Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier

Statistics are reliable, but only as idiot demons.

So-called advertisers can seize the moment when you are perfectly primed and then influence you with messages that have worked on other people who share traits and situations with you.

it’s just not right to call direct manipulation of people advertising.

What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.

The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.… No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.

It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other.

Companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter are finally trying to fix some of the massive problems they created, albeit in a piecemeal way.

This book will argue that the companies on their own can’t do enough to glue the world back together.

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.

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

Social media algorithms are usually “adaptive,” which means they constantly make small changes to themselves

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

Social concerns are not optional features of the human brain. They are primal.

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.

The prime directive to be engaging reinforces itself, and no one even notices that negative emotions are being amplified more than positive ones.

the result is an unnatural global amplification of the “easy” emotions, which happen to be the negative ones.

there’s something about the rigidity of digital technology, the on-and-off nature of the bit, that attracts the behaviorist way of thinking.

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.

new kinds of massive monopolies because of network effects and lock-in. We foolishly laid the foundations for global monopolies.

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.

Addiction gradually turns you into a zombie. Zombies don’t have free will.

You’d have to be insensitive and uncaring to not change how you act around someone in response to how that person reacts.

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.

smart people should delete their accounts until nontoxic varieties are available.

A is for Attention Acquisition leading to Asshole supremacy

B is for Butting into everyone’s lives

C is for Cramming content down peo...

D is for Directing people’s behaviors in the sneak...

E is for Earning money from letting the worst assholes secretly scr...

F is for Fake mobs and Fa...

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

With nothing else to seek but attention, ordinary people tend to become assholes, because the biggest assholes get the most attention.

Algorithms choose what each person experiences through their devices.

deliver stimuli for individualized behavior modification.

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

Fake people are present in unknown but vast numbers and establish the ambiance. Bots, AIs, agents, fake reviewers, fake friends, fake followers, fake posters, automated catfishers: a menagerie of wraiths.

the only tech giants that fully depend on BUMMER are Facebook and Google.

The problem isn’t any particular technology, but the use of technology to manipulate people, to concentrate power in a way that is so nuts and creepy that it becomes a threat to the survival of civilization.

The choice is to victimize or be a victim.

I’ve observed that since social media took off, assholes are having more of a say in the world.

We can either be solitary or members of a pack of wolves. I call this switch the Solitary/Pack switch.

Democracy fails when the switch is set to Pack.

When you’re in a pack, social status and intrigues become more immediate than the larger reality. You become more like an operator, a politician, or a slave.

A prevalent layer of motivation to do anything aside from attention-getting or seeking other purely psychological rewards is the key.

Your character is the most precious thing about you. Don’t let it degrade.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS UNDERMINING TRUTH

A Assholes change discourse into discharge.