So… apparently there’s this deal out there called “FaceApp” or something like that. Supposedly it’s all the rage now with millions and millions of people across the blue planet. Take a picture of your face and then tell your phone how old you want to look and “Whamo!” there you are! Or, there you’ll be. Wanno know what you’ll look like in another twenty, thirty or fifty years? FaceApp will show you and let you show the world. As if there’s not enough unpleasantness in our future already…

Seems that there’s some measure of controversy.

Along with the wonderful humor of getting to see your grown children suddenly look twenty years older than you, there’s the fact that the company that created, owns and maintains the app is located in Russia. There was a time when that fact alone would make every decent red, white, and blue-blooded American run for the nearest fallout shelter. Not so much anymore. Russian? Well, cool, let’s shake hands, share some vodka and borscht, and then go interrogate some would-be defectors. And by the way, we’re really sorry about all those nasty things our intelligence agents and military generals keep saying about you.

Is the app a sinister espionage scheme whereby the Ruskies are sneaking around inside millions of phones and swiping all the information you’re stored in there? Or is it just a semi-harmless bit of entertainment whereby a company collects a few billion pictures, makes a ton of money and amuses itself by creating complex algorithms to predict the effects of aging on facial features?

Beats me.

There’s hardly anything anymore that can’t be easily manipulated into the next colossal digital argument and battleground. We live in an age when people deliberately fabricate claims and stories that can be instantaneously spread across the planet, lapped up and spread even further by minds consumed by their own prejudices, fears and hate. Trying to ferret out the truth takes time we don’t have and effort we don’t want to give. Far easier to believe what we want to believe.

It would be nice to think that FaceApp is just another element of instant entertainment with enough associated advertising to make some rich folks even wealthier. As for me, I’m just going to leave it be.

As the good Lord said, “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.” I don’t need to add anything to this day’s stress, worries, cares and apprehensions. It’ll bring enough of its own without me having to create more. There’ll be enough bad stuff actually happen that it doesn’t make sense for me to add to that with the unpleasantness of what could happen.

And besides, I can already see what I’m going to look like when I get old; I have a mirror.

H. Arnett
7/19/19