Is it obsession? Voyeurism? A massive archival project? Fear of oblivion? Whatever: for around a billion people, Facebook has infiltrated our daily lives. Facebook is at once an intimate village, a towering empire, a lucrative data mine, and a ravenous advertising machine. It is a streaming ticker tape of mundane comments, political rants, bold confessions, marketing slogans, and anything else you can possibly imagine. In 21st century social media, we carry on a distributed conversation with anyone who pops up on the news feed: friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, until this whole snaking, viral discourse wraps itself around and you find yourself talking to yourself.

Surely, when the earth freezes over and the human race has gone the way of the dinosaur, some future species will dissect human civilization by examining the remains of our hard drives, only to determine that we were a civilization drowning in narcissistic self-portraiture. OK fine, but first I need to upload this post.