Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier

Consciousness is the only thing that isn’t weakened if it’s an illusion.

When you live as if there’s nothing special, no mystical spark inside you, you gradually start to believe it.

I haven’t included all the arguments about social media that you should consider; I haven’t even come close. I have only presented arguments for which I have an uncommonly informed perspective or expertise.

This book doesn’t address problems related to family dynamics, to untenable pressures placed on young people, especially young women (please read Sherry Turkle on those topics), the way scammers can use social media to abuse you, the way social media algorithms might discriminate against you for racist or other horrible reasons (please read Cathy O’Neil on that topic), or the way your loss of privacy can bite you personally and harm society in surprising ways. This book only scratches the surface.

In a way, your resistance can help free us.

The best way you can help is not to attack those who would manipulate you from afar, but simply to free yourself.

Don’t reject the internet; embrace it! The internet itself is not the problem.

Email your friends instead of using social media, but use accounts that aren’t read by the provider—so no Gmail, for instance.

Read news websites directly (instead of getting news through personalized feeds), especially sites that hire investigative reporters.

Subscribe to great news sites!

Read three a day and you’ll be better informed than social media users, and in less time. Consider using browser ex...

If you want to find things to do, look up local culture and events websites; there are usually wonderful ones...

You can even still watch YouTube videos, for now at least, without a Google account. Watching without an account and with some privacy plugins will give you ac...

You’ll be amazed to discover how much of your time was taken up before by BUMMER schemes.

Quit ’em all! Instagram and WhatsApp are still Facebook and still scoop your data and snoop on you. Don’t tweet about how you quit Facebook or post to Facebook about how you quit Twitter.

You can’t use the internet well until you’ve confronted it on your own terms, at least for a while. This is for your integrity, not just for saving the world.

If you can find a way to challenge us without vilification, it’s good for us. Taking charge of your own information life is a great way to do that.

unless and until you know yourself, even you won’t have standing to argue about what’s right for you. And you can’t know yourself unless you go to the trouble to experiment a bit.

You need to make sure your own brain, and your own life, isn’t in a rut.

whatever form your self-exploration takes, do at least one thing: detach from the behavior-modification empires for a while—six months, say?

After you experiment, you’ll know yourself better. Then decide.

You are the AI. It’s just that under the present system, your data is taken without pay so it feels like this new creature, the AI, is a real entity, but it isn’t. If we had a system where your contributions were recognized, then you wouldn’t feel that you’re going to be obsolete.”

People are nothing more than ‘hacks’ companies can use for a little while longer until the machines get good enough. Then we’ll sit around and get high while we watch our species fade away.”

Hannah Arendt and more recent thinkers like Masha Gessen point out that aimless, rootless, unfulfilled people are the fuel of authoritarian dysfunction.

If the most lucrative business of the world is the AI race, which gives machines meaning at the expense of people, then that is a recipe for global authoritarianism.

We are often asked to fear AI because the robots of the future might wish to see us dead, but this scenario shows us the true danger of AI. Believing in AI is the thing that could kill us.

There have been new studies of deleters; the evidence that deleting is good for you continues to grow.

even when Facebook does its best to reduce the horrors it amplifies, the effect is to ruin the moderators it hires.15 You can’t fix a poison factory by hiring an army of poison tasters.

other helpful books have appeared from writers like Mary Gray, Shoshana Zuboff, Roger McNamee, Sherry Turkle, Tiffany Shlain, Douglas Rushkoff, and many more,

We need to find a way back to reality, and the only way to do that is to have conversations that aren’t mediated by technology that is financed and animated by third parties who hope to persuade us. We must fight to speak to each other outside of the persuasion labyrinth.

PS: Research continues to show that cats understand more than they let on because they are inner directed; they resist meeting the expectations of trainers.16 There’s still time to become a cat!