Really, it's the most natural thing for someone like me to write about. After all it's a big bucket; music, tv, movies, all things Internet...I could just yap about my job (if I bothered to get one) and the zany goings on there, and even that would qualify, since a huge part of our culture revolves around what we do for a living and how we feel about it.

And the way we feel about things is a commodity right now, make no mistake. I've spent enough time in marketing-related industries to know that any insight we're willing to give away is like crack for brand managers, campaign runners, and marketing metrics nerds. They can't get enough of this stuff. They've even got crazy names for it like lifecycle forecasting and attitudinal data. Nope, not kidding. Attitudinal – man, where I'm from, a guy might just get his ass kicked for using a word like that.

But it makes perfect sense. The more adenoidal (or whatever) data they've got, the more raw material they have to predictably manipulate our senses, and ultimately the way we behave, on and offline. Now this sounds more cynical than I intend, but it's hard to talk about this stuff without pointing out the obvious; marketers want and need us to behave predictably. That's how they sell us shit, and without that, the whole capitalism thing kind of grinds to a halt, for better or worse. (Better, if you’d enjoy spending your days bartering, say, farm-fresh eggs for, gee, I dunno, drywall? Worse, if you enjoy Saturday afternoon trips to Target for things like DVD's, cheap underwear and Swiffers. Hey, I'm not here to judge. I'm for all that stuff.)

Of course, a huge playground for abdominal (or whatever) data-collection is Facebook. And the majority of us in The Cult of Eff are happy to supply said data all day and night - it's what Facebook's all about. I Like this, I Comment on that. I Share this, I Subscribe to Them. That's attitude baby, and so what? The whole idea is to let people know what you do or do not dig, agree with, listen to, care about, or otherwise buy.

But here's what I like to do. 

I like to drive through Cambridge with all my windows down, un-ironically blasting late-era KISS tunes as though they are completely relevant in this Fox News, America's Got Talent-driven culture of ours.  And they are relevant. Why? Because Paul Stanley fuckin RULES and I say so. I say it loudly, through the wide-open windows of a 2005 Honda Element, and that, my friends, is what it really means to Like something, old school, analog-style.

This is what the world used to be. You knew something was hot when you heard it spiraling out of someones car, infecting the masses, making asses shake, fists pump, and square people sweaty and uncomfortable. It's a true measure of relevance - not a collection of passive/aggressive clicks or quips hidden behind a Facebook persona - when a guy in a car, so totally taken over by a tune that's just kicking his ass, absolutely wants to, needs to, has to share it with anyone within shouting distance.

And you can bet your two-tone Vuarnet shades that I'm scanning the rock-deprived populace for telltale signs that someone out there identifies with the stone-cold, teenage-mania inducing anthem that is my gift to the Davis Square throng. Cuz that's the good stuff, right at the heart of being alive and communing at an emotional, visceral level. Identity. Belonging. Broadcasting something primal and seeing if you get a reaction, an unconscious bobbing of the head, or a full-on thumbs up from a total stranger.

It's about being part of a movement, or creating a new one.

But it's not measurable, and noone wants to hear that crap anyway, Jeff! Yeah, yeah. I know. KISS is a big joke, laugh it up, but know this: more gold-certified records than any other American band, and that was before the Internet even existed.

Measurable, attitudinal data. Hrm. Does any of the data we're trading in exchange for virtual community really measure up to the horny throb of Runnin' with the Devil pouring out of a T-top Trans-Am? Are we sharing what we feel, or are we sharing to feel? I gotta know, does the Like button really have enough juice to replace windows down, volume up?

in terms of minute-by-minute convenience, maybe so. But I think these public, searchable mediums of self-expression promote a kind of sterilizing behavioral interference that belies our most valuable - our truest - selves. And that's just got to compromise the abominable (or whatever) data, doesn't it?

I've mentioned KISS and Paul Stanley in this post a few times, but no matter what Google thinks, that doesn't mean I want to buy any KISS merchandise right now (Well, I might). And just because I followed your lead and listened to Chickenfoot on Spotify doesn't mean I'll keep on trucking over to Amazon to buy Sammy Hagar's autobiography (already have it). Now, you might deduce that - strictly attitudinally speaking - I'm inclined to favor late-seventies arena rock artists. But if you want to separate me from the twenty bucks in my wallet, you're gonna have to do something pretty provocative (and this usually translates to expensive) with that data. 

However, if you can actually catch me in my car rocking out in real time to something that sounds like Pyromania, that might just be the perfect opportunity to try and sell me an original Def Leppard tour program or a WKRP lunchbox. Because in that moment, I am all in, brothers and sisters. 

I am all in.

Sleepless.

It's two in the morning. My 5-year-old daughter has been in school exactly one week, and she's already brought home a lovely collection of drawings, handwriting worksheets, and the requisite headcold, which is now keeping me awake, along with the surprisingly annoying pitterpat of rain on asphalt and a Sudafed-induced psychedelia of voices and images swirling 'round my poor, stuffy skull.

I'm a bit of a worrier, and at my age and life stage (the two aren't exactly in synch thanks to my spending all of my twenties and, yes, even some of my thirties trying to be a professional musician) there's plenty of nourishment for the big green monster loving in Binkley's Anxiety Closet. Still, I was somewhat shocked - enough so to prop myself up and subject my watery eyes to the microwave blaze of the iPad - to discover I was not only lying awake, suffering the indignities of late-night snot and Psuedoephedrine night terrors, I was also sweating the increasing burden and exponential, existential complexity of Facebook.

So long had I been meditating on this, flip flopping around in my bed like a sneezy fish the whole while, that I had formed an image in my mind of a stooped, naked human figure climbing uphill, struggling to keep ahold of a giant, stone, lower-case "f" that wobbled precariously atop his broad, scarred shoulders. 

Worse than the curious image of this prone man and his weighty alphabet was the knowledge that his is a voluntary burden. 

He's strong for having carried the monolithic Eff so far - yet his back is criss-crossed with the scars of social foibles past; regretful, embarrassing, and narcissistic status updates and unflattering photos his so-called friends had tagged him in, not to mention botched app requests that spammed everyone in the network he so cautiously and deliberately constructed out of family, friends, coworkers, and old highschool chums, all in the spirit of self publishing and habitual early adoption. 

He trucks The Eff uphill, always climbing, his legs bent under the weight of it. His knees pop and crackle and stinging sweat trickles into his eyes. This is effort, after all, The Cult of Eff demands a consistent degree of studious dedication. One must be expert in the ways of Quip & Snark, but one must also deftly intuit the delicate, ever-morphing Etiquette of Eff, because the abysmal threat of being someone who just doesn't get it is always there.

And he is naked, of course, because he's been stripped of his privacy. For all the personal boundaries he's been willing to set aside in the names of Transparency, Being Sociable, and plain old Good Fun, he's been awarded a set of tools so convoluted, so obviously, consciously designed to inspire apathy and avoidance, that he has simply forsaken them, leaving them behind to rust in the exposed desert of Unmanaged Settings where marketing buzzards and intel gathering bots conspire to dine upon our boy's increasingly public behaviors. 

Now, I realize this is all a bit dramatic, but I told you, I'm on drugs. 

The Cult of Eff 

For those of us paying attention this week, Facebook gave us an awful lot to think about. First, they made the same kind of glaring, in-yo-interface feature changes they always do, heedless of the consequences, and maybe rightly so. There is something admirable in the Fuck 'Em if They Don't Like It approach, I think. This ain't no IBM, after all, right? None of us signed up for this so we could enjoy quarterly, soothing, non-threatening bug fixes, did we? Hell no, we signed up because it was a wild frontier, a bold new take on what the Internet was for.

And while I'll admit to having a bug up my ass about the ticker, and it's clunky sidekick Sidebar, what Facebook unveiled this week is nothing short of visionary experience design. However, I'm not gonna get into evangelizing for Timeline, and Open Graph Apps & Verbs  - not just yet. 

What's nagging at me tonight - aside from terminal cotton-mouth and what seems to be a smallish bee taking up residence in my right nostril - is that Facebook claims to have 750 MILLION users, and an average 50 percent of that base logging in daily. All those people - all of us in The Cult of Eff - will have to work hard to add shape and texture to Facebook's vision, otherwise, they'll shape it for us. 

Furthermore, anyone really committed to Eff is going to put in some serious time making sure that what's being reflected as "Uniquely Me" is in any way accurate. I'm already playing around with the new developer tools, messing about with Timeline, experimenting with my new, WAY richer profile. My casual first impression is that all this new stuff that might someday be a super-transparent, passively personalizing artificial intelligence…well, right now it takes a lot of clicking on a whole lot of doodads to make the thing tick. 

Innocently, Facebook has always been about personal branding as a byproduct of social interaction. But when 750 million people are "into" personal brand, what does that even mean? It's one thing to have a personal brand - but it's another thing entirely to actively sculpt one, day in and day out, remotely, from an electronic box. I'm not judging, I'm obviously in this up to my tickly little nose hairs. But how do we wrap our heads around this evolutionary concept? This incredibly widespread, mainstream, workaday adoption of remote, detailed self expression reflects something important about us - but what? 

And it begs another question - why do so many of us willingly take on the burden?

Have you ever called someone out for having more style than substance? Even if you haven't, you probably get the idea. Some people spend a lot of time on appearances and not enough on the stuff that matters, the human stuff. Personal development. Talent cultivation. Experiential living. Trust. Love. Relationships.

On the one hand, it's easy to view all this Facebooking though the cynical lens of narcissistic self-gratification. I paint a picture of myself every day so you can listen to what I listen to, watch what I watch, and react to my opinions. Who? Me, that's who.

On the other hand (maybe it's the one clutching a damp Kleenex while I type), there's the more hopeful lens of creative self-exploration. I paint a picture of myself every day so I can understand myself better. I. 

Maybe one scenario feeds the other, and the contiguous relationship between Me and I is the secret sauce that's fueling the minions of the Cult of Eff.

Substance vs. style. Who I Really Am vs. My Facebook Profile. For 750 Million people, this just became a more complex proposition.