Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier

Judgments based on social media might determine what loans you can get,25 which countries you can visit,26 whether you get a job,27 what education you can receive,28 the outcome of your auto insurance claim,29 and your freedom to congregate with others.

How can you have self-esteem when that’s not the kind of esteem that matters most anymore? How can you find happiness without authentic self-esteem? How can you be authentic when everything you read, say, or do is being fed into a judgment machine?

I realized a long time ago that I don’t want to be ranked unless it’s for something specific that I chose. If I want to get funding for a research project, I know I have to compete for it, and I know my project will be ranked. But how dare some crappy algorithm broadcast an unsought ranking of me?

Uber, which is pseudo-BUMMER, called the ability to spy on people the “God View.”

let me remind you that negative emotions are more readily accessible and more profitable BUMMER magnets for people than positive ones.

Facebook is the first public company controlled by one person.

You can’t make a society wealthy by making it crazy.

It just isn’t right to tell people they are no longer valuable to society when the biggest companies exist only because of data that comes from those same people.

We’re pretending that the people who know how to translate are obsolete, when in truth they’re still needed. Isn’t it some kind of sin to tell someone that they’re obsolete when it isn’t true?

Look at how rich BUMMER companies are and remember that their wealth is made entirely of the data you gave them. I think companies should get rich if they make things people want, but I don’t think you should be made less and less secure as part of the bargain.

The fantasy of human obsolescence not only undervalues people, but often makes supposed AI programs less functional because no one is motivated to improve the underlying data.

the new roles that came into being because of tech disruptions were often more creative and professional than the old ones. Robotics programmers instead of ironworkers. This meant that more and more people gained prestige and economic dignity.

This hypothesis needs to be tested more, but it is possible that when we enter into a new era in which people are paid for the value their data brings to the online world, then that world will become less dark and crazy.

BUMMER makes tech companies brittle and weirdly stagnant.

companies like Netflix and HBO convinced people to pay a monthly fee, and the result is what is often called “peak TV.” Why couldn’t there also be an era of paid “peak social media” and “peak search”?

I won’t have an account on Facebook, Google, or Twitter until I can pay for it—and I unambiguously own and set the price for using my data, and it’s easy and normal to earn money if my data is valuable. I might have to wait a while, but it’ll be worth it.

BUMMER undermines the political process and hurts millions of people, but so many of those very same people are so addicted that all they can do is praise BUMMER because they can use it to complain about the catastrophes it just brought about. It’s like Stockholm syndrome or being tied to an abusive relationship by invisible ropes. The sweet, early idealists lose, all the time thanking BUMMER for how it makes them feel and how it brought them together.

What social media did at that time, and what it always does, is create illusions: that you can improve society by wishes alone; that the sanest people will be favored in cutting contests; and that somehow material well-being will just take care of itself.

What actually happens, always, is that the illusions fall apart when it is too late, and the world is inherited by the crudest, most selfish, and least informed people. Anyone who isn’t an asshole gets hurt the most.

Gaming should be turning into the new way we learn and talk about complicated issues. That’s happening to a small extent, but the biggest productions tend to target the same demographic over and over again. You’ve got guns, you’re traversing terrain, and you’re shooting at something. Over and over. The industry needs to spread its wings more.

I've always wondered why I could never get into video games and I think this just nailed it.

Gamergate became a feeder and model for the alt-right.

It’s not that BUMMER disfavors LGBTQ people. BUMMER could care less. It’s that it favors con artists and assholes.

BUMMER is neither liberal nor conservative; it is just pro-paranoia, pro-irritability, and pro–general assholeness.

As a lefty, I don’t think a BUMMER-style lefty leader would be any better than Trump. Debasement is debasement, whatever direction it comes from.

People who worked on the social media strategy of the Trump campaign have claimed15 that Trump gained hundreds of times more access16 for a given spend than did the Clinton campaign, though Facebook claims that wasn’t so, without revealing enough to make the story transparent.

If there was a multiplier, it probably applied as much to Russian operatives and other pro-Trump parties buying access on Facebook as to the Trump campaign making direct purchases. The algorithms can’t care and don’t care.

An interesting detail that came out a year after the election is that Facebook had offered both the Clinton and Trump campaigns onsite teams to help them maximize their use of the platform, but only Trump’s campaign accepted the offer.18 Maybe if Clinton had agreed to have Facebook employees in her office, she would have won.

It’s as if Facebook is saying, “Pay us or you don’t exist.” They’re becoming the existential mafia.

I want to be wrong about all this stuff, but so far BUMMER looks worse and worse as more is revealed.

A social media company is in a better position if it doesn’t know what’s going on, because then it makes just as much money, but with less culpability.

BUMMER is a shit machine. It transforms sincere organizing into cynical disruption. It’s inherently a cruel con game.

BUMMER moneymaking caused black social media to unintentionally elevate a new tool optimized for voter suppression. As if there weren’t enough voter suppression tools out there already. As if gerrymandering, inaccessible polling stations, and biased registration rules weren’t enough.

Your best intentions were turned against you.

The important change is that you now have less free will, and a few people whom you don’t know have more of it.

If the BUMMER theory is right, then the overall project of the internet is not at fault. We can still enjoy the core of it. BUMMER wants you to think that without BUMMER there would be no devices, no internet, no support groups to help you through hard times, but that is a lie.

Memes might seem to amplify what you are saying, but that is always an illusion. You might launch an infectious meme about a political figure, and you might be making a great point, but in the larger picture, you are reinforcing the idea that virality is truth.

In the very big picture, virality might indeed be truth.

If humanity destroys itself because malicious memes prevent us from dealing with climate change, for instance, then eventually, in a hundred million years, a species of intelligent octopus will take over and perhaps come across our remains and wonder what went wrong.

Our ability to conquer mystery is still a mystery.

The foundation of the search for truth must be the ability to notice one’s own ignorance. Acknowledging ignorance is a beautiful feature that science and spirituality hold in common. BUMMER rejects it.

You might not have thought about Google’s worldview or mission, but you buy into it when you optimize your presence to rank high in search or optimize your video for views. The purpose of your life is now to optimize. You have been baptized.

A single company is going to see to it that every single person has a purpose, because it presumes that was lacking before. If that is not a new religion, I don’t know what is.

Google famously funded a project to “solve death.”6 This is such a precisely religious pretension that I’m surprised the religions of the world didn’t serve Google with a copyright infringement take-down notice.

The assertion is not that consciousness doesn’t exist, but that whatever it is, Google will own it, because otherwise, what could this service even be about?

One of the reasons that BUMMER works the way it does is that the engineers working at BUMMER companies often believe that their top priority among top priorities isn’t serving present-day humans, but building the artificial intelligences that will inherit the earth.

AI is a story we computer scientists made up to help us get funding once upon a time, back when we depended on grants from government agencies. It was pragmatic theater. But now AI has become a fiction that has overtaken its authors.

AI is a fantasy, nothing but a story we tell about our code. It is also a cover for sloppy engineering.

AI is a role-playing game for engineers, not in itself an actual technical achievement.

Acknowledging that experience exists might make us kinder, since we understand people to be more than machines. We might be a little more likely to think before hurting someone if we believe there’s a whole other center of experience cloaked in that person, a whole universe, a soul.

Saudi Arabia has granted citizenship to a “female” robot, and with that citizenship, rights not available to Saudi human women.10 This is a big problem with human-machine equivalence.