Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier

There were others who pointed out that not everyone is privileged enough to quit, so it felt cruel to leave the less fortunate behind.

We’re being tracked and measured constantly, and receiving engineered feedback all the time. We’re being hypnotized little by little by technicians we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know. We’re all lab animals now.

It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.

This first argument will introduce a few key concepts behind the design of addictive and manipulative network services. Awareness is the first step to freedom.

When people get a flattering response in exchange for posting something on social media, they get in the habit of posting more.

Social media algorithms are usually “adaptive,”

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.

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.

Once you can use a pocket device to order rides and food and find out where to meet your friends right away, it’s hard to go back.

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.

Deleting your accounts now will improve the chances that you’ll have access to better experiences in the future.

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