By Jesse Scaccia

Facebook warned me to chill out.

I was adding too many friends, she said. Too many wall posts. Too many comments and conversations.

Every time that little warning box came up I could almost hear the voice of my jealous ex-girlfriend. “How do you know her? What do you have to say to her that’s so important? Give it a rest and come to bed.”

I didn’t listen. And now Seven Cities Mag’s Facebook page is gone.

The friends are gone. The email conversations–many of which were business related–are simply gone for good. Gone also, at least for the moment, is the way we were finding, and connecting with, the majority of our readers.

It was so much more intense than a real-life breakup where your partner keeps the friends and steals your records.

This was like if your girlfriend had access to the H-Bomb.

(Not really, but once I typed that line I couldn’t bear to untype it.)

In the end it was my fault. We had a ‘personal profile,’ not a fan page, so we were pretty overtly going against FB’s terms of service. And we have a new page. It’s all on the up and up, and even reflects our new brand name. So I/we landed on our feet.

But what really bothered me was that, warnings notwithstanding, Facebook actually went through with it. I thought she was the girlfriend whose rules could be broken and she’d always take me back. Having this website as a personal profile and how that allowed me to seek out new friends/readers, in some way, felt like the old Rolling Stones song, “Under My Thumb.”

Under my thumb, I can still look for somebody else.

That’s what made this such a horrible breakup. I was supposed to, one day, break up with Facebook. Maybe I’d grow out of her. Maybe a sexy new social networking site would crop up, I’d cheat for a while, and then I’d switch. But Facebook dumping me? Moi? It’s a sin against nature.

Then Facebook stepped it up a level: they started giving me warnings on my personal profile. And that’s when, for me, the music stopped, the lights came on, and I realized I was standing naked, the only one at the party with his dick in the mashed potatoes. I realized just how much Facebook has come to mean to me. For real.

I’ve lived a bunch of places and Facebook is where I ‘keep’ my friends. If they deleted my account, there is practically no way I could refind people I couchsurfed with in Ireland, or that I had dormed with in college in the Midwest. It’s not that I couldn’t find them find them. They’re still out there, of course. But, in some social-networking, meta way, Facebook has become my social brain. I no longer keep those friends in any part of my consciousness.

I don’t need to. Facebook is, at least for now, my literal hard drive for my past lives. It has my connections, my pictures, my life.

And you know what? That kind of scares the shit out of me. If the terrorists destroyed Facebook I might cry actual human tears. (Lower your head in shame if you’re with me.) More realistically, imagine if Facebook, through some loophole in the terms of service, (and you know they’re there) decided to start charging money. How much would you pay to keep access to your Facebook?

In other words, What is your life worth to you?

Seriously: Just how much power have we given them?

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