Thursday, March 14, 2013

Downcast Emo Kids, Computer Algorithms, and the United States Constitution

I've been on Facebook for a few years now, and if you have too, then you know that that means I've seen my fair share of pictures with words on them.  Some try to be funny; some are utterly saccharine; most attempt to boil down some complicated social issue into, at most, a single sentence.  I don't think I'm alone in saying that I never thought I'd learn something from one of these pictures; today, though, I discovered I was wrong to think that way.

Yes, thanks to whatever algorithms Facebook uses to arrange the posts on my newsfeed, this image...

...was immediately followed by this image:


Ladies and gentlemen, today I learned that the US Government is a shaggy-haired emo kid, and that the asinine break-up poem scrawled in the back of his school planner is actually the Constitution.  Makes you think.