RIP My Facebook Account, 2004-2025

If you want to poke me, you'll just have to do it IRL

I want to tell you this isn’t one of those “Why I Left Social Media” essays, but who am I kidding, that’s exactly what this is, or will become. Honestly, I think everyone gets to do it once. If not in 2025, then when? If not on one’s Substack, then where?

Goodbye to All That (Russian Disinformation)

Earlier this year, yes, I left Facebook, which is very much a social media company, which makes the following paragraphs about leaving it VERY MUCH a “Why I Left Social Media” essay. Joan Didion left New York almost sixty years ago, and her account of that exodus, “Goodbye to All That,” has served as both inspiration and template to decades of equally navel-gazing writers (🙋🏼‍♀️) eager to process their own moving-on emotions.

“All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire.”

Didion herself was probably spinning in her grave long before she actually died about the volume of “Goodbye”-inspired personal essays our culture has been forced to bear over the years. But at least those used to be about leaving cities, or marriages! Now they’re just about deactivating social media accounts.

What Joan She Didion Means *indeed*

On top of that, we’re only talking about one of those accounts! I left Facebook, one small — to me; obviously it’s the biggest site on the Internet — corner of social media. If I had any real guts I would leave the sites I’m actually addicted to, like Instagram (literally owned by Facebook, so what am I even escaping here) or Twitter (which is full of Nazis and schizophrenic 20-year-olds, at least the latter of whom are consistently entertaining). Leaving Facebook at this point, years after it last provided any semblance of utility in my life, is like loudly screaming “I’m DONE” to a party that most of my peers left ages ago. I’m screaming to an empty room, with a bunch of functional illiterates in the corner poring over the finer details of Project 2025.

And yet it’s still… something, saying goodbye to all that, in this case a site I poured parts of myself into¹ for nearly two decades; a place that once truly felt like indispensable social glue, especially for those of us there at the start. Anyway, cue the music!

The Way We Were

As an elder Millennial (the elder signifies that yes, I have seen and gotten emotional watching the video of MGMT performing “Kids” for the first time at Wesleyan in 2003), my experience with Facebook goes back pretty much all the way to the beginning. I was an incoming freshman at Columbia² when I joined the site in June of ‘04; by that fall, I think, it had expanded to pretty much every college in the country. In no amount of time at all, Facebook was as inextricable from the collegiate experience as binge-drinking and pretending to read ‘Ulysses’. I don’t think anyone of my age group can imagine our undergraduate years without it.

Remember The Wall? Remember Poking? Remember the group “I Went to Public School, Bitch”?³ It’s hard to explain today the genuine pleasure and… idk, safety these silly features provided us, your elder Millennial brethren, but at a time before social media was even a concept, using Facebook felt like turning on cheat codes. Making friends at college — challenging! You might tell a joke that falls flat and have to switch schools entirely. And now here was this extra thing, practically an Iron Man heads-up display of interests and personality, to make it all easier. WAIT, you like ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’⁴ and ‘Arrested Development’ too? I thought I was the only one; I thought I was different. Maybe we could be different… together.

Will it shock you to learn this movie meant a great deal to me as a 23-year-old

I’m mocking what would morph over the next five years into standard Millennial hipsterdom, but in retrospect there’s also something sweet about Facebook’s early days architecture. It was common interests, shared. It was also an immediate, tangible way to catalog the hundreds of people you met at college. Someone who could be a friend. Someone who could be an academic asset. Someone who could be, like Summer Finn, a manic pixie dream girl. Long before Mitt Romney’s binders of women, we had binders of social possibility. There was a genuine utility to Facebook which, in an era where Google search now yields blatantly false AI “answers,” feels practically radical in retrospect.

It’s weird to reflect on it now, knowing Where The Internet Went, but at the time… it all felt innocent. I think it was innocent, insomuch as the Internet wasn’t yet overrun by scammers and bad actors. Governments weren’t yet being toppled; AI-generated depictions of Jesus Christ as a collection of plastic bottles, or shrimp, weren’t yet propping up the Malaysian economy. I mean yes, okay, Facebook was erected on the foundation of Mark Zuckerberg’s well-catalogued antisocial tendencies and general misogyny, as depicted in the documentary ‘The Social Network’, but let’s say that for a brief window of time the service really did foster a new kind of connection, that it did sort of work as advertised on the tin. In retrospect those were the salad days; speaking only for myself, a naive infant, I had no idea they would ever end.

But End They Did

These days, you’re being naive — or worse, irresponsible — to set digital foot on Facebook now without understanding that you’re beset on all sides by people looking to, in one fashion or another, hurt you. Which is just so psychically fucked! To recount the thousand cuts that led to Facebook’s living death would far outstrip my capabilities as an armchair journalist, and anyway that’s not what this post is about. We can say “Facebook throttled legacy media, housed and promoted endless anti-democratic content, and knowingly abetted the youth mental health crisis” and sort of leave it at that. Better essays exist that run down, beat by beat, Facebook’s twenty-year descent into Mephistophelian evil!

No, my vantage point on all of it is strictly personal. Things were a certain way, and then they weren’t. You noticed it in increments as the ‘00s became the ‘10s:

• the way, once Instagram came along, people stopped posting lengthy photo albums. You know the ones: entire nights uploaded to Facebook with, oftentimes, zero sense of discretion (we’re young and no one’s running for office and we’re never gonna die!) let alone photographic quality

• birthday wishes — which I would often, super-unhealthily, tabulate the number of and compare to last year’s count — declining as more and more friends fled the service

• text-only wall posts (in essence a digital recreation of the whiteboards so many of us had outside our actual dorms) giving way to the news feed — first newspaper articles, which was fine, but then the infamous “pivot to video” (see “throttling of legacy media,” above) re-ordered everything you saw. In the end, all that was left was just shittier YouTube

• the mounting sense that this was barely a social network anymore, just an advertising platform on which, with significant effort, you might stumble on something that could, definitionally, be considered social content. But probably still engineered in Mother Russia

Look, the internet was never going to maintain its innocence, if it even had that to begin with. Undoubtedly you’ve seen the word “enshittification” thrown around these past few years. Coined by writer Cory Doctorow in 2022, it describes… precisely what you think it describes: the slow, steady erosion of internet-based services. User attention has been captured, a market has been claimed. What value — what financial value — is there in simply maintaining these sites as they were originally intended, and once happily utilized? Don’t be stupid!

Pulling the Plug

When I finally went to delete Facebook — after pressing the “Yes, Confirm” button that arrived after no fewer than four “Are You Sure?” screens trying to convince me to stick around, maybe on a junior membership level — I’ll be honest, I didn’t feel very much. I hadn’t changed my profile picture since 2017…

Take THAT, Donald Trump

…and hadn’t meaningfully used the site for at least two years prior to that, when I removed my birthday information from the site before re-adding it the day of, all because I was scared of turning 29 (I am now 57).

It cost me very little to leave a site that has meant nothing to me for almost ten years! Like I said, screaming into an empty room.

But then it hit me, pure cinema, these flashes of what it had meant to me — to a lot of us — way back when. Facebook is where I left cryptic notes about my mental well-being. It’s where I practiced Dadaist art with photo albums dedicated to my striped shirt collection. It’s where I became obsessed with this movie-logging widget, the name of which now escapes me, that cemented a lifelong passion for reviewing movies without getting paid to do so. It cemented friendships; it provided topics of conversation for would-be lovers; it felt, for a time, honest. Most importantly, Facebook is where I discovered that, yes, other people also liked ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’, a true leaving the cave moment for someone who’d assumed he was the only person on earth to really get Wes Anderson.

So on the one hand, deactivating an account like this is whatever. On the other hand, it’s some kind of confrontation with digital mortality. And today I say GOODBYE TO ALL THAT, to a younger version of me — who could have very well remained frozen in time on Facebook until the day I died, and then made into an eternal memorial page. These are very real! — and all the promises of electric youth. Goodbye to an internet that didn’t feel dedicated to destruction and obfuscation, but creation and at least an attempt to bridge connection, however easily this would stall out in the years to come. For at least a little while, we tried.

HENNING FOG can still be found on Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky, and his beloved Letterboxd

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Two More Things:

1. 🗣️ SPECIAL SHOUT OUT to musician/philosopher/friend Steve Page, who helped put some of these ideas through their paces over text. He produces ambient music under the moniker Lucent Lake; give him a listen here on Spotify, including his latest release, “Once Was Enough.”

2. ☕️💵 “BUY ME A COFFEE”: I have no interest in — let alone justification for — putting Lifting Fog behind a paywall right now, and even pushing paid subscriptions (which are available!) feels a little gauche when I’m still not posting on a truly regular schedule, let alone a must-read one. That said, I was recently turned on to a service called “Buy Me A Coffee,” where instead of paying a monthly LF subscription, you can just toss me a few bucks, at will. Liked the post? Please consider a donation in my digital hat! Here’s the link:

1. In Millennial parlance, we call this “Horcruxing”

2. shout-out suppression of free speech!

3. “Remember when is the lowest form of conversation” - Tony Soprano

4. About now is when I should tell you that, two months before it came out, I listed ‘The Life Aquatic’ as my third-favorite movie of all time (behind ‘Rushmore’ and ‘Tenenbaums’, of course) on the grounds that my loving it in the near-future was a foregone conclusion. I would pretend, for a while, that this was true