Like me

The Beatles may have believed that money can’t buy you love but

today it can sure buy you a boatload of `likes’. And I was reading in my

trawling of the interweb that there as many as 20 million fake follower accounts for twitter . I think that’s what I’m going to demand for my birthday –fake twitter followers. I think that would be better for my self esteem issues than the Old Spice body wash gift set I’m expecting and it will help me vent my impotent rage as yet another old friend I  reach out to in search of work gives me the old non-reply treatment. My fake twitter followers will re-tweet everything I post so that I can publicly humiliate the bastards and make it trend at the same time. If one fake tweet can devastate Wall Street my legion of twittery Orcs and their twitchy thumbs can cause some real damage. At $60 for five thousand fake followers I can command an army the likes of which has never been seen before. Not counting Justin Bieber’s fake followers of course. Bieber is King. And while I’m at it I can set up 2,500 likes for $34 on Facebook. Fake likes on my fake page? Yes I have a fake Facebook account doesn’t everybody? Now I want to connect my twitter followers and Facebook fans to it to my LinkedIn page and have a thousand recommendations for nothing and truly be seen as a leader in emerging media. There’s nothing new about this. It has been done before. About six hundred years ago actually.

Back then the Church had a practice of selling what they called `indulgences.’

Think of these as spiritual `likes.’ You hand over the cash and someone gives you a piece of paper setting out the value of your blessing. Indulgences were one of the things that had Martin Luther flipping his wig and breaking away from the church of Rome. This schism brought on what’s known as the Reformation. It was a pretty big deal that rocked the religious universe way back in the day. Can the fake friend controversy of today have the same effect in the work world of today? Possibly. Where’s the value in friendship when you can buy yourself a bunch of fake ones really cheap and let the true ones go to hell?