Essays in Idleness

A journalist hiding behind a “Premium” pay wall, one Margi Murphy of the London Telegraph, noticed something I did, too, during my brief video reconnoitre of yesterday’s congressional hearings. It was about this Zuckerberg fellow who, with friends who have since been suing him, launched the appalling Facebook social media site, from his Harvard dorm room in 2004.

Did I mention that the whole idea of the thing is appalling? Or that it should be eliminated for reasons of good taste? Or that the “softball” questions the lad is being asked by the Merican Senators should be supplemented with spinballs, knuckleballs, spitballs, rocks, and the occasional guided missile? No? Well, sometimes I run over my self-imposed space allowance, in my tireless efforts to be “fair and balanced.”

What this Murphy lady noticed, with the help of some “body-language expert” — and I could spot without — was that young Zuckerberg is a computer animation. My words, not theirs, but they flagged the robotic delivery of prepared answers to prepared questions, and the facial gestures corresponding to the keystrokes in an emoji chart.

Now that we have seen him in action, an inquiry should be called to establish whether Zuckerberg actually exists. In his Wicked Paedia entry, for instance, his pre-college claim to know French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek is stated. Surely that is a giveaway. Many questions need answering, for instance: Was his height-enhancing seat-cushion real? Or was it part of the holographic projection? How many of the Senators were real? And how do we know the camera slips were genuine?

I do not accuse “Z.” of working for the Russians. Rather, I wonder if he was invented in the same Moscow simulation studios that came up with the characters of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Pope Francis. In which case we should worry: for Trump is able to simulate spontaneity.

Will the missile smacks on Syria that Trump has telegraphed be real? Was Putin’s promise to shoot them down part of the arrangement? What if there was no arrangement, or some gaffer accidentally deleted the script? Will more or fewer people be killed as a consequence?

I have other questions. They occur to me whenever I check the news. Nothing makes sense, on the Facebook of things, and one naturally tries to find explanations. I see various attempts that I would call paranoid, but those are as likely to come from the news presenters as from the Facebook customers.

The human mind seeks order. Even hallucinations serve this quest. Placed in an environment where nothing is intelligible, quite wonderful things will be imagined. Notwithstanding, I am struck by a horrible thought. What if Zuckerberg is real?