckerberg suggests that your future friends should be "Creations of AI."
I am most definitely NOT suggesting that you follow Mr. Zuckerberg's advice, and have some computer program, under the control of a gigantic corporation, "find" your friends for you - or "create" them for you, this being a more accurate way to state what Zuckerberg is proposing.
"Making friends" is a good idea, but Zuckerberg wants to redefine what that means. He clearly wants his company, Meta (formerly "Facebook") to be in the business of provisioning us with a simulacrum of the flesh and blood friends I am suggesting we should be "making" in the good, old-fashioned way. Zuckerberg is urging us to "manufacture" friends, using the online, digital tools that his company and other companies will provide. "Manufactured" friends, however, are not what we need. What we need are "real" friends - "human friends."
If we are lucky enough to be able to "find some friends," or to "make some friends," in the way that I am advising - the good, old-fashioned way - what are we going to do with those "real friends"?
Well, I suggest that we should change the world!
That's my advice. When you really analyze it, what Zuckerberg is urging is that we let the world change us, and that we let "artificial" friends, "manufactured" friends, occupy and help direct our life.
Really? Does that seem at all attractive to you? As I have put it in a completely different context (though I think a related one), "Don't Bite!"
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