Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier

How can you remain autonomous in a world where you are under constant surveillance and are constantly prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history, which have no way of making money except by being paid to manipulate your behavior?

The algorithms don’t really understand you, but there is power in numbers, especially in large numbers.

The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.… No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem—this is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem.…

The core process that allows social media to make money and that also does the damage to society is behavior modification.

addiction makes people crazy. The addict gradually loses touch with the real world and real people. When many people are addicted to manipulative schemes, the world gets dark and crazy. Addiction is a neurological process that we don’t understand completely. The neurotransmitter dopamine plays a role in pleasure and is thought to be central to the mechanism of behavior change in response to getting rewards.

Using symbols instead of real rewards has become an essential trick in the behavior modification toolbox.

somewhat random or unpredictable feedback can be more engaging than perfect feedback.

A touch of randomness is more than easy to generate in social media: because the algorithms aren’t perfect, randomness is intrinsic.

Adaptive algorithms can get stuck sometimes;

Social networks bring in another dimension of stimuli: social pressure.

We only survive by getting along with family members and others.

On social networks, the manipulation of social emotions has been the easiest way to generate rewards and punishments.

for now it’s all about feelings that can be evoked in you—

affirmation works better to motivate adult workers.

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.

negative emotions are being amplified more than positive ones.

Addiction is a big part of the reason why so many of us accept being spied on and manipulated by our information technology, but it’s not the only reason.

the benefits of networks only appear when people use the same platform.

There’s no such thing as perfectly free will. Our brains are constantly changing their ways to adapt to a changing environment.

We modify each other’s behavior all the time, and that’s a good thing.

The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes.

When we’re solitary wolves, we’re more free. We’re cautious, but also capable of more joy. We think for ourselves, improvise, create. We scavenge, hunt, hide. We howl once in a while out of pure exuberance. When we’re in a pack, interactions with others become the most important thing in the world.

Capitalism fails when the switch is set to Pack.

What we need is anything that’s real beyond social pretensions that people can focus on instead of becoming assholes.

What you say isn’t meaningful without context.

But when we’re all seeing different, private worlds, then our cues to one another become meaningless. Our perception of actual reality, beyond the BUMMER platform, suffers.

The ability to theorize about what someone else experiences as part of understanding that person is called having a theory of mind. To have a theory of mind is to build a story in your head about what’s going on in someone else’s head. Theory of mind is at the core of any sense of respect or empathy, and it’s a prerequisite to any hope of intelligent cooperation, civility, or helpful politics. It’s why stories exist.

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.

Gig economy workers rarely achieve financial security, even after years of work. To put it another way, the level of risk in their financial lives seems to never decline, no matter how much they’ve achieved.

The software that matters most is the most hidden, the least revealed.

One way is to directly monetize services such as search and social media.

Lately, this approach to the future of digital economics has become known as “Data as Labor.”

Instead of trying to shut down BUMMER companies, we should ask them to innovate their business models, for their own good.

Something is drawing young people away from democracy.

It’s random that BUMMER favored the Republicans over the Democrats in U.S. politics, but it isn’t random that BUMMER favored the most irritable, authoritarian, paranoid, and tribal Republicans.

Facebook and other BUMMER companies are becoming the ransomware of human attention.

BUMMER was gradually separating people into bins and promoting assholes by its nature, before Russians or any other client showed up to take advantage.

You were had. You were tricked. Your best intentions were turned against you.

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.

Your point will be undone by whatever other point is more viral. That is by design.

quantity can’t replace quality,

The foundation of the search for truth must be the ability to notice one’s own ignorance.

Consciousness is the only thing that isn’t weakened if it’s an illusion. You’d have to experience the illusion in order for the illusion to exist. But the flip side of that is that if you choose not to notice that you’re experiencing, you can negate your own consciousness.

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