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.

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. For instance, a smartphone game like Candy Crush uses shiny images of candy instead of real candy to become addictive. Other addictive video games might use shiny images of coins or other treasure.

I know attend Waldorf schools, which generally forbid electronics.

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.

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.

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.

Ordinary people are brought together in a setting in which the main—or often the only—reward that’s available is attention. They can’t reasonably expect to earn money, for instance. Ordinary users can gain only fake power and wealth, not real power or wealth. So mind games become dominant.

obsolete,

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.

Your character is like your health, more valuable than anything you can buy. Don’t throw it away.

If, when you participate in online platforms, you notice a nasty thing inside yourself, an insecurity, a sense of low self-esteem, a yearning to lash out, to swat someone down, then leave that platform. Simple.

quants.

What’s really going on is that we see less than ever before of what others are seeing, so we have less opportunity to understand each other.

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.15

The horoscope in the newspaper didn’t do anything outside of your own head; it did nothing that affected the power relationships between you and other people.

The judgments of the BUMMER algorithms that classify you might not be meaningful or reliable in a scientific sense, but they really do matter in real life. They play into what news you see, whom you’re introduced to as a potential date, what products you are offered. 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.30

As often happens with people, we forgot that we made a choice. Now we feel helpless. But the choice remains, and we can remake it.

The business plan of BUMMER is to sneakily take data from you and make money off it. Look at how rich BUMMER companies are and remember that their wealth is made entirely of the data you gave them.

sacrilege

Watch the end credits on a movie on Netflix or HBO. It’s good discipline for lengthening your attention span! Look at all those names scrolling by. All those people who aren’t stars made their rent by working to bring you that show.

BUMMER only supports stars. If you are one of those rare, rare people who are making a decent living off BUMMER as an influencer,4 for instance, you have to understand that you are in a tiny club and you are vulnerable.

When you use BUMMER, you implicitly accept a new spiritual framework. It is like the EULA agreement—the user agreement—that you clicked “OK” on without reading. You have agreed to change something intimate about your relationship with your soul. If you use BUMMER, you have probably, to some degree, statistically speaking, effectively renounced what you might think is your religion, even if that religion is atheism. You have been inducted into a new spiritual framework. I am not speaking rhetorically or being cute. This is a sincere effort to illuminate what is happening.

Believing something only because you learned it through a system is a way of giving your cognitive power over to that system.

Whatever a person might be, if you want to be one, delete your accounts.

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

You don’t need to give up friends: Email your friends instead of using social media, but use accounts that aren’t read by the provider—so no Gmail, for instance.

You can still get news online: Read news websites directly (instead of getting news through personalized feeds),

You won’t stew in the dark: If you want to find things to do, look up local culture and events websites; there are usually wonderful ones run by dedicated local people. Start your own website!

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 access to a much less manipulative experience.

Your immediate goal is to be a cat.

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.

However, unless and until you know yourself, even you won’t have standing to argue about what’s right for you.