Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier

BUMMER manipulations are not perfect, but they are powerful enough that it becomes suicidal for brands, politicians, and other competitive entities to forgo payments to BUMMER machines. Universal cognitive blackmail ensues, resulting in a rising global spend on BUMMER.

If you hang out in Silicon Valley, you’ll hear a lot of chatter about how money is becoming obsolete, how we’re creating forms of power and influence that transcend money. Yet everybody still seems to be chasing money!

If owning everyone’s attention by making the world terrifying happens to be what earns the most money, then that is what will happen, even if it means that bad actors are amplified.

Prohibitions generally don’t work. When the United States attempted to outlaw alcohol in the early twentieth century, the result was a rise of organized crime. The ban had to be rescinded. When marijuana was outlawed later in the century, the same thing happened. Prohibitions are engines of corruption that split societies into official and criminal sectors. Laws work best when they are reasonably aligned with incentives.

Tweaking the rules of BUMMER without changing the underlying incentives will probably meet a similar failure. Tweaks have already failed: BUMMER pioneers like Google and Facebook have avidly chased bad actors, fakers, and unsanctioned manipulators, and the result has been the rise of technically accomplished, underground cyber mafias, sometimes working for unfriendly states.

The most dispiriting side effect of BUMMER policy-tweaking is that each cycle in the arms race between platforms and bad actors motivates more and more well-meaning people to demand that BUMMER companies take over more and more of our lives. We ask remote, giant tech companies to govern hate speech, malicious falsified news, bullying, racism, harassment, identity deception, and ot...

The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes. Here I have put forward a hypothesis that our problem is not the internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms. Instead, the problem that has made the world so dark and crazy lately is the BUMMER machine, and the core of the BUMMER machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people.

Which companies are BUMMER? This can be debated! A good way to tell is that first-rank BUMMER companies are the ones that attract efforts or spending from bad actors like Russian state intelligence warfare units. This test reveals that there are pseudo-BUMMER services that contain only subsets of the components, like Reddit and 4chan, but still play significant roles in the BUMMER ecosystem.

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. If you want to help make the world sane, you don’t need to give up your smartphone, using computer cloud services, or visiting websites. You don’t need to fear math, the social sciences, or psychology. BUMMER is the stuff to avoid. Delete your BUMMER accounts!

The most curious feature of the addict’s personality is that the addict eventually seems to seek out suffering, since suffering is part of the cycle of scratching the itch. A gambler is addicted not to winning, exactly, but to the process in which losing is more likely. A junkie is addicted not just to the high, but to the vertiginous difference between the lows and the highs.

As a Twitter addict, Trump has changed. He displays the snowflake pattern and sometimes loses control. He is not acting like the most powerful person in the world, because his addiction is more powerful. Whatever else he might be, whatever kind of victimizer, he is also a victim.

I just stopped using the stuff because I didn’t like who I was becoming. You know the adage that you should choose a partner on the basis of who you become when you’re around the person? That’s a good way to choose technologies, too.

I found myself falling into that old problem again whenever I read the comments, and I could not get myself to ignore them. I would feel this weird low-level boiling rage inside me. Or I’d feel this absurd glow when people liked what I wrote, even if what they said didn’t indicate that they had paid much attention to it. Comment authors were mostly seeking attention for themselves.

After a short while, I noticed that I’d write things I didn’t even believe in order to get a rise out of readers. I wrote stuff that I knew people wanted to hear, or the opposite, because I knew it would be inflammatory.

BUMMER platform experiences ricochet between two extremes. Either there’s a total shitstorm of assholes (that’s not a mixed metaphor, right?) or everyone is super careful and artificially nice. The biggest assholes get the most attention, however, and they often end up giving a platform its flavor. Even if there are corners of the platform where not everyone is an asshole all the time, those corners feel penned in, because the assholes are waiting just outside. It’s part of how BUMMER Component A pushes tribalism.

It’s not helpful to think of the world as being divided into assholes and non-assholes, or if you prefer, trolls and victims. Each of us has an inner troll.

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

The switch in people should generally be kept in the Solitary Wolf position.

There would no longer be a way to guess the number of beans because the power of diversity will have been compromised. When that happens, markets can no longer offer utility to the world.

There are situations that call for the switch to be set to Pack. Military units are the canonical example. Sometimes people must lose themselves to a hierarchical order because that’s the only way to survive. But a primary goal of civilization should be to make those times as rare as possible.

Capitalism fails when the switch is set to Pack.

Democracy fails when the switch is set to Pack. Tribal voting, personality cults, and authoritarianism are the politics of the Pack setting.

It might sound like a contradiction at first, but it isn’t; collective processes make the best sense when participants are acting as individuals.

When you are a solitary wolf, you are forced to get directly in touch with the larger reality that doesn’t care about what a society thinks. You must find water and shelter, or you will perish. You have to scavenge and hunt for yourself. Your personality shifts; you must solve problems on the basis of evidence you gather on your own, instead of by paying attention to group perception. You take on the qualities of a scientist or an artist.

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.

In BUMMERland, it seems as if every little comment either turns into a contest for total personal invalidation and destruction, or else everyone has to get all nicey-nicey and fake. The obvious example is that the BUMMER-addicted U.S. president, the social media addict-in-chief, turns everything into a contest over who can destroy someone else most completely with a tweet, or else who gets good treatment in exchange for total loyalty.

Assholes change discourse into discharge. 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.

Tech companies spy on you, Butting into your life. The perception of truth requires that people be authentic, so that they can perceive authentically. This principle was explained in the analogy of the jelly beans in the jar. When people are constantly prodded by spying technologies, they lose authenticity.

Cramming experiences down your throat. When what people can be made to perceive is the product sold by some of the richest corporations, then obviously truth mu...

Directing lives through ubiquitous behavior modification. When engineered addictions are applied to manipulate masses of people for commercial gain, obviously those masses become...

Earning money by letting some people, often nasty ones, secretly modify the behaviors of other people. Economic incentives tend to win over rules, policies, and good intentions, as will be explained in the Argument to come about economics. Therefore, incentives in...

Fake people have no reason to tell the truth. Indeed, truth is suicide to a fake person. But fake people have be...

The fake people from Component F are stem cells for all the other fakeness in BUMMER.

This is a difficult truth to accept, but because of the importance of social perception, it is true to at least a small degree that you have been living a fake life yourself. BUMMER is making you partially fake.

Whatever you can do, bots can do a million times while you blink. Fake people are a cultural denial-of-service attack.

fake people are manufactured in a new underworld. There is now an industry that sells counterfeit humans.

According to reporting by the New York Times, the going rate for fake people on Twitter in early 2018 was $225 for the first 25,000 fake followers.

The mainstream BUMMER companies don’t have completely clean hands when it comes to bots. It is hard for mainstream BUMMER operators to get rid of fake people entirely, because they become codependent, in the way that animals need gut bacteria. Component F provides momentum and free energy. The interlopers become part of the machine.

Techies might rationalize the situation for themselves, coming up with arguments about how bots increase the diversity of free speech, or some similar nonsense,6 even though bots can drown out authentic speech.

the craziest conspiracy theories often start on BUMMER, amplified by artificial people, before they appear in hyperpartisan legacy media.7 Hyperpartisan outlets like Fox News can therefore be thought of as part of Component F. They are chunks of legacy media that have been jury-rigged to become part of the BUMMER machine.

Bots route around attempts to tweak or regulate BUMMER. If BUMMER ads were to become tightly regulated, for instance, bots might whip up a blizzard of shitposts9 to accomplish what could no longer be done with ads. This is one of the reasons that BUMMER must be removed from our world.

I have tried to engage with these parents, and that’s when they show me their BUMMER feeds. Every day they digest memes, fake scare stories, and clickbait that appear to come from bots,11 though no one really knows to what degree.12 An ambience of paranoia and dismissal has overtaken these BUMMER addicts as they seek a new fix from positive and negative social stimuli every day.

People are clustered into paranoia peer groups because then they can be more easily and predictably swayed. The clustering is automatic, sterile, and, as always, weirdly innocent. There wasn’t anyone sitting in a tech company who decided to promote anti-vaccine rhetoric as a tactic. It could just as easily have been anti-hamster rhetoric. The only reason BUMMER reinforces the stuff is that paranoia turns out, as a matter of course, to be an efficient way of corralling attention.

It’s maddening to drive through Silicon Valley and realize that many of my friends working behind all those green glass windows in the low-slung tech company buildings that reach to the horizon might be contributing to a process that’s reviving once-defeated diseases in children.13 Save children; delete your accounts.

For a while, it wasn’t uncommon for an ad for something innocuous, like soap, to be streamed in sequence with a horrible terrorist-recruitment video. When advertisers complained—and only then, after the fact—Google started to root out terrorist content.1 Actual money was paid to affected advertisers in compensation. The advertisers are the true customers, so they have a voice.

These extreme examples occur only because the rules of the game in BUMMER are that you don’t know the context in which you are expressing anything and you have no reliable way of knowing how it will be presented to someone else.

No one ever knows exactly how what they’re saying will be received, but in non-BUMMER situations you usually have reasonable guesses. I speak in public sometimes, and I instinctively adjust my presentation to an audience. I say different things to high school students than I do to a room full of quants.4 This is just a normal part of communication. Speaking through social media isn’t really speaking at all. Context is applied to what you say after you say it, for someone else’s purposes and profit. This changes what can be expressed. When context is surrendered to the platform, communication and culture become petty, shallow, and predictable. You have to become crazy extreme if you want to say something that will survive even briefly in an unpredictable context. Only asshole communication can achieve that.

Dystopian science fiction often imagines an evil empire that replaces names with numbers. Real-life prisons do it to prisoners. There’s a reason. To become a number is to be explicitly subservient to a system. A number is a public verification of reduced freedom, status, and personhood.

In order for the news to regain context, people will have to discover news through non-BUMMER systems. What will these systems be? Hopefully people will develop direct relationships, even more hopefully with subscriptions, to sources of news and other content. In the meantime, there are many problems with the subsuming of journalism to the god of statistics. Some of the criticisms are familiar: too much clickbait lowers the level of public discourse; writers aren’t given the space to take risks.

Our huge nation is only a few organizations away from having no independent newsrooms with resources and clout.