I look up from my book
and the classical music
I play for some peace
in our tiny condo
and muse, sad and guilty
that I am giving up
as the day my father
sold the black baby grand.

But then Horowitz
begins to play Moonlight Sonata
tentatively,

tenderly,
and suddenly we are
heart to heart.

I listen
over and over
trying to know
this man I’ll never meet.

Vlady,
play me the piano

and I will write you poems.

I’ve been watching with great amusement the Facebook Protest that is supposed to convince Mark Zuckerberg to give us our privacy back. The protesters plan to avoid logging into Facebook on June 6th, 2010.

What happens on June 7th? I guess they all log back in again.

What effect is this supposed to have? Beats me.

In fact, I think it sends a pretty clear message contrary to what they intend: It doesn’t matter how bad Facebook privacy gets and how angry it makes them, they’ll still come back.

If you’re looking for a cause that doesn’t wobble, check out the guys who are quitting Facebook on May 31st, 2010. And if you’re aware of anyone else who is taking swift, definitive action to send Facebook the message that we’re mad and we’re not going to take it anymore, please leave a comment so the rest of us can stand (or sit) with them, too.

And when was everyone planning to drink the privacy Koolaid? October 10th, 2010.

Let me state the obvious: joining a Facebook group to commit suicide means you’re still on Facebook. Over the months you’re waiting to do your profile in, Facebook will presumably continue to make things worse, sharing more and more of your data with god-knows-what third parties and the general public.

The other problem with the sometime-in-the-semi-distant-future suicide pact is that timing is everything. When you’re training your puppy not to piddle on the rug, or training your child not to hit his siblings, you know that consequences not immediately delivered are pointless.

If you want Zuckerberg to stop chewing on your privacy, do something now.

Deactivating your Facebook account does little to protect your privacy; while it may keep you from posting those drunken photos from future company Christmas parties, your data remains intact. It’s difficult to tell, and I can’t test it without opening an account, but the unwritten message is that data posted on others’ walls, groups, and fan pages will still be associated with your name unless you permanently delete the account. If you’re quitting Facebook to protect your reputation with future employers, for example, this doesn’t cut it.

Read the relevant sections of the privacy policy for yourself:

Deactivating or deleting your account. If you want to stop using your account you may deactivate it or delete it. When you deactivate an account, no user will be able to see it, but it will not be deleted. We save your profile information (connections, photos, etc.) in case you later decide to reactivate your account. Many users deactivate their accounts for temporary reasons and in doing so are asking us to maintain their information until they return to Facebook. You will still have the ability to reactivate your account and restore your profile in its entirety. When you delete an account, it is permanently deleted from Facebook. You should only delete your account if you are certain you never want to reactivate it. You may deactivate your account on your account settings page or delete your account on this help page.

Limitations on removal. Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users. However, your name will no longer be associated with that information on Facebook. (For example, if you post something to another user’s profile and then you delete your account, that post may remain, but be attributed to an “Anonymous Facebook User.”)

Deleting your account is fairly straightforward, but it does take 14 days to take effect. During that time, you must not log back in, even by accident, or you’ll have to start over.

It seems one of the ways Facebook continues to secure its user base of over 400 million is simply by making the option to leave so obscure that few know it exists. You may be free to leave at any time, but first you have to find the exit.

Facebook itself has no way of exporting contacts, so I was in the process of writing down the list of e-mail addresses and IM identities of all my friends. The day my husband told me how to import my Facebook contacts into Windows Live or Yahoo! Mail was the day I left.

The situation continues to devolve, with continual erosions to their users’ privacy, apps mysteriously installed without users’ knowledge and consent, and multiple accidental leaks of private data.

This morning, I thought to myself: Wouldn’t it be funny if at some point we learned that Facebook’s erosion of privacy was just some massive social psychology experiment?

Enter Stanley Milgram. In the early 1960′s, inspired by the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann as a war criminal, Milgram began conducting a series of experiments designed to examine obedience to authority. The experiment was clever, though by today’s standards considered highly unethical.

The subjects, initially all men, showed up for what they were told was an experiment on learning. There were three participants. The first was the experimenter, who wore a white lab coat. The second was the subject himself, who was always “randomly” assigned to the role of teacher. The third, a confederate of the experimenter pretending to be a subject, was “randomly” assigned the role of learner and taken to another room.

The conditions of the experiments vary, but in each condition, the teacher was asked by the experimenter to read pairs of words to the learner and then test him on his ability to complete the pair. Each time the learner supplied a wrong answer, the teacher was to give him an electrical shock that escalated in voltage with each wrong answer. The shocks began at 15 volts and increased in 15-volt increments up to 450 volts. Some of the shocks were also labelled: 75-120 volts as Moderate,  135-180 as Strong, 375-420  as Danger: Severe Shock, and 435 and 450 as XXX.

Of course, the learners never received these shocks. The shocks triggered a tape recorder that transmitted through the intercom. At 75 volts, the learner began to groan in pain. At 120 volts, the learner told the teacher, “Hey, this really hurts.” At 150 volts, “Experimenter! That’s all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart’s starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please. My heart’s starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out.” The learners’ pleas continued to escalate, until at 345 volts, there was silence.

If the subject protested or questioned whether he should continue, the experimenter told the subject, “Please continue,” then “The experiment requires that you continue,” then, “It is absolutely essential that you continue,” then, “You have no other choice, you must go on.” If the subject continued to protest, the experiment ended.

The experiment also ended after the teacher administered 450 volts three times.

In the initial experiment, all subjects went to 300 volts, and a remarkable 65% reached 375 volts, a voltage at which the learner had already stopped responding and which was marked as Danger: Severe Shock. Many were visibly distressed, even as they continued to administer greater and greater shocks.

What does this have to do with Facebook?

Very few of Milgram’s subjects would have agreed to administer the highest level of shocks had they been asked to do so at the outset. They’d have probably said to the experimenter, “Are you nuts? No way!” Likewise, few of us would have agreed to give up this much privacy at the outset if Facebook had asked for it. Instead, like a frog being brought to a boil, we’ve given it up, bit by bit. Our privacy is only dead because we’ve been led, 15 volts at a time, to administer the lethal shock.

Those 15 initial volts were the foot-in-the-door. Asked to comply with one small request, we become more willing to comply with later, greater requests. There’s another principle, that of sunk costs, that describes a similar phenomenon. The more we invest in something, the less likely we are to abandon it, even if to do so is in our best interests.

The most interesting condition of the many variations of the Milgram experiment was the one that gained the most compliance. When the subject was simply the one who read the list of words and another subject (actually a confederate of the experimenter) administered the shocks, compliance jumped to over 90%. The subjects, able to displace responsibility onto the person administering the shocks, absolved themselves of the responsibility of taking part. How many of us blame our friends for keeping us on Facebook?

The good news in all of this is that simply being aware of these social psychology principles inoculates us from continuing to make these errors. Think about it: If Facebook had started out asking this much of you, would you have complied?

Imagine painstakingly going over the alphabet again and again with your class when you already know how to read. Imagine practicing basic arithmetic day after day, long after you get it, but never moving on to more sophisticated math. Imagine the boredom, frustration, and apathy that sets in after a period of time. If you’re a quiet kid, you might just get depressed, feign sick to get out of class, or spend a lot of time looking out the window, daydreaming. Even though it’s easy, too easy, your work might suffer. If you’re a little antsier, you might play a practical joke or pick a fight, just to have something to do. Either your teacher gets angry with you for not paying attention or she gets angry with you for causing trouble.

Or imagine that your teacher notices how bored you are, and starts you on the next lesson while she works with the other kids. Maybe you’re not bored anymore, but it’s awfully lonely sitting in the corner by yourself, doing different work from the other kids all the time. Your teacher doesn’t have much time to answer your questions, and there’s no one else in class you can ask. Sometimes your teacher asks you to read to the other kids, or help them, and while it makes you proud at first, it gets tiresome after a while being responsible for everyone else. After all, you’re just a kid. When do you get to learn?

Your classmates are mostly good kids, nice kids, who make good trades at lunch, who try really hard in class, and who love a good joke and the Saturday morning cartoons the same as you do. They may be good friends, but there’s a gap there. You’ll never share the same experiences. They may never know what it’s like to finish high school or go to college, or to read a 300-page novel. They may be your friends and your classmates, but they’re not your peers.

Now slide that gap over, and imagine you’re the lone gifted kid in a class full of kids of average intelligence. It’s the same amount of difference, statistically speaking. It seems absurd that a child of average intelligence in a classroom of intellectually disabled kids wouldn’t immediately be pulled out of the class and put in a class with his or her peers, right? But that’s precisely what we do to gifted kids every day.

I was that kid. Although in 7^th grade I tested well enough on the SAT to be admitted to many colleges and universities, the only accommodation I received in my elementary and middle schools was a bit of acceleration and in-class differentiation. I was fortunate to attend a high school, a public one no less, in which three quarters of the student population was gifted, just like me. It was finally like what I imagine most people’s school experience was. The work was hard, but not too hard, and my classmates and I were working at similar levels. Even among that population, though, I stood out: I ended up graduating third in my class.

I didn’t finish my bachelor’s degree right after high school, so not long ago I went back to university. That old, familiar sense of discomfort I felt all those years in elementary and middle school came creeping back. Granted, I’m a mature student and I stick out anyway, but the real differences are intellectual.

I get vague about grades – most of them are A+’s, but I just tell people I’m happy with what I got. I get selective about raising my hand in class because I’d rather answer the hard questions than the gimmes, and inevitably my profs urge me to give someone else a shot. I often end up saving them from those uncomfortable, answerless silences anyway. I frustrate them sometimes because I am often five steps ahead, and I often ask questions that no one else even understands, much less knows how to answer. I feel like I’m that lonely, awkward little kid again, in a class full of people who will never delight in reading Abraham Maslow for fun; who don’t get kicks out of winning a shiny blue pencil for solving the Math department’s problem of the week, week after week; who write poetry not because it’s the best way they know of expressing themselves, but because they thought creative writing would be an easy A.

I may get down about it, but as an adult, I’m much better equipped to deal with the inevitable disappointments and frustrations. I can provide myself with the resources I need – intellectual challenge and interaction with true peers – and don’t have to rely on the educational system to do it for me. In so many ways, I’m glad I’m not that little kid anymore. The system is still failing us.

He is 15, maybe,
tall, Chinese, with
smart, stylish glasses.

He skips hellos goes straight
to my dog’s name,
then sticks his hand out.

I’m Ronnie what’s your name?

I decide against
my citydweller’s caution
shake his hand
and tell him.

How do you spell that?

He spells it back in staccato,
tapping his leg at each letter.

His parents call him back in.

It’s ok,
he says,
you go on without me.

I stand there dumbly, smiling,
wanting to tell them
he isn’t bothering me,
staring at the crack in the door,
from which he struggles
to emerge,
pressing his long,
taut fingers against it,
frustrated,

telling me again,
It’s ok,
you go on without me,
as his parents
wrangle him inside

and the door closes
in front of him.

Nighttimes,
they drove me past
dead end signs
so I could flirt
with what lay beyond them

I piled around me
in my canopy bed
a pillow grave
so I could pretend at death.

Tonight
amid the pillows
I fold my arms across my chest
and hope to remember
whether death fancied me

and whether the crows
whispered back.

The
thing I wanted to tell you
is dat

That

That
I used to sit
in the chair across
from my father

And dat

That

That
I couldn’t pronounce
th’s da way

The

The
way he wanted.

It isn’t dat

That

That
I have nothing to say.

It’s just dat

That

That
half da

The

The time,
I don’t think

you’re willing to wait.

about twenty dollars, please,
I said

instead He did me one better
and answered
a long unspoken wish

I’d eyed one
in the J. Peterman catalog
for years
a duster,
cowboy coat,
made of oilcloth
split down the back
straps for each leg

my father frowned
at my tomboyishness
when I was a teenager
and refused to buy it

but my God
found me one, black,
at the secondhand store
for twenty-five dollars

my God,
who answers back,
“Ride ‘em, cowgirl!”