News that Facebook today (18th May 2012) has gained a $104 billion flotation fills me with misgivings. Why? Let me digress a little...

It’s nice to be loved, even by a robot. Happy Birthday!

Or so nine emails sang to me this month. Somebody at Scribophile I’d never heard of  wanted to send me a token of his esteem. (Beware geeks bearing gifts.) From eight other writing sites came an effusion of bad rhymes.

Even my youngest daughter sent me one. “How did you know it was my birthday?” I asked her, suspiciously. “I found it on Facebook,” she replied, with the candour of a teeny demi-monde who lives half her live in cyberspace. Blogo, ergo sum.

Problem is, it wasn’t my birthday.

Nor was I born in Eccles in 1901, as my Litopia profile attests. It would make me England’s oldest fruit cake. In the interests of security, I have never entrusted true data about myself to the Internet. Nor should you. (The exception, of course, is all the good things I have ever posted about myself. You can trust those.)

Does anyone speak the truth on the web other than willing candidates for identity theft or worse? Has anyone, in these days of paranoia, publicly displayed a profile on Facebook that was not a simulacrum of inventive lies?

True, Facebook works hard to exclude impostors. It wouldn’t let Salman Rushdie have a Facebook account because that is not his real name. (Did you know that?) Facebook only relented after Rushdie threatened to expose the true name of Mark Zuckerberg, the site’s founder, in Rushdie’s latest novel Nightmares From Timeline.

I’m sure you didn’t know that - but you might have expected it. After all, the name ‘Zuckerberg’ means literally ‘a town of suckers’. It’s the perfect allonym for Facebook.

And Facebook is a bubble, based on a myth.

Facebook is a bubble, despite its absurd market valuation.Anyone can acquire a thousand different email accounts today without charge, rotate their IP addresses, and populate the site entirely with their own avatars. (You know you’re old when you find yourself corresponding with yourself.)

My theory is that Facebook does not have one billion users as advertised. It has merely ten. Each is called Jed or Sharon and they live together in a yellow submarine disguised as an Internet cafe. And each is a frustrated novelist.

How else can one account for the mania with which authors flit among each others’ sites, ‘liking’ each other like groupies in a New Age cult, and leaving cryptic messages for themselves that nobody understands? Of course, they sell a few books that way, but only because they buy each others’ books. It’s why authors stay poor.

How else can one understand blog tours? It’s just Jed and Sharon again. Each runs a hundred guest sites. Each welcomes the other as a guest poster. Glaring at each other across the Internet cafe, they bicker in code. “I swooned over your latest book” means “LOL, Jed. I just ate your bockwurst sandwich”. The reply “Sensitive readers like yourself bring joy to my heart!” means “No sweat, Sharon. You can pay for my doughnut.”

Facebook's $104 billion flotation is a myth created by Jed and Sharon.

I propose a new approach.

Suppose we all agree to represent ourselves in cyberspace exactly as we are? Away with those air-brushed photos taken in our days of youth and beauty. Away with those fake cvs. (Before you ask: No, I do not teach at the University of Ludology as my Facebook profile suggests. The truth is worse.)

Let’s usher in a new age of transparency. After all, in the era of Google, Facebook and the soon-to-be-legitimised government hacking of all our Internet transactions, we have no privacy left anyway.

Of course, there’s a downside.

No longer shall we be able to post a thousand rave reviews of our own books at Amazon under different aliases. No longer shall we be able to disguise the same novel under a thousand different titles, each angled to a specific market niche. (Trust me. It happens.)

But there’s an upside. No longer shall we be seduced into buying those delightful books only to discover, when they arrive, that we wrote them.

Let me inaugurate this era of lucidity with a true confession. Deception has no place in our Brave New World! Facebook is not worth tuppence. And my real birth date is...