Facebook is Worse than an Android Invasion

A little backstory first...

In Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, android technology has become so powerful and advanced that it threatens human society's very definition of what it means to be human.  After the nuclear apocalyptic events of "World War Terminus", Earth is reduced to shambles and left deserted by mostly everyone.  Androids have been manufactured as expendable workers with the purpose of colonizing the harsh conditions of new planets for the survivors of mankind.  As it advances, the android technology becomes increasingly self-aware.  This leads to periodic escape attempts by small groups of androids as they use deadly force in efforts to escape their labor camps and flee to Earth.  The humans on Earth eventually catch on to the androids attempts to hide within the remains of human society as humans.  They assign bounty hunters to track down, "retire" (kill), and purge these artificial machines from the human collective.

This is the general premise of Philip K. Dick's book.  But what I didn't add in that short synopsis is that it is hinted throughout the book that androids were not only designed in order to do the dirty, dangerous work on planets like Mars, but that they were also designed as a cure for the existential loneliness that the survivors of World War Terminus felt since so many people had perished.  

And the electric animals are an even more obvious example of humanity desperately attempting to fill in that void of loneliness with something that is not real.  Let me explain.  Animals were wiped out even worse than the humans after the war.  And in the post-apocalyptic society that emerged out of the ash and nuclear fallout came a renewed sense of value for living organisms.  Thereafter it became not only altruistic to take care of a living animal, such as a cat or goat in one's home, but it also became a status symbol.  Living animals were rare, and as they were valued so highly, (ironically) they became very expensive commercial commodities.  And like all successful commercial commodities, ersatz "fake" electric animals also became popular.  They were much cheaper than the real animals and for all intents and purposes were identical to living animals (much like the androids and humans).  

The main character in Androids, Rick Deckard, is a bounty hunter whose goal in life is to own a living animal.  We begin the book introduced to his unhappy, depressive wife and dying malfunctioning electric goat.  Clearly Deckard is disheartened by the situation, but he's determined to make enough money to win his goat.  Right from the start we can tell that the electric animal isn't fulfilling his desires as a real animal theoretically would. 

Why? Well I suppose you could say that it's unnatural, but many things are "unnatural" and even if they aren't made in nature, they are still a part of the natural world.  

Instead I would argue that Deckard isn't satisfied with the electric goat because it exists solely for the purpose of serving the demands of society which has unnaturally imbued it with immense, but entirely artificial, value.  Something is of value to us because it inherently creates its own meaning simply because it exists in its existence and nothing more. The act of inflating something with value not only contradicts the very definition of value, but it also has the opposite, degrading effect. 

And this is where Facebook comes in......so tune in next week!

Does it really...?