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.

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.

Ordinary people are brought together in a setting in which the main—or often the only—reward that’s available is attention.

Data are gathered about each person’s communications, interests, movements, contact with others, emotional reactions to circumstances, facial expressions, purchases, vital signs: an ever growing, boundless variety of data.

Customized feeds become optimized to “engage” each user, often with emotionally potent cues, leading to addiction.

They turn the Solitary/Pack switch to Pack, which makes people pay so much attention to social status competition that they can become blinded to everything else, to any broader or more fundamental truth.

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

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 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.

Facebook and other BUMMER companies are becoming the ransomware of human attention. They have such a hold on so much of so many people’s attention for so much of each day that they are gatekeepers to brains.

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

Even so, it is not irrational to base faith or hope for an afterlife on the mysterious existence of internal experience in this life. None of us really knows what’s going on in our strange situation of reality, but if you perceive a sense of positivity, of grace and progressive creativity in the world, then perhaps experience connects to more.

We can acknowledge experience, we can enjoy it, we can have an emotional reaction to the mystery of it, perhaps even a pleasant one. 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.

The BUMMER business is interwoven with a new religion that grants empathy to computer programs—calling them AI programs—as a way to avoid noticing that it is degrading the dignity, stature, and rights of real humans.

Even so, deleters remain a minority. The addiction wave dominates.