Yesterday was, so I’m told, #FriendsDay on Facebook. I’m not sure what this means, in part because I’m not on Facebook but perhaps more because I’m finding it harder these days to conceptualize just what a “friend” is.

In the week leading up to Friends Day (or #FriendsDay, if you insist) there was a new study out from Oxford University that says that people who use social media — and in particular Facebook, with its handy tool for “friending” people — have no more friends offline than other people.

This isn’t surprising, though as always breaking down the numbers is complicated. At the heart of the problem is the very slippery label of friend.

The definition of friend varies widely between different cultures, meaning something different in America than in Europe, Africa, or Asia. Then there are degrees of friendship. The Oxford study speaks of the “hierarchically inclusive layers” of our personal social networks. The inner ring is the “support clique” of people who care about you, and which usually consists of around five “very close friends.” This is apparently a hard limit based on a combination of “cognitive constraint (the product of the relationship with neocortex size known as the social brain hypothesis) and a time constraint associated with the costs of servicing relationships.”

Outside of the support clique there is a “sympathy group” of maybe a dozen “close friends,” then a social network, then a larger number of acquaintances, and then maybe 1 500 or so faces that you might not be able to put a name to.

At least that’s one way of breaking it down. Other studies use different labels and different criteria for seeing who fits in where. So when it was recently reported that 1 in 10 people in the UK say they have no close friends it wasn’t immediately clear what that meant. In a 2006 study out of Duke University and the University of Arizona, “Social Isolation in America,” the key variable for determing a close friend was someone you could “discuss important matters with.” These people make up a “core discussion network.” The results of that study were depressing:

Researchers . . . found that the number of people who said they had no one with whom to discuss such matters more than doubled [in the past two decades], to nearly 25 percent. The survey found that both family and non-family confidants dropped, with the loss greatest in non-family connections.

The study paints a picture of Americans’ social contacts as a “densely connected, close, homogeneous set of ties slowly closing in on itself, becoming smaller, more tightly interconnected, more focused on the very strong bonds of the nuclear family.”

That means fewer contacts created through clubs, neighbors and organizations outside the home — a phenomenon popularly known as “bowling alone,” from the 2000 book of the same title by Robert D. Putnam.

It’s these definitions of friendship that are so frustrating. People like to speak of “social capital” a lot these days, which suggests a fairly utilitarian view of friendship. Such friends are people who in some way add material value to one’s life. They are people who can do things for you; as, for example, take care of you during an illness, help you out financially, or provide a source of free on-demand labour. Still other definitions suggest more of a psychological symbiosis, a network of people we find to be good company, something that is beneficial in many ways to our physical and mental health. Then there are definitions that stress the importance of trust. A close friend is someone we can “tell everything” to. The friend here may be a therapist, sounding board, or mentor.

All of this makes talking about friendship very difficult. What does seem real is a general though perhaps slight erosion, at lest in the hyper-individualist West, of close social bonds, and their replacement with ersatz, even parody forms of friendship like the “BFF” (best friend forever) and the Facebook friend. These aren’t “real” friends but are made to seem as though they’re worth more in some nebulous form of virtual currency. I wonder if, when the bait-and-switch is complete, we’ll be able to remember what being a friend once meant, or be able to get back to an authentic sense of self.

Along the way to a reading recently I wanted to stop in somewhere and pick up some Life Savers. I’ve been having cravings for Life Savers lately. In particular, “Wint-O-Green” Life Savers. Apparently this kind of Life Saver will spark in your mouth if you do something really stupid like bite down hard on them. I just like the taste.

I thought this would be easy. This only goes to show how old and out of touch I am. I first went to a Little Short Stop I passed on my way downtown. They had no Life Savers, only Certs and Menthos.

Then I tried a seedy variety store downtown. I mean, this place looked so run down I couldn’t believe it was open. They had a candy rack that had one — one! — roll of Life Savers. God knows how long it had been sitting there. Plus it was the multi-fruit flavours package. No deal.

I then went into the drug store in the mall. They had a big candy rack but no Life Savers were on display. The checkout lady then showed me the aisle where they had bags of Life Savers. Ridiculous! Apparently Life Savers don’t come in rolls any more. You buy them in these big bags, wherein each Life Saver is individually wrapped, like in those jars you see on the counter in front of the teller in your bank. If you still go to a bank. How environmental is that? There’s more packaging in one of those bags then there is candy.

By the way, did you know that a mere four Life Savers total 60 calories? That’s incredible! So a whole roll — and that’s not a lot of candy — has more calories than a Snickers bar! How is that possible? I mean, they’re really, really small.

Anyway, I didn’t want a bag of Life Savers, I wanted a roll. I did, however, get a bag of wine gums because they were half price and I was getting hungry for a sugar fix. Plus I really like wine gums.

My final stop was another variety store on the main drag. No Life Savers. I got into a conversation with the guy at the checkout. He told me that Life Savers aren’t popular any more. He said that people like something called Jolly Rogers candy better. At least I thought he said Jolly Rogers. Maybe he said Jolly Ranchers, or meant to say Jolly Ranchers. I’ve never heard of Jolly-anything candy before.

How depressing! Life Savers were a part of my childhood. Now they seem to be disappearing.

Then yesterday . . .

I was going to the bank just after lunch and stopped in to Dairy Queen for some dessert. Specifically, what I wanted was a dipped cone. A dipped caramel cone. This was another childhood favourite.

Did you know you can’t get a dipped caramel cone in Canada any more? The only flavour is chocolate! The cashier told me that lots of people ask for caramel but they only have that flavour in the U.S. now.

Whatever happened to the world I grew up in? The past doesn’t even want to sell me its stuff!

Last week I was passed by four — four! — bikes zooming past me on the sidewalk as I was walking to the bank. This is more than annoying. It’s unsafe, because that’s a lot of weight moving at a good speed. What really bugged me though is that on that particular stretch of road there is a clearly marked bike lane, complete with pictures of a bicycle stenciled on it for those who can’t read. I didn’t see any bicycles using the bike lane.

What is the purpose of having bike lanes if cyclists won’t use them? Where does the sense of privilege and entitlement (the essence of rude behaviour) come from that lets cyclists feel they have a right to appropriate the pedestrian walkway? It’s clearly against the rules. I’m not sure if it’s strictly illegal, but I think you may be liable to get a warning for doing it. These cyclists put pedestrians at risk, especially when they’re passing you from behind and you don’t even know they’re there.

Anyway, I’ve started yelling at these people to keep their bikes on the road. I suppose this only increases the general level of everyday rudeness, but you have to draw the line somewhere.

Rudeness isn’t limited to merely inconsiderate behaviour that leads to minor inconvenience. Indeed, thinking of it in such terms only makes it worse. Anti-social behaviour means something and has consequences.

But what is rudeness? I suppose it takes many forms in many different contexts, but one of the most prominent today is assholery. In his book Assholes: A Theory (2012), philosophy professor Aaron James offers up the following definition:

a person counts as an asshole when, and only when, he systematically allows himself to enjoy special advantages in interpersonal relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people.

At the gym that I go to the locker room is set up with a single bench surrounded by three rows of lockers. So if you want to sit down to take your shoes off or put them on, bench space can be quite limited depending on the time of day. Despite this, people regularly (and I mean every day) load the bench up with their gym bag, clothes, towels, shoes, etc., thus preventing anyone else from sitting on it (which is, after all, what it’s actually there for).

Several weeks ago one retired fellow went into a very vocal (and profanity-laden) tirade against the “young people” he saw doing this. What I’ve noticed, however, is that older members do this just as often as kids. As much as we may want to shake our heads (or fists) at such egregious displays of youthful  narcissism and entitlement, it isn’t a generational thing.

At times it really gets to be a bit much. My favourite bench assholes are the ones who take all their gear out of their locker, arrange it across half the bench, and then leave to take a shower! Thus preventing anyone from using their bench while they’re not even in the general area. It’s all I can do at such times not to sweep their mess right on to the floor, where it properly belongs (why the hell do your shoes need to be put up on the bench?). And this is not something that I’ve only seen occur once or twice. I see it two or three times a week.

I’ve always wondered what would happen if someone actually confronted such assholes. My guess is that they would be baffled, if not offended. I doubt any of them would think they were doing anything wrong. And yet clearly things would become unmanageable in the locker room if everyone behaved the way they do. They simply take for granted the idea that they have a right to do what other people don’t. They are assholes.

He seems like a nice enough guy.

The problem isn’t a new one. It’s been sixteen years since Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, famously opined “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

It’s also not an obscure bit of news. The revelations by Edward Snowden about the extent of government surveillance made headlines, at least once they finally broke through the political barriers (there was some initial reluctance to run with the story, especially in the American media).

So the war on privacy is no secret. Nor is the identity of who is behind it: an alliance of big business and big government. Their goal is also openly acknowledged: profit and control. In the digital age information is an asset, identity a commodity.

The more troubling question is why this has been happening, given all of the warnings, and all of the reports of the immense personal costs involved. We may forget, for example, that in the United States a woman’s right to an abortion was located by the Supreme Court in the right to privacy in the landmark Roe v. Wade decision. And the disastrous results of exposing ourselves on Twitter and social media have been recently documented by many commentators, including Jon Ronson, who recently looked at cases where jobs have been lost and lives destroyed by momentary lapses of judgment leading to mass social shaming. At the same time, employers have taken workplace electronic surveillance to new extremes, giving rise to an entire industry described by Esther Kaplan in the most recent Harper’s, in an essay titled “The Spy Who Fired Me.” And it seems there’s no end to the invasiveness, as a report from CBC News (I at first thought it must have been satire from The Onion) indicates:

Workers at a new high-technology office building in central Stockholm are doing away with their old ID cards on lanyards, and can now open doors with the swipe of a hand — thanks to a microchip implanted in the body.

The radio-frequency identification? (RFID) chips are about 12 mm long and injected with a syringe.

“It’s an identification tool that can communicate with objects around you,” said Patrick Mesterton, CEO of the building, Epicenter Office.

“You can open doors using your chip. You can do secure printing from our printers with the chip, but you can also communicate with your mobile phone, by sending your business card to individuals that you meet,” he said.

Mesterton thinks some of the future uses for implanted chips will be any application that currently requires a pin code, a key or a card, such as payments.

“I think also for health-care reasons … you can sort of communicate with your doctor and you get can data on what you eat and what your physical status is,” Mesterton said.

“You have your own identification code and you’re sending that to something else which you have to grant access to. So there’s no one else that can sort of follow you on your ID, so to say. It’s you who decides who gets access to that ID,” he said.

The implant program is voluntary for the workers in the office complex.

“It felt pretty scary, but at the same time it felt very modern, very 2015,” said Lin Kowalska shortly after she had a microchip implanted in her hand.

Yes, it’s voluntary. Any resistance to Big Brother is made all the harder by the most sinister aspect of this erosion of the private sphere: we’ve done this to ourselves. A piece by Andrew Couts in Digital Trends explains the real problem:

Nearly 1 billion people around the world have signed up to divulge endless details about their lives on Facebook, which has in turn used our willingness and need to share ourselves into a multi-billion dollar business. The same goes for Google, Amazon, Twitter, Pinterest, Foursqure, and countless other companies that trade the ability to connect for our personal data.

Yet, despite the growth of these services, an opposing undercurrent still flows through a segment of the population. Anytime Congress or corporations make a grab for our data, “privacy advocates,” that dying breed, cry out “Injustice!” for the rest of us. They warn us of the dangers of allowing such information sharing. “Do you really want the corporations and the government reading your emails and text messages?” they ask in a grave, incredulous tone. Based on the relative quietness of our public outrage, the collective answer seems to be, “Sure, why not?”

McNealy said privacy was dead 12 years ago, and things have only gotten worse. This isn’t just troubling, it’s downright weird. Why do we freely handed over the details of our lives? Is privacy really that invaluable?

…

Regardless of which came first — Facebook’s desire for greater openness, or ours — it is clear that we have given the social network, and all other companies and governments that benefit from voluntary personal information sharing, exactly what they want without putting up a fight. The death of privacy as a common value is our own fault. We allowed it to die, and continue to expedite the smothering by making it appear as though anyone who wants to maintain pre-Facebook levels of privacy has something to hide. Privacy is no longer an ideal, it’s a dirty word.

In other words, we have come to love Big Brother. But why? In an essay I wrote for Canadian Notes & Queries several years ago I found myself asking the same question with regard to why we were so eager to toss so much of our cultural infrastructure onto a digital bonfire. The resulting “culture crash” was widely predicted (indeed its effect were already being felt), but the warnings were just as widely ignored.

The answer I came up with then was that it was part of the larger culture of narcissism. As we have become less politically active and involved we have retreated into a smaller circle of self, a process predicted by Alexis de Tocqueville and analysed by Robert Putnam (in Bowling Alone). As Colin Robinson, writing in the London Review of Books, put it a few years back: “In an increasingly self-centered society a premium is placed on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching, and being read rather than reading.” When posting status updates on Facebook trumps looking at porn, and studies have shown this is now the case, then you know some kind of threshold has been passed.

It’s a downward spiral. As we’ve become less connected to others we’ve begun to fear them more. We crave security, though not from any of the people collecting all this information. Ten or perhaps twenty years ago anyone suggesting a national DNA registry would have been met with incredulity or even outrage. Now I know a lot of people who support the idea. In the face of such an abject and willing surrender of one’s personal identity to the powers-that-be (both corporate and governmental), what hope is there of mounting popular opposition to such invasive data collection? Humanity is being reduced, and it seems we’re good with that.

Just don’t kid yourself into thinking there’s any way back to the garden.

Tom Holland chose an interesting pair of contrasting epigraphs by ancient authors who were contemporaries for his book on the fall of the Roman republic, Rubicon:

“Human nature is universally imbued with a desire for liberty and a hatred for servitude.” Caesar, Gallic Wars

“Only a few prefer liberty — the majority seek nothing more than fair masters.” Sallust, Histories

The points of view contrast, but are not contradictory. It’s Sallust’s cynical reflection, however, that gets more play in a recent essay by John Gray reprinted in Harper’s (January 2015):

Most human beings, most of the time, care about other things than more than they care about being free. Many will vote readily for an illiberal government if it promises security against violence or hardship, protects a way of life to which they are attached, and denies freedom to people they hate.

Today these ideas belong in the category of forbidden thoughts. When democracy proves to be oppressive, liberals insist it is because democracy is not working properly — if there were genuine popular participation, majorities would not oppress minorities. Arguing with this view is pointless, since it rests on an article of faith: the conviction that freedom is the natural human condition, which tyranny suppresses.

Liberalism can be its own worst enemy. I don’t mean that in the ancient formula of liberty breeds license, and license chaos, then chaos begs for an end to liberty. Just as prevalent as the liberal mindset Gray critiques is the neo-liberal world view also known as market fundamentalism. Free markets lead to free people, or so we’re told. Yet this isn’t what happened when the Chicago boys put Pinochet in power in Chile. And it’s the opposite of the so-called “Beijing consensus”: the surrender of political rights for economic growth and higher standards of living. Slavery is freedom.

Gray is concerned that the triumphalist idea of freedom as destiny, that history is on the side of liberal values worldwide, makes it harder to deal with the world as it is. “Coping with that world requires realistic thinking of a kind that the liberal mind, as it exists today, is incapable of.” But you have to wonder who believes this liberal myth. George W. Bush was one of its biggest cheerleaders during his presidency, seeing the spread of freedom and democracy not only as America’s mission but as divine providence. (Example: “The momentum of freedom in our world is unmistakable – and it is not carried forward by our power alone. We can trust in that greater power Who guides the unfolding of the years. And in all that is to come, we can know that His purposes are just and true.”) But this was freedom out of the barrel of a gun, and the only form of democracy being promoted was one that gave cover to governments friendly to American interests. Or take as another example today’s digital oligarchs and the mantra “information wants to be free.” Only if it’s other people’s freedom, says the fine print. Google isn’t giving anything away.

I know it’s become a slippery word, especially in American politics, but it still makes you wonder: Just what is a real liberal anyway?