Last Post of the Social Media Feed
Duncan refreshed the feed again. Nothing new loaded.
That was the way things were now. His feed had been stale for the past year.
He navigated to the ‘Connections’ page. He had a dozen friends. Their profile images were frozen in time, a reminder of how they used to look. Many hadn’t been updated in decades, giving him a look at them again before they turned gray and wrinkled like him.
Susan had posted a photo a year ago where she was sitting on a beach on Titan. Samson received a bottle of whiskey, aged for fifty years, as a birthday gift. Duncan wasn’t sure if he ever managed to finish it. Beth had a photo of her newborn great-granddaughter. That was the newest one.
He had lived a long life, over a century, with these close group of friends. They had done everything together and shared everything. This social media feed was like a collective diary, of everyone’s life lived and celebrated together.
Now he was the only one left. The algorithm was designed to find new content for perpetual usage, yet it didn’t know what to do with him. There were only memories now. The live feed would be an empty spicket.
A popup window appeared suddenly, interrupting his thoughts. “Suggestions for you” it seemed to scream at him in a large bold font. It had scanned his network, offering new people to befriend. He recognized half of them: distant neighbors and relatives he met once. A few were AI companions designed to satiate a person’s need for friendship.
He remembered one woman in particular. She ran the local solar farm co-op. She seemed nice. He thought about the posts she’d share, of new kinds of vegetables they were growing and a life still being lived.
Then his finger recoiled before he could click the _Follow_ button.
To follow her... it felt like he’d be replacing his friends with new ones. He’d bury his friends again, this time under a stream of contemporary posts. Their profiles and their data would be moved into a deep archive and he wouldn’t see them anymore.
He thought about how Samson hated the taste of whiskey when they snuck it after baseball practice, and how Beth’s charming laugh was silenced by a supervirus just a few days after the photo was captured.
Duncan took a deep breath and then swiped the suggestion box away.
No, the feed was not actually empty. It remained as a monument for him to remember, and to honor them. He was their last connection and he couldn’t break their trust.
“Refresh feed,” he whispered.
The phone processed his command, thinking for a second before returning with a chipper “No new posts.”
“That’s good,” Arthur closed his eyes. “Very good.”