Blogging Volumes

Alright, it’s actually just our algorithm. But stick with us. This will be a trip. Clickbait is something our platform specialises in, so we’re sorry, but we couldn’t help ourselves. We don’t really have a space programme.  Keep reading though, because we’ve got something even better . Firstly, let me explain our business model. At Facebook, these days, we view ourselves less as a social media company and more of a mining company. And here, we mine the most valuable, sustainable resource on the planet: consumer data. ‘Consumer data’ is any information we collect about the people who use our services. It includes (but is certainly not limited to) their date of birth, relationship status, everything they view on-site and how long they view it for, their entire history of private messages, their private spoken conversations, the majority of their browser history even when they’re not on Facebook, all of their photos, videos… You get the picture. Gold, oil and diamonds have got nothing...

In cribbage, a ‘nineteen hand’ is an impossible hand. It’s also, commonly, the term for a hand that makes zero points. Now, I’ve never played cribbage, but I feel like turning nineteen in 2020 is life’s equivalent of an impossibly unlucky ‘nineteen hand’. Sure, there have always been bad times to turn nineteen. In Vietnam, for one, the average age of the combat soldier was (n-n-n-n-)nineteen, as Paul Hardcastle has told us. And obviously, as a young person, I’m much less likely to be seriously affected by the coronavirus than someone aged nine ty (although, if I do get a bad case of covid, medical research suggests I’ll be feeling the effects of it for the rest of my life). But I’ve been thinking about the number nineteen nonetheless, prompted by the cosmic coincidence of ‘Covid- 19 ’ spreading worldwide in the year of my nineteenth birthday, and it’s led me in many directions. Firstly, it’s led me backwards; nineteen years ago, two planes crashed into the world trade center, and set...