Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier

Everybody suffers from social anxiety from time to time, and every child has encountered a bully who used social anxiety as a weapon of torture, probably because behaving like a bully lessened the chances that the bully might become a target. That’s why people, even those who would normally be decent, tend to pile on to a victim of social anxiety torture. They’re so afraid of the very real pain that social anxiety brings that they can lose sight of their better natures for a moment.

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.

Your understanding of others has been disrupted because you don’t know what they’ve experienced in their feeds, while the reverse is also true; the empathy others might offer you is challenged because you can’t know the context in which you’ll be understood.

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. It is a lie you celebrate and reinforce when you use BUMMER, just as someone who attends a corrupt church is supporting its corruption.

The purpose of your life is now to optimize. You have been baptized.

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

“If artificial intelligence is going to surpass people in our lifetimes, if we won’t have jobs, if the future doesn’t need us, why did our parents have us? Why are we here?”

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 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.