Dear Mark Zuckerberg: My Friend Died

Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

I am writing to let you know that my friend L. died. Technically, L. was my editor—one of my very first editors at the New York Times—but we liked each other, and we were connected on your platforms, so in the world you created we were, indeed, friends.

Yesterday I went to her memorial—a “secular shiva” held at her father’s place in the East 50s. I didn’t really know what to expect, since most of my friends, family, and acquaintances are still somehow around. Would there be wailing? Would I, arriving late, be the only mourner? Would my lack of deep connection to L. be viewed with skepticism? But up on the sixth floor, I walked into one of those lovely, old-school Manhattan apartments whose walls are covered with paintings, and I relaxed: This was a cozy, convivial space so jammed with people—friends, colleagues, an ex-husband—that I never made it more than about 10 feet from the entryway.

I spoke to the first person with whom I made eye contact—A., a documentary filmmaker with artsy eyeglasses—and he introduced me to the ex-husband, who called over L.’s father when he walked by and introduced us. L.’s father asked me to share a memory of his daughter, and I recalled how, on my first story for her, she’d at first questioned the litany of references in my lede graf—from Edith Wharton and Claus von Bülow to Paxil and Mark Crispin Miller—but ultimately, and cheerfully, let me keep them all in. For a fledging writer, this faith meant everything. It’s been almost 20 years ago, and I haven’t forgotten it.

The last time I saw L., I told her dad, was five years ago in the Berkshires, at Tourists Welcome, a renovated motel in North Adams that is one of my favorite hotels in the world. It was the morning, and we’d each just emerged from our rooms at almost precisely the same moment, and we had that wonderful, exciting shock of recognition: It’s you! We didn’t talk long, we each had things to do that day, but we shared our love of the motel, and I was glad to see she was the same casual, enthusiastic person I remembered. Sometimes you don’t need much more than that from friends—just a reminder that you both exist and that you both remain connected, still, across the sketchy sands of time and space.

As I spoke with people at the shiva, it began to feel more like a typical New York party: We’d start off sharing memories of L. and then, of course, talk about work. What else can you do in the face of tragedy but revert to the comforts of trope? Naturally, there were a lot of other writers, editors, artists, and media people there—including another of my Times editors, S., who was L.’s boss way back when—and they complained about discussed their jobs and I complained about discussed mine, and we talked about travel plans (what’s good in Vienna these days?), and we laughed quite a bit, which felt strange at such an officially sad occasion, and I may even have promoted the existence of this very newsletter. What can I say? It’s on my mind all the damn time. Anyway, I didn’t feel so bad a few minutes later, when I had left and was waiting in the hallway for the elevator: A., the documentarian with the cool glasses, followed me out, announced he was having his first photography show, at a Lower East Side gallery, and said I seemed like the kind of person who’d be into it. He handed me a promotional postcard. I may have come with Trying! in mind, but A. brought postcards. The circle of life continues.

I’m telling you all of this, Mark Zuckerberg, because I learned of L.’s death on Facebook. S., the other Times editor, had posted it there, along with the details about the shiva, at 8:36 a.m. on Friday morning. His post was short and simple, adorned with a poorly lit photo of L. and another of their mutual friends. As I write this now, 35 people have reacted to it with the usual variety of mourning emoji (Sad, Like, Care), and there are 25 comments below, including one from me. These figures, it seems to me, are a little low given the number of people with whom both S. and L. were connected, both online and off. What’s with your algorithm? Did I just get lucky in spotting S.’s post among the ads and AI slop and Reels I never want to watch? How many others who knew L. miss it entirely? What’s the point of the platform anymore?

Let’s be clear: I have loved Facebook as much as, or maybe more than, anyone out there. You opened it up to non-academic users just at the right time: I was beginning to travel the world far and wide as a writer, and I was meeting people and making new friends wherever I landed. I was collecting their email addresses and phone numbers, so we could stay in touch, but that, I think we all knew, was going to lead to only very occasional contact. I would email or text when I needed something or was coming to town, and them likewise. The time and energy it takes to maintain an email relationship with someone are not insignificant. You think and write, write and think, digest what the other person has thought and written, and, when you find a moment, you respond as best you can. This, as you say in Silicon Valley, does not scale.

But Facebook let us scale friendships across borders and time zones. Each new person I added to my friend list brought me joy: Here was someone I liked whose life I could now easily follow, from the big moments (marriage, children, book launches) to the insignificant observations and commentaries that sprang into their heads and onto my screen. I might not have much to say about any of that, or I might, but that was not important. The important thing was that I knew a little more of their narrative—what they were going through every day. And they could know about mine: what I was thinking, eating, reading, watching; where I was going next. I could not have done my job, or lived the life I did, without the friendship network Facebook allowed me to build.

Throughout that time, so many people have decried that kind of “friendship” as cheap and superficial: Who are these friends you never see, whom you know only through their breakfast photos and inane political rants? But that, I think, gets friendship wrong. As much as we want our friendships to be defined by frequent meetings and deep conversations, often what we need is just to stay up on the little things—the new shoes as much as the new spouse. By keeping track of the quotidian, we keep ourselves prepared for the moments of deeper connection, though they may come only once every few years. Because when they do come—when I’m visiting your Japanese village or you’ve just read a book you know I’ll love and we need to talk about it—we’ll feel like we still know each other on more than a historical level: We are friends, we have remained friends, and we won’t ever have to have those awkward chats where we try to “catch up” and realize we know nothing about each other anymore because at least I know that L.V. completed another triathlon and S.L. made brown-butter mafaldine with king crabmeat for dinner the other night.

This was the brilliance of your creation: It allowed scaled-up friendships through the magic of continuous partial connection. But that has now come to an end. I’ll leave it to other writers to enumerate the choices you and your colleagues made—from missteps and miscalculations to laziness, insult, and greed—that brought us to this point. Me, I just want to let you know how things are now, from my point of view as a frequent user of the product.

We use it less and less these days, and we want to use it even less. You may think of us as gleeful haters who don’t get what you’re trying to do here and who delight in defying you, but that’s not us at all. We retreat with a kind of sadness, because we remember what Facebook was and what it could have become. I can’t tell you how many times in the last few years I’ve wanted to post something—something minor, an observation about Brooklyn or a link to a story I read and liked—but just decided not to. Would anyone see it? Would anyone care? People who know me probably still consider me a frequent poster, but I’m becoming a lurker, scrolling in hopes of catching a stray blip of information about a friend but mostly just skipping past pretty images (space! nature!) from accounts I don’t and won’t follow, idiotic memes from meme accounts, mistargeted ads (whose sponsored I diligently Hide), and AI fakery. And the more I lurk, the less I have to say. I don’t know, maybe I’m saving it for this newsletter.

It’s been a little different the past week, with the fires in Los Angeles pushing people back onto Facebook to show their networks of friends the devastation, to let everyone know if they’re all right or not, to raise money for firefighters, for pet shelters, for housing for the displaced. I will admit to having stared, open-mouthed, at minutes-long Facebook videos of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, all the homes but a handful turned to ash.

You might argue that the visibility of these posts proves that your system is working as intended, but to me it says the opposite: We don’t want this only in times of crisis! I want to see my friends, all of them, all across the world, every single day, even when nothing catastrophic is befalling them. I like them, and I miss them.

Instead, every day a few more of them leave the world you’ve created entirely. Some do it with a sign-off post—which I might miss, because who knows whether your algorithm will show it to me?—while others do it silently. I don’t even know that they’re gone, because they’ve already been so erased by the platform that I’d forgotten they were there to begin with. And yet they do remain in my memory, and when their names do leap into my head and I wonder what they’ve been up to, I see they last posted in 2018 or 2022, and all that persists of their presence is memories others have shared: a photo of a group meal in 2014, a grown child dropped off at college, the time they ran into each other at the dog park. As our Facebook friends vanish, we share these memories more and more, because they’re often all that’s left of the human beings we love but cannot see in person as much as we’d like, or sometimes at all. Their quiet departures are like miniature deaths: sudden, mysterious, irrevocable. Those of us who stick around Facebook live in a cemetery surrounded by the tombs of people we are sure continue somehow to exist, but beyond our sight, their lives—their snacks and shoes and streaming video preferences—forever outside our knowledge. They are the digital ghosts of living bodies. They are, or were, our friends, and we miss them. And when they do finally die IRL, how will I find out? When I die, how will they know? And where will we all mourn? 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: Obōz

I love hiking, but I hate heavy-ass boots. Obōz, out of Bozeman, Montana, ain’t that: They’re light, rugged, and comfortable, and seem to last forever. I’ve got a pair—and so do Jean, Sasha, and Sandy. We’re a goddamn Obōz family. Check them out.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt