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 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.… I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds—even though we feigned this whole line of, like, there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of, we kind of knew something bad could happen.…

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.

The power of what other people think has proven to be intense enough to modify the behavior of subjects participating in famous studies like the Milgram Experiment and the Stanford Prison Experiment.

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.

In the meantime, there is something you can do personally. If, when you participate in online platforms, you notice a nasty thing inside yourself, an insecurity, a sense of low self-esteem, a yearning to lash out, to swat someone down, then leave that platform. Simple.

Public health measures and modern medicine have doubled our life spans. Doubled! The unintended result is that now some of us can believe nonsense and not pay for that belief with our lives. At least for a while.

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.

Feedback is a good thing, but overemphasizing immediate feedback within an artificially limited online environment leads to ridiculous outcomes.

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.

is one reason that BUMMER naturally promotes tribalism and is tearing society apart, even if the techies in a BUMMER company are well-meaning. In order for BUMMER code to self-optimize, it naturally and automatically seizes upon any latent tribalism and racism, for these are the neural hashtags waiting out there in everyone’s psyche, which can be accentuated for the purpose of attention monopoly. (I’ll address this problem in more detail in the argument about how social media makes social improvement hopeless.) Not only is your worldview distorted, but you have less awareness of other people’s worldviews. You are banished from the experiences of the other groups being manipulated separately. Their experiences are as opaque to you as the algorithms that are driving your experiences. This is an epochal development. The version of the world you are seeing is invisible to the people who misunderstand you, and vice versa.

Trump supporters seem nuts to me, and they say liberals seem nuts to them. But it’s wrong to say we’ve grown apart and can’t understand each other. 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.

Research4 shows a world that is not more connected,5 but instead suffers from a heightened sense of isolation.6

you, are the product, not the customer.

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.

You might be making traumatic experiences worse by using social media.

The inability to carve out a space in which to invent oneself without constant judgment; that is what makes me unhappy.

How can you find happiness without authentic self-esteem? How can you be authentic when everything you read, say, or do is being fed into a judgment machine?

Deep mechanisms in the social parts of our brains monitor our social standing, making us terrified to be left behind, like a runt sacrificed to predators on the savannah.

Being free is what propelled these services to become so big so fast. It is also the foundation of the BUMMER business plan that has been so destructive, that has turned most of the human race into part-time lab rats.

I suggested LinkedIn as one example of how economic engagement, instead of purely social engagement, can have a civilizing effect.

When social media companies are paid directly by users instead of by hidden third parties, then they will serve those users. It’s so simple.

People who worked on the social media strategy of the Trump campaign have claimed15 that Trump gained hundreds of times more access16 for a given spend than did the Clinton campaign, though Facebook claims that wasn’t so, without revealing enough to make the story transparent.

To review: 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 ability to know the world, to know truth, has been degraded, while the world’s ability to know you has been corrupted.

There is a long history of people rejecting a structure connected with a religion while not rejecting the core.

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

(please read Sherry Turkle on those topics),