What Happens If You Like Everything On Facebook?

What happens if you like everything on Facebook? Disaster. By Mat Honan

- Mat Honan

There’s a great Andy Warhol quote you’ve probably seen: “I think everybody should like everybody.” You can buy posters and plates with pictures of Warhol and that phrase plastered across his face in Helvetica. But when you view Warhol’s quip in its full context, from a 1963 interview in ARTnews, it is just as much a prescient description of how weinteract on social media today as it is a definition of pop art.

Warhol: Everybody looks alike and acts alike, and we’re getting more and more that way. I think everybody should be a machine. I think everybody should like everybody. 

ARTnews: Is that what pop art is all about?

Warhol: Yes. It’s liking things. 

ARTnews: And liking things is like being a machine?

Warhol: Yes, because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.

This sounds a lot like Facebook, where the default response is a ‘like’. New job? Like. ASOS has 10 per cent off with free shipping today only? Like. Bedbugs? Oh, I’m so sorry. Like. By putting that binary option on everything it shows us, Facebook encourages us to be really efficient, Warholesque liking machines. And every like informs Facebook’s algorithm, which uses that data to feed you more stuff it thinks you will like. By that logic, the more you like, the more you will like, in an ever-escalating spiral of satisfaction. To follow that to its logical end, in Facebook’s perfect world we would like everything we see – from status updates to news stories to ads. If its algorithm truly works as intended, we shouldn’t be able to stop ourselves from liking all the stuff it shows us.