Surfing's ultimate sell-out?
I hate everything about Facebook. I
hate that it leeches away time and energy. I hate that it allows
people to live shadow lives, cultivate false personas, or justify
hateful behaviour by forming hateful allegiances with hateful
strangers.
And I hate that Facebook owns the data of so many
people, just as it now owns professional surfing.
I’m sure the WSL considered a subscription model to
let us watch events, but obviously they’ve dismissed it as not
viable at this stage. It’s probably the right decision for them,
but not for me. Outsourcing broadcast and tech expertise and
mainlining to millions of potential viewers is likely a “smart”
move, but it doesn’t feel like the right one. I would gladly pay to
keep surfing free from the shackles of tech behemoths and Big
Data.
In my mind the marriage between the WSL and Facebook
is surfing’s ultimate sell-out and I can’t believe more people
don’t see that.
I gave up on Facebook a while back. It was making me
angry and condescending. It was sapping my hope, and it was casting
a gloomy net of opinion and judgement over family and friends.
Facebook stokes the embers of the worst versions of
ourselves, the ones we push back in daily life and polite company.
It is a platform to hoist our human failings for the world to see –
greed, vanity, deceit, jealousy, bitterness, obsession with the
self…you name it.
I object to people “liking” tragedy and serious
illness, just as much as I object to them spraying love hearts and
thumbs up emojis at blatant attention seeking and cries for
help.
Recently a young boy from my town was killed in a car
crash. I watched as the community clambered over each other in
comment threads and faux heartbreak posts to grieve the hardest and
fastest. A race to see who could get the most likes for a pithy
post about a 17-year-old boy, smashed against a tree on a
singletrack road. And I watched as the dead boy’s brother stumbled
through some awkward posts of his own, unable to find the words or
the will to grieve publically for his little brother, yet carried
on a tide of competition to see who could be the most sympathetic,
the most hurt. Some things are best kept private.
Declarations of love on FB are just as bad. I don’t
think it would be a stretch to map the correlation between the
professed happiness of a couple on FB and their actual happiness.
Touting your wonderous union online is absolutely the death knells
of that relationship.
People actually define themselves by their FB posts. I
know a guy who came back from a snowboarding trip genuinely
downbeat because “Facebook didn’t really make it look as good as it
was”.
I know another guy, who, when his old man died, was
told by FB that his dad’s profile page could and would not be
removed. It had to stay there, frozen in the ether, his father’s
memory presided over by grief tourists.
I shudder at the idea of being defined by things that
I once posted on Facebook. I imagine dying tomorrow, and then, when
my son is old enough, him trying to build a picture of his father
based on look-at-me posts and vitriolic commentary I’ve been sucked
into online. Better not to engage at all, I think. Better to opt
out.
Which is what I did some months ago now. I know my
page is still there, on an algorithmic hair trigger, ready to
launch once more should I accidentally make an errant log in. But I
haven’t so far, and I don’t intend to. Not even for surfing.
I haven’t missed FB. I find myself lagging on the
occasional water cooler conversation, but that hardly matters. I
can enjoy genuine interactions these days. Conversations with
friends (you know, actual friends) that aren’t pre-loaded with
pre-conceptions. It takes a moment or two for people to catch on.
It takes a second for them to rediscover face-to-face engagement.
After we’ve got by the statutory “Oh, so you didn’t see that on
FB?”, conversations can actually feel real again.
So it’s against this background that I’ll bid adieu to
watching pro surfing. On principle I can’t accept the union with
FB. I understand it, sure. I understand that it’s a financial
decision and a business decision and yet another decision in
pursuit of pro surfing’s white whale – the mainstream audience –
but I will not step aboard.
I love professional surfing, as dubiously entertaining
as it may be.
But I will not sell myself or my data to Facebook in
order to watch it, even for free.
