“The only game in town.”

Long before I got my Commodore 64, I had a cardboard computer simulator called CARDIAC. This was part of a gifted class in elementary school that included a trip to the UCLA computer lab. Like any computer, CARDIAC came with games. One of them was single-pile nim. This is a mathematical game with a specified set of outcomes. You can program CARDIAC so it always picks the right outcomes and always wins. This is no fun, as anyone who played a video game with an unbeatable final boss can attest. The creators of CARDIAC knew it and included this story in their user manual:

You may have felt a little like the gambler who was hailed by a friend on his way to the local casino.

“Where are you headed?” asked the friend.

“Oh, I figure to try my luck at the Silver Dollar Casino.”

“You danged fool, don’t you know the game is crooked?”

“Sure I do…but what can I do? It’s the only game in town!”

Fast-forward 51 years when we’ve replaced cardboard computer simulators with real computers that can fit in our hand. Today, we have Facebook, Instagram, and a quandary: Can we still trust social media services we depend on to promote our writing and collaborate with other writers?

Before the events of the past few days, which included damning testimony from a Facebook…