The pro-Dislike crowd, in addition to being on the wrong side of history, don’t really understand the nature and functioning of the Like button. They believe it offers no choice, that it is a unitary decision mechanism, a switch forever stuck in the On position. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Like button, in actuality, provides us with a binary choice: one may click the button, or one may leave the button unclicked. The choice is not between Like and Dislike but rather between Like and Absence of Like, the latter being a catch-all category of non-affiliation encompassing not only Dislike but also Not Sure and No Opinion and Don’t Care and Ambivalent and Can’t Be Bothered and Not in the Mood to Deal with This at the Moment and I Hate Facebook — the whole panoply, in other words, of states of non-affiliation with particular things or beings. By presenting a clean binary choice — On/Off; True/False — the Like button serves the overarching goal of bringing human communication and machine communication into closer harmony. By encapsulating the ambiguities of affect and expression that plague the kludgy human brain and its messaging systems into a single “state” (Absence of Like), the Like button essentially rids us of these debilitating ambiguities and hence tightens our cohesion with machines and with one another.