Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier

What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.

An unfortunate fact is that you can train someone using behaviorist techniques, and the person doesn’t even know it.

The core process that allows social media to make money and that also does the damage to society is behavior modification. Behavior modification entails methodical techniques that change behavioral patterns in animals and people. It can be used to treat addictions, but it can also be used to create them.

Using symbols instead of real rewards has become an essential trick in the behavior modification toolbox.

Social concerns are not optional features of the human brain. They are primal.

Negative emotions such as fear and anger well up more easily and dwell in us longer than positive ones. It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust. Fight-or-flight responses occur in seconds, while it can take hours to relax.

The prime directive to be engaging reinforces itself, and no one even notices that negative emotions are being amplified more than positive ones. Engagement is not meant to serve any particular purpose other than its own enhancement, and yet the result is an unnatural global amplification of the “easy” emotions, which happen to be the negative ones.

In the bigger picture, in which people must do more than conform in order for our species to thrive, behaviorism is an inadequate way to think about society.

The term “engagement” is part of the familiar, sanitized language that hides how stupid a machine we have built. We must start using terms like “addiction” and “behavior modification.”

What started as advertising morphed into what would better be called “empires of behavior modification for rent.”

Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results. An unfortunate combination of biology and math favors degradation of the human world. Information warfare units sway elections, hate groups recruit, and nihilists get amazing bang for the buck when they try to bring society down.

We foolishly laid the foundations for global monopolies. We did their hardest work for them. More precisely, since you’re the product, not the customer of social media, the proper word is “monopsonies.”17 Our early libertarian idealism resulted in gargantuan, global data monopsonies.

One of the main reasons to delete your social media accounts is that there isn’t a real choice to move to different social media accounts. Quitting entirely is the only option for change. If you don’t quit, you are not creating the space in which Silicon Valley can act to improve itself.

So the problem isn’t behavior modification in itself. The problem is relentless, robotic, ultimately meaningless behavior modification in the service of unseen manipulators and uncaring algorithms.

To free yourself, to be more authentic, to be less addicted, to be less manipulated, to be less paranoid … for all these marvelous reasons, delete your accounts.

Remember, with old-fashioned advertising, you could measure whether a product did better after an ad was run, but now companies are measuring whether individuals changed their behaviors, and the feeds for each person are constantly tweaked to get individual behavior to change.

Your specific behavior change has been turned into a product.

creepier customers get more bang for their buck.

Some have compared social media to the tobacco industry,5 but I will not. The better analogy is paint that contains lead.

When it became undeniable that lead was harmful, no one declared that houses should never be painted again. Instead, after pressure and legislation, lead-free paints became the new standard.6 Smart people simply waited to buy paint until there was a safe version on sale. Similarly, smart people should delete their accounts until nontoxic varieties are available.

“Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent”? BUMMER.

Like climate change, BUMMER will lead us into hell if we don’t self-correct.

Ordinary users can gain only fake power and wealth, not real power or wealth. So mind games become dominant.

The problem isn’t any particular technology, but the use of technology to manipulate people, to concentrate power in a way that is so nuts and creepy that it becomes a threat to the survival of civilization.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS MAKING YOU INTO AN ASSHOLE

I’ve seen myself start turning into an asshole online, and it was scary and depressing.

A junkie is addicted not just to the high, but to the vertiginous difference between the lows and the highs.

You know the adage that you should choose a partner on the basis of who you become when you’re around the person? That’s a good way to choose technologies, too.

I don’t think I’m better than you because I don’t have social media accounts. Maybe I’m worse; maybe you can handle the stuff better than I can. But I’ve observed that since social media took off, assholes are having more of a say in the world.

It might sound like a contradiction at first, but it isn’t; collective processes make the best sense when participants are acting as individuals.

When you’re in a pack, social status and intrigues become more immediate than the larger reality. You become more like an operator, a politician, or a slave.

What we need is anything that’s real beyond social pretensions that people can focus on instead of becoming assholes.

Your character is the most precious thing about you. Don’t let it degrade.

Fake people are typically not operated by the same people who operate BUMMER platforms; instead, fake people are manufactured in a new underworld. There is now an industry that sells counterfeit humans.

According to reporting by the New York Times, the going rate for fake people on Twitter in early 2018 was $225 for the first 25,000 fake followers.

For a while, it wasn’t uncommon for an ad for something innocuous, like soap, to be streamed in sequence with a horrible terrorist-recruitment video. When advertisers complained—and only then, after the fact—Google started to root out terrorist content.

A number is a public verification of reduced freedom, status, and personhood. It’s especially chilling to me, because my mother survived a concentration camp, where your number was tattooed on your arm. That would be too expensive to do today. The Nazis would just store your number, along with your biometrics, in the cloud.

Here’s a non-geeky framing of the same idea: What if listening to an inner voice or heeding a passion for ethics or beauty were to lead to more important work in the long term, even if it measured as less successful in the moment? What if deeply reaching a small number of people matters more than reaching everybody with nothing?

SOCIAL MEDIA IS DESTROYING YOUR CAPACITY FOR EMPATHY

Empathy2 is the fuel that runs a decent society. Without it, only dry rules and competitions for power are left.

I still believe that it’s possible for tech to serve the cause of empathy. If a better future society involves better tech at all, empathy will be involved.

The ability to theorize about what someone else experiences as part of understanding that person is called having a theory of mind.

Theory of mind is at the core of any sense of respect or empathy, and it’s a prerequisite to any hope of intelligent cooperation, civility, or helpful politics. It’s why stories exist.

I remember when the internet was supposed to bring about a transparent society. The reverse has happened.

Research4 shows a world that is not more connected,5 but instead suffers from a heightened sense of isolation.

Facebook researchers have practically bragged9 that they could make people unhappy without the people realizing why.10

More recently, Facebook researchers finally acknowledged11 what other researchers have found: that their products can do real harm.

Yes, of course it’s great that people can be connected,12 but why must they accept manipulation by a third party as the price of that connection? What if the manipulation, not the connection, is the real problem?

Addiction is associated with anhedonia, the lessened ability to take pleasure from life apart from whatever one is addicted to, and social media addicts appear to be prone to long-term anhedonia.

The BUMMER algorithms behind companies like Facebook and Google are stored in some of the few files in the world that can’t be hacked; they’re kept that secret. The deepest secrets of the NSA21 and the CIA22 have leaked, repeatedly, but you can’t find a copy of Google’s search algorithm or Facebook’s feed algorithm on the dark web.