How Facebook left a graveyard in my calendar

Some thoughts on dying in a digital universe that won’t let you die

I confess I’ve still got mixed feelings about AI-generated images, but this one isn’t too bad

Back in the mid-2000s, I had a conversation with a friend about how this weird new website called “Facebook” was warping her experience of life. “It’s like,” she said, “there will be people from your past who’ve moved on, and you’re thinking, Yeah, I’m pretty okay with that person being out of my life—but then Facebook happens, and suddenly they’re back in your life. And it’s like, Why do I need this?”

I didn’t say anything at the time, but internally I was gasping in horror. You want people to NOT BE IN YOUR LIFE??? I thought. Don’t you realize that all humans have INHERENT WORTH AND DIGNITY??? In retrospect, it was a dumb reaction to have: Even if all humans are valuable (a dubious claim to make in a universe that includes Lady Gaga), I’m still a finite being. Everyone may deserve to have a friend who will help them move or drive them to the airport or whatever, but the limits of space and time mean I can only be that for, at most, a couple dozen people—most likely people who are still in my meatspace orbit.

I didn’t see things that way back then, though, so I accepted every Facebook friend request I got—people I knew, people I used to know, people I’d never known—and soon I had more than a thousand friends. And somewhere in there, Facebook and/or Apple (I forget which) added a feature to automatically add all your Facebook friends to your phone contacts, and even though I knew I’d never use most of them, I went ahead and clicked Okay, and suddenly I had more than a thousand contacts in my phone as well. And then, some time later, I decided I was done with Facebook and logged off for good, and never heard from most of these people again.

Except that they’re all still haunting my calendar.

(Essay continues after the break:)

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***

I don’t know why Facebook decided to make birthdays so central to its experience, but they were there almost from the beginning. You would log on and it would say, “Hey, it’s [friend]’s birthday! You should write on their wall!” It had a way of making your own birthday feel like a fourth-grade Valentine’s Day party: you couldn’t wait to open your little pile of greetings, even knowing that most of them would turn out to be generic “happy bday!”s from vague acquaintances—the Facebook equivalent of “Here is a card with a picture of Superman and a lame pun because school rules and my mom said I had to give you a card.”

I remember once—refusing to be one of the “happy bday!”-intoning drones—I wrote a bespoke poem on a friend’s wall when she turned twenty-two. It made me feel like I’d risen above the system, but of course, there’s no way to do that for everyone; the sands of time just won’t allow it. At some point, Facebook’s birthday reminders stopped being fun and became a source of stress, and shortly thereafter, I realized I could just ignore them. It felt like a massive weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

But the birthdays never went away. It turned out that, when I had added all my Facebook friends to my Contacts app, it also added all of their birthdays to my Calendar app. And now every time I open my calendar, there are birthdays on almost every day of the year, often crowding out events and appointments I actually need to know about. And every morning, all of my devices ping with reminders: “It’s ___’s birthday! It’s ___’s birthday! It’s ___’s birthday!”

I’ve tried and failed to get rid of these 1,000+ birthdays clogging up my calendar—or at least pare them down to the names I still recognize. There’s a checkbox that allows me to “hide” the birthdays, but all that does is turn them invisible (I still get the endless notifications). If you right-click an individual birthday, the Delete option is grayed out. Even if I delete the individual in question from my contacts, their birthday remains on my calendar, indelible. All the people I used to almost-sort-of know, turning my calendar forever into a graveyard of celebration.

A bunch of ghosts in my machine.

***

I knew a guy in high school who I still think about all the time. He was the sort you might call “low self-esteem” or “self-hating”: a big black guy, 300-pounds-ish, who never hesitated to crack a fat joke or speak in exaggerated ebonics, presumably in hopes of beating the haters to the punch. If he didn’t like himself much, though, he seemed to like everyone else quite a bit—always had something kind to say. One of the finest tenors I’ve ever heard sing; perfect pitch, but never used it to show off.¹ Only ever brought it out to help the choir sound better.

Our paths diverged after graduation, but on Facebook he looked like he’d been doing better. Gotten in shape, come out as gay, gotten more involved in his local church. We only interacted occasionally, mainly to trade jokes, but when my first novel dropped, he posted something on my wall I’ll never forget: “I knew this book would be good,” he wrote, “because you wrote it, but I’m amazed at how much it’s sucked me in. Can’t wait to finish!” One of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me, from one of the best people I’ve ever known.

And a few months later, he was dead.

I never learned the circumstances of his death. All I know is that, every year, Facebook’s “Memories” feature recycles that now-bittersweet-at-best post. No new information, obviously, just “Remember when your dead friend wrote this on your wall???” And like the birthdays, it seems entirely purposeless, just another ghost in the machine, a memory frozen in time by algorithm, melting away like a glacier in the sun.

***

There are billionaires out there who think they’ll achieve immortality by “uploading” their consciousness into “the cloud” or whatever. You’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical; I’m sure in a century, it’ll all sound just as stupid as the Gilded Age robber barons dreaming about posthumously installing their brains into steam engines (which—without doing any research on this at all—I guarantee you is a thing that happened at least once).

Anyone who’s interacted with an “AI” assistant should be able to see the absurdity here—even the most advanced computer can barely simulate a consciousness, let alone become one. All “large language models” (LLMs) like GPT can do is swallow a bunch of text and regurgitate it semi-randomly. It’s not all that different, really, from Facebook endlessly recycling that one post from my friend; it’s just got more hype behind it.

But even if LLMs can’t become humans, I’m increasingly convinced humans can become LLMs. On the occasions when I glance at social media these days, I always see the same things: the same names, having the same arguments they’ve been having for decades, repeating the same talking points, forever. Zombies locked in a mausoleum, dancing for a dawn that never comes.

The billionaires are half-right: The cloud will be the land of the dead. But it’ll be through necromancy, not apotheosis.

***

Something I think about a lot is the “Stone Tape Theory” of ghosts. First dreamed up by parapsychologists in the late nineteenth century,² “Stone Tape” hypothesizes that ghostly apparitions are not, in fact, the conscious spirits of the dead; rather they’re just “recordings” that have been pressed onto nature itself. Maybe, says the theory, when something terrible happens—a murder, say—the psychic pain caused is so intense that the rocks themselves cry out, storing and repeating that moment, over and over, forever. It’s unproven (and unprovable), but I have to admit it jibes with my own metaphysical instincts: If bodies can scar, why shouldn’t the universe?

It’s easy to see why the idea never became all that popular, though—most who believe in ghosts do so out of a need to think death isn’t the end. Entire industries are built on the hope that you can still communicate with your deceased loved ones (and, after you’ve passed, your living ones). It’d be a perfect, poetically cruel joke, though, if all the “ghosts” that have ever been witnessed were nothing more than the rocks and trees and sky thoughtlessly replaying the worst moments of people’s lives forever—the spookiest way possible for the universe to shrug and say, “That sucks.”

I was only a little surprised to learn that one of the pioneers of “Stone Tape” thinking was Charles Babbage, the father of modern computing—a silicon chip, after all, is nothing more or less than a rock that can store information.

(But it can’t make that information mean anything.)

***

At some point in our lives, we all reach the moment when the literal ghosts outnumber the metaphorical ones. I’m not there yet, but at almost-forty, the bodies are piling up.

I got word a couple weeks ago that one of my childhood friends—someone I’d known since before I can remember—had passed away exactly the way I would have expected (read: drugs). Actually, I was surprised to see he’d even made it this far: he was that sort of person, hounded his whole life by demons, whether metaphorical or metaphysical I don’t know.

My contact with him had been sporadic since middle school, but whenever I ran into him I’d never know which version of him to expect. He’d either be coked out of his mind and carving pentagrams into his own flesh, or on fire for Jesus and setting fire to his Manson CDs. Always in and out of prison, often not for the types of crimes that make you popular in a prison yard. The sort of person the internet mobs will demand you denounce, but I’m not here to do that; mostly, I just wonder why so many of us get to skate through life while a handful lose everything in the psychic lottery.

When I heard he was gone, all I could think was that multiple versions of him are still there, somewhere, in my Facebook notifications. Every few months I’d get a friend request from some new pseudonym similar to his given name, each with a photo of him looking slightly more like a cult leader—I don’t know if he was rage-quitting and then rejoining Facebook, or just getting himself kicked off and trying to sneak back on (both make perfect sense), but I eventually stopped responding to the requests. I can tell you happy birthday; I can drive you to the airport; I can’t save you from yourself.

And he’s gone now, but all of his stone tape ghosts are still there, forever repeating his spiral into oblivion.

***

It’s weird to think that Facebook’s main legacy in my life will be a long list of indelible birthdays. For all of Meta’s attempts to convince us to move our entire lives online (a great idea that has had no terrible repercussions), it couldn’t erase the reality that birthdays point to: we’re all just bags of meat, pushed into the world through holes in other bags of meat. The ghosts in the machine might be something, but they’ll never be us.

And maybe that’s another reason why my initial goal of being everyone’s friend was misguided: like all bags of meat, we’re all just rotting away in the sun, slouching toward the grave like sand slipping through an hourglass. You get a billion and a half heartbeats, and that’s it; it’s barely enough time to make a difference in your own life, let alone anyone else’s.

It’s Father’s Day today, and I intend to spend it with my own little meatbags—my daughters are taking me to watch the local semi-pro softball team play. Should be a good time, but no photos will be snapped, and if they are, they won’t be uploaded to the cloud—I don’t need the stone tape repeating my every memory forever. Sometimes it’s okay to let things fade into nothing.

It’s inevitable, anyway—everything fades. Even the stones eventually crumble.

(But I’m increasingly convinced that all those damn birthdays will stick around forever.) 🕹🌙🧸

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1. Can you show off with perfect pitch? He’d definitely laugh at me for implying this if he were here

2. Yes, this means it predates tape recordings. I believe the name was coined long after the hypothesis itself