By contrast, the sludge-brained anomie of stoner noir is just what it looks like: the rudderless yawing of youth culture on the morning after the ‘60s. It’s the numb realization that the tide that carried in the counterculture’s utopian dreams and cries for social justice has ebbed away, leaving the windblown scum of Altamont and My Lai, the Manson murders and the Zodiac Killer. Stoner noir stares back at you with the awful emptiness of the black-hole eyes in a Smiley Face. Have a Nice Decade. As late as the mid-‘70s, the iconography of rebellion®, at least in the tract-home badlands of Southern California, was a politically lobotomized version of hippie: the bootleg records, blacklight posters, underground comix, patchouli oil, and drug paraphernalia retailed at the local head shop.

But stoner noir isn’t just the burned-out roach of ‘60s youth culture. It’s equally the toxic mental runoff of suburban sprawl: dirthead existentialism. It’s the psychological miasma that hung, like the sweetly rotten reek of Thai stick, over adolescent psyches battered by divorce, lives dead-ended in high school, torpid afternoons bubbled away in a Journey to the Bottom of the Bong. Stoner noir is the default mindset of teenage wasteland: life seen through a glass pipe, darkly. 

The scene was always the same: 

INT. SOMEBODY’S BEDROOM – DAY.

The curtains are drawn against the radioactive desert light---and prying eyes. The fake-wood-paneled walls are festooned with photos of arena-rock gods from Circus or Creem. Or maybe an M.C. Escher calendar. Or the poster that came with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, a strenuously “trippy” photo of the Great Pyramid of Giza, eerily phosphorescent in infra-red. Or the bodacious fantasy art of Boris Vallejo, the Caravaggio of the roach-clip crowd: mighty thewed barbarians and valkyries in brass bras striking spraddle-legged attitudes against tequila-sunrise skies---core samples of the stoner unconscious, lovingly airbrushed onto bubble-windowed vans everywhere. Inevitably, Farrah Fawcett is somewhere up there, in the pin-up that launched a million ejaculatory arcs of transcendence, to paraphrase Camille Paglia. (For whatever inscrutable reason, the bony, Coppertoned Farrah always had the opposite effect on this writer: that Velociraptor smile made my undercarriage retract in fear). Just as inevitably, the parents aren’t home because parents were never home, in those days.

The cartoonist Charles Burns captures the mood in his stoner-noir masterpiece, Black Hole, a graphic novel about teen angst set at the cultural pivot point in the mid-‘70s “when it wasn’t exactly cool to be a hippie anymore, but Bowie was still just a little too weird.” In an interview, Burns recalled the era with a shudder: “To be sitting in a room for four hours listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon get played over and over, and sitting around with a bunch of guys for hours and hours, is horrific to me.” 

Horrific not only because of the No Exit claustrophobia of those pot-hazed afternoons, but because of the creeping fear that anything could happen. The pot-fueled paranoia, together with the passive-aggressive “hassling”---jockeying for social dominance disguised as joking---made for a charged atmosphere, the feeling that the afternoon might end with the ritual sacrifice of the resident dorkwad. Say you love Satan! Even worse, nothing might happen---and always did, while time slowed to a crawl and Bonham’s drum solo, on The Song Remains the Same, thumped on forever. 

Stoner noir is the feeling I get when I think of those years---of the hulking pothead in my junior-high art class, a hopeless fuck-up with a frizzed-out bowl cut who giggled perversely while showing me the grape-sized clot in his vein. (He later committed suicide, to no one’s shock and awe.) Or the shag-haired troll with the perpetually red-rimmed eyes and Goofy Grape grin who was always sneaking off, into the chaparral-covered scrubland just off campus, to smoke a bowl in a secluded fort. 

Fort: a teenage hideaway in the arroyos that snaked between suburban developments. In his essay “Teenage Head: Confessions of a High School Stoner,” the cultural critic and fellow Southern Californian Erik Davis, mythologizes these secluded nooks as Temporary Autonomous Zones, pockets of adolescent resistance to the parental-academic complex: 

[P]ot taught us the guerilla art of concealment, of disappearing into the fractal curves in the landscape: pockets of sagebrush, sandstone, and pine that have since been almost entirely obliterated by the tumorous development endemic to Southern California. Secret forts became stoner zones... Like some pied piper of Pan, marijuana leads kids to places gone to seed---vacant lots, stream beds, canyons, underpasses, boundary zones where landscape becomes imaginative clay, suddenly collectivized in the ritual trinity of substance, vessel, and flame. 

For a lit junkie like me, alienated from the brain-dead whoah-dude-ism of stoner culture, forts were quintessential stoner noir---creepy, shadowed glades, cloaked by tumbleweeds and wild fennel, that seemed darkly luminous with the paranormal aura of bad things waiting to happen. One summer day, I rode my Stingray alone, through the scrub-covered back country, out where our stucco-box sprawl lapped at the wild edge of canyon country. And stumbled on the remains of somebody’s secret hideout, a trash-strewn lair camouflaged on all sides by a thicket of wild grass, high as my sixth-grade eyebrows. The heat was incandescent, the air close. The silence stretched taut, waiting for a twig to snap. When a gust of wind kicked up, I shivered, suddenly aware of the sweat that glued my T-shirt to my back---and of the miles between me and my parents, who had no idea where I was because parents never did, in those days. 

Planet Xeno. I don’t remember who came up with the name. But that’s what we called it... To get there, you had to climb a steep ravine and then make your way along thin trails through mud and stickers... Once you got there, it was beautiful. Huge trees hanging overhead, white light filtering through the branches... It was like being in a cocoon...a soft insulated green world...the perfect place to get stoned. That is, until all of the weird shit started coming down.  

— Charles Burns, Black Hole

Stoner noir.

Tellingly, Black Hole’s back-cover endpaper is a bad-trip flashback to your high-school yearbook: the perky girl with the Dorothy Hammill bob, her neck bulging with golfball-sized goiters; the guy flashing a ghastly rictus of a smile, so hideously long in the tooth he looks like a decomposed corpse; the girl with insect mandibles sprouting from her forehead. It’s a reprise of protagonist Keith Pearson’s nightmare, in which he’s being teased by his stoned buddies. “You’re not gonna believe what we found!,” one guy crows. “Check it out! It’s your yearbook!” Holding it open, he thrusts the book into Pearson’s face. “And look! It’s got pictures of all your friends! Hah! Hah! Hah! Hah!” Before our eyes, the faces in the thumbnail portraits morph into creepshow horrors.

Facebook returns us to the adolescent psychology of high school, a regression writ small in the site’s insistence on the cringe-inducing use of the noun “friend” as a verb when the perfectly serviceable “befriend” is readily at hand. 

When I wondered aloud why a total stranger from my hometown wanted to Friend me, given that, back in the dear dead days of high school, we weren’t even passing acquaintances, she opened the bilge-cocks of her soul: 

Yes, I realize we never “knew” each other personally, but I, like you, was curious which alumni were a part of this social-networking site. Also, living with a disability, and not able to work because the work-world is prejudiced against hiring someone with a disability (except for those who are mentally challenged, which I AM NOT), I find the social-networking sites enjoyable to connect with old friends (high school and college---yes, I am a college-graduated individual). I apologize for sounding hostile, but I get very rattled when someone questions why I choose to sit in front of a computer 20 or so hours a day...

Forget I spoke.

Another Facebook moment: Someone’s rattling my mailbox. What brings him knocking, I’m curious to know? Pleading early onset Alzheimer’s, I ask if we’ve met before. We’ve never met, he replies. Maybe he’s read one of my books? Naw, he writes, he doesn’t really have a clue who I am or what I do; he just mails “everybody,” at random.

Here’s one for the specimen jar: A stranger comes calling. “You’ll forgive me,” I write, “but I can’t recall where—if?—we’ve met. How do we know each other?” He’s an alumnus from my college, it turns out, though not in my class. Even so, he remembers a poetry reading I gave, “a very impressive performance as I recall.” Weeks go by. One morning, my Inbox is pelted by messages he’s broadcasting to his friends. “Why am I being cc’d on this?,” I ask. He’s quick with his reply: “Why are you such a grouchy prick? That’s how I remembered you...” 

Am I a grouchy prick? Maybe. Or maybe my definition of “friend” is anachronistic, founded on the superannuated assumption that we reach out to people with whom we feel (or felt) some affinity; that our social networks grow organically, rooted in a mutual desire to connect (or re-connect) and twined around common interests or consonant sensibilities, if not a shared history. It’s out of joint with Facebook’s Phantom Zone, a being-in-nothingness where disembodied strangers pluck at other strangers’ sleeves for no reason whatsoever. Or because they’re curious about people they never knew. Or only knew from afar and now want to know up close, even if they always were grouchy pricks. Was the world a better place, I wonder, when everyone lived in Spoon River or Winesburg, Ohio or Holcomb, Kansas, and friendships that outlived their usefulness died and stayed dead? 

Of course, our inescapably connected age has its virtues. On rare occasion, a table-rap from the great beyond—a Facebook “Friend Request”—reminds you, out of the blue, of someone you were inordinately fond of but had lost touch with. Usually, though, that spectral hand tugging on your lapel is someone you didn’t know at all. Yes, he went to your high school. But your paths never crossed—for good reason, likely. Nonetheless, he feels inclined to “friend” you, perhaps to pad his roll call of friends, despite the unhappy example of the New York Times writer Hal Niedzviecki who, “absurdly proud of how many cyberpals, connections, acquaintances and even strangers [he’d] managed to sign up,” invited his Facebook Friends to hoist a jar at his favorite bar. Out of 700 hundred, one showed. 

Recently, on Facebook, I ran into someone I hadn’t seen since his last day at the college we’d both attended, an afternoon curling and bleaching in my memory like an old Polaroid, tinged by one of those apocalyptic L.A. sunsets, not to mention the Maxfield Parrish colors switched on by the magic mushrooms we’d eaten. 

A lifetime later, the rapport was instant, as if we’d never left that lost world, him telling me about his life as an ER doctor, mesmerizing me with war stories from his big-city MASH unit: 

A bunch of gang shootings a month ago or so, one shot in leg, shattered tibia, one shot in chest, never even made it to ER, and one shot in back of head with .22, very sad, 17 years old, came in still breathing but dead eyes. (If someone is brain injured but not dead, their eyes will respond to light with pupillary constriction, they may be disconjugate, meaning one eye looking this way and the other eye another way, they may be rolled back, or both looking to one side, but you can see the struggle going on. The lids still try to protect the eyes. Dead eyes have dilated pupils, they are relaxed, looking forward, the lids no longer protect, and may be open.) 

Jump-started by Facebook and revved by a three-hour phone conversation, our renewed friendship peeled out of the pit, then...stalled into silence. 

Frequent and fervent at first, our Facebook exchanges grew gradually more sporadic and finally subsided altogether. Was our instant intimacy some sort of Rapture of the Deep, an artifact of online social interaction? Does the veiled nature of e-mail or Facebook chat have a disinhibiting effect, like the grille in a confessional? If that sense of connection, after all those years, was genuine---convincing evidence that the seeds of something profound were sown, on that supersaturated afternoon way back when---then why did it tail off? Is it even possible to sustain a hydroponic friendship, uprooted from our everyday lives? Once the first flush of all that catching-up fades, what’s a Facebook friendship’s reason for being---to peg the currency of memory to the gold standard of the present? To prove we’re not one-dimensional inhabitants of Facebook’s Flatland, breezily discarding the instant “friends” of a few dozen mails ago?

Then again, isn’t the objectification of friendship---the reduction of our social networks to so much social capital, indexed to the headcount in our Friends list---an inescapable part of what Facebook does? 

Certainly, it X-rays our onsite social lives, rendering our stated “likes and interests,” along with any Facebook pages we connect to---including those expressing support for, or opposition to, controversial issues such as gay marriage, abortion rights, and the decriminalization of marijuana---instantly visible to, say, potential employers or the feds, whom the Electronic Frontier Foundation suspects are using social networking sites for “investigations, data-collection, and surveillance.” Moreover, Facebook commodifies our personal information, serving it up to data miners and targeted advertisers. 

When such revelations came to light in the newsmedia this April, many users were sorely troubled. But Facebookers who were shocked---shocked!---by the site’s blithe disregard for their demographic details and true confessions hadn’t been paying attention. In March ’09, Facebook announced that, henceforth, it would “own” all user content; in January 2010, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg airily dismissed civil libertarian concerns, noting that “people don’t want privacy.” As the Web developer Tim Spalding noted on Twitter, “Why do free social networks tilt inevitably toward user exploitation? Because you’re not their customer, you’re their product.” 

Then again, as the tech journalist Wagner James Au pointed out in a Boing Boing comment thread, “most people are willing to sacrifice some privacy in exchange for greater and deeper social connectivity. Or to put it another way, since Facebook makes it much easier for you to find and connect with a long lost friend or family member on the Internet, do you really care all that much that the ads on the sidebar were precisely targeted at you?” 

Personally, I abhor the mind-gouging visual cacophony of Facebook’s interface, its brazen disrespect for my privacy (including those privacy bugs that made users’ live chats public), and, not incidentally, the company’s ideological ties to the right. As I write this, four NYU computer science students have generated $171,093 in donations via the fundraising site Kickstarter to fund the creation of Diaspora*, a distributed social-networking site that will grant users “full control of your online identity.” 

The group’s Kickstarter proposal reads like a fist-thumping, to-the-barricades manifesto for the age of social networking:

We believe that privacy and connectedness do not have to be mutually exclusive. With Diaspora, we are reclaiming our data, securing our social connections, and making it easy to share on your own terms. We think we can replace today’s centralized social web with a more secure and convenient decentralized network. [...] As more and more of our lives and identities become digitized..., the convenience of putting all of our information in the hands of companies on “the cloud” is training us to casually sacrifice our privacy and fragment our online identities. But why is centralization so much more convenient, even in an age where relatively powerful computers are ubiquitous? Why is there no good alternative to centralized services that [come] with “spying for free?”

The minute these guys launch, I am so out of here.  

Meanwhile, Friend Requests from the restless dead of 1978---the shag-haired, bong-loaded Banquos of my high school class---keep coming. 

My Inbox pings. 

Too perfectly, it’s someone from my dear dead high-school days, from the class a year behind me, yet another Someone I Never Knew, who has Added Me as a Friend on Facebook, and Needs Me to Confirm That I Knew Her in Order for Us to be Friends on Facebook. 

I find myself thinking of Raymond Chandler, an almost pathologically private man who would have found abhorrent the transparency of our fishbowl selves, the awful, grabby neediness of our compulsively social age. 

Yet Chandler was a conundrum: a confirmed misanthrope and inveterate recluse, he was haunted, late at night, by his self-imposed loneliness, which he warded off with a bottle of gin and a Dictaphone, composing letters to exorcize “that horrid blank feeling of not having anybody to talk or listen to.” A difficult man (“my character is an unbecoming mixture of outer diffidence and inward arrogance”), he found epistolary friendship more congenial than face-to-face interaction. “I don’t quite know why you are so close to my heart, but you are,” he wrote to a female friend. “In some mysterious way you have put me inside of you, so that I have to lie awake at night and worry about you—you a girl I have never seen. Why? The older you get, the less you know...” 

Even in his despairing last years, after his wife had died, he shrank from human contact. “All my best friends I have never seen,” he wrote to one correspondent. “To know me in the flesh is to pass on to better things.” Maybe Facebook would have helped? 

— Mark Dery

A substantially shorter version of this essay originally appeared in Cabinet magazine, issue 36, Winter 2009/10. Layout derived from Facebook's stylesheet as of May, 2010.

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• Algernon Charles Swinburne, “The Garden of Proserpine” (1866), archived at The Poetry Foundation The Poetry Foundation.

• Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder” in Raymond Chandler: Later Novels and Other Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1995), p. 990.

• Charles Burns, Black Hole (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), front jacket flap copy.

• Edward Champion, “Interview with Charles Burns,” Edward Champion’s “Reluctant Habits,” January 22, 2008,  Edrants

• Erik Davis, “Teenage Head: Confessions of a High School Stoner,” originally published in The Village Voice, June 22, 1993,  Techgnosis.

• Charles Burns, Black Hole (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), unnumbered page.

• Hal Niedzviecki, “Facebook in a Crowd,” The New York Times, October 24, 2008 NYT

• Kurt Opsahl, “Updated: Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information,” Deeplinks Blog, Electronic Frontier Foundation website, April 19th, 2010,  EFF

• See “FOIA: Social Networking Monitoring,” under “Our Work,” EFF website,  EFF

• Rubenr, “Facebook’s Anti-Privacy Monopoly,” DeObfuscate, May 3, 2010,  De-obfuscate

• “LibraryThingTim (Tim Spalding),” Twitter, May 1, 2010, 11:04 P.M.,  Twitter

• W. James Au, Comment #20 in Xeni Jardin, “Infographic: Facebook's ‘anti-privacy monopoly,’” May 3, 2010, 7:02 P.M.,  Boing Boing

• See Tom Hodgkinson, “With friends like these...,” The Guardian, January 14, 2008. Guardian

• Maxwell Salzberg, “Decentralize the Web with Diaspora,” Kickstarter.com,  Guardian

• The Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nonfiction, 1909-1959, ed. Tom Hiney and Frank MacShane (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000), p. 125.

• Ibid., p. 101.

• Ibid., p. 243.

• Ibid., p. 84.