We are not Borg.

I recently disabled wall postings on my facebook page. I felt that it was my duty as a free-thinking individual. Don’t hate me because I’m dutiful. I love my friends. But we are not Borg.

The Borg, I should briefly explain for the benefit of any non-nerds in the audience, are a group of aliens from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Though never acknowledged on the program, the name is obviously shorthand for “cyborg,” which is an abbreviation of “cybernetic organism.” “Cybernetic” comes, in turn, from Greek kybernetes, “steersman.”

“Cybernetic” was coined from the Greek in 1948 by mathematician Norbert Weiner. In his 1966 book, God And Golem, Inc. Weiner observes:

"The future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honesty and our intelligence."

Suggesting that, even way back then, he foresaw the direct implications of the Internet.

The Borg were an advanced species, possessing technology superior to that of humans. And their sociological development had evolved in such away that they had sacrificed all individual identity. Through cybernetic technology, they had become very much like a colony of robotically augmented social insects, with each individual like a bee in a hive, existing only as a member of the whole. Even their personal pronouns reflected this. They didn’t have the word “I.” It was always “we.” “We are Borg.”

Ladies and gentlemen: We are not Borg.

If you have a message for me, there is a perfectly simple way to ensure that I get the message: send me email. Just send me email! There is no reason that every single one of my friends needs to see what every other friend of mine has to say to me at all times. It warms the cockles of my heart to receive greetings from my friends, and mind you, I have some cold cockles, but all 100+ of my other friends don’t need to see it. I doubt that your greeting to me will do much to warm their cockles in any event.

With few exceptions, my own friends have not yet abused this. There have been a couple of times that I’ve scratched my head and wondered “why is this personal message to me written on my wall and not in email?” but, these occasions have been rare. I have seen where it all leads, however, and it is ugly. Or at least asinine. Definitely asinine.

I have on occasion taken a gander at the wall postings of friends of mine to see what sort of messages they were putting out there. What do they have to say? What are they feeling passionate about? What creative efforts have they produced that they wish to showcase? I want to know!

Some of that stuff may have been buried amongst what has become the equivalent of their new message inbox, full of personal missives addressed specifically to them and having nothing to do with anyone else and not in any way representing a topic warranting public discussion, conveniently posted for all the world to see. But I didn’t have the patience to sift through it.

I really just don’t get it. If you want to tell your friend “hey it was great to see you the other day,” why not—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—send them an email that says “hey it was great to see you the other day!”? Why do all her friends need to see your message? Most of them don't even know you. Why is it so important to you that they all see that you said "hi"?

When did we become this society of exhibitionists and voyeurs holding the bizarre notion that every interaction between us must be in a public forum, even the exchange of trivial pleasantries? Have we no sense of individual identity? Is every goddamn thing we have to say to one another up for community commentary? I say no. We are not Borg.

I disabled wall postings. It isn’t because I don’t want to hear from my friends. I love hearing from friends. I have an email inbox for that. It has worked remarkably well for years. Send me an email! If it contains information or ideas that I want to put out for public discussion, I’ll go ahead and do that. If it’s just a personal message to me, then I will keep it to myself, which is where it belongs.

I’m hoping some others will follow my lead: let’s use our walls to showcase the things we really want our friends to know about. Our art, our causes, things we are passionate about. Let’s send individual messages to one another in private. Each and every one of your friends does not need to see what each and every other one of your friends writes to you, especially when they are writing “yo, wazzup?” They really don’t. We are not Borg.

I don’t want to be part of a collective group mind, thank you very much. I’m not a drone in a beehive. I believe that our society and all the individuals within it benefit when said individuals are conscious of our part in a larger whole. I believe there is nobility in self-sacrifice for the greater good. But I don’t believe in abandoning all lingering shreds of individual identity. We are not Borg.

We are not Borg.

I am not Borg.

You are not Borg.