Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier

We’re being tracked and measured constantly, and receiving engineered feedback all the time.

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

The term “engagement” is part of the familiar, sanitized language that hides how stupid a machine we have built. We must start using terms like “addiction” and “behavior modification.” Here’s another example of sanitized language: We still call the customers of social media companies “advertisers”—and, to be fair, many of them are. They want you to buy a particular brand of soap or something. But they

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. An unfortunate combination of biology and math favors degradation of the human world. Information warfare units sway elections, hate groups recruit, and nihilists get amazing bang for the buck when they try to bring society down.

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

The perception of truth requires that people be authentic, so that they can perceive authentically.

tech companies all do battle with fake accounts, but they also benefit from them. While people who work at Twitter might, on an emotional or ethical level, prefer that their platform was bot-free, the bots also amplify the activity and intensity of the service. Massive fake social activities turn out to influence real people. They indirectly create a genuine social reality, which means they make money. People are successfully manipulated by them. 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 most common extreme examples, however, might arise when women and girls who attempt to express themselves online find that their words and images are sexualized or incorporated into a violent or manipulative framework. Women’s online presences have often been grotesquely transformed for the purposes of humiliation, shame, and harassment.

We have given up our connection to context. Social media mashes up meaning. Whatever you say will be contextualized and given meaning by the way algorithms, crowds, and crowds of fake people who are actually algorithms mash it up with what other people say.

What if deeply reaching a small number of people matters more than reaching everybody with nothing?

When writers become less motivated by the desire to reach people directly, but instead must appeal to a not necessarily reliable number-dispensing system, then writers are losing their connection to their context. The more successful a writer is in this system, the less she knows what she’s writing.

Even when the readers are real, not fake, algorithms are routing them to particular content, so their choices aren’t really independent.

The speed, idiocy, and scale of false social perceptions have been amplified to the point that people often don’t seem to be living in the same world, the real world, anymore.

We don’t need to all see the same thing to understand each other. Only old-fashioned authoritarian regimes try to make everyone see the same thing. But we do need to be able to peek at what other people see.

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.

Yes, of course it’s great that people can be connected,12 but why must they accept manipulation by a third party as the price of that connection? What if the manipulation, not the connection, is the real problem?13

You might become anxious that you’re not as attractive or successful as other people you are exposed to, even as you’re harnessed by the system to make someone out there feel the same way.

How can you be authentic when everything you read, say, or do is being fed into a judgment machine?

We’re talking about an industry that supports some of the richest companies the world has ever known, and it’s all driven by data that comes from people who are often being told that they’re about to be obsolete, that they’ll need to go on the public dole with a basic income system. It just isn’t right to tell people they are no longer valuable to society when the biggest companies exist only because of data that comes from those same people.

Look at how rich BUMMER companies are and remember that their wealth is made entirely of the data you gave them.

Before the BUMMER era, any time a new technology came along that made a set of human roles obsolete, new roles appeared that were less physical. Car drivers instead of horsemen. Indeed, the new roles that came into being because of tech disruptions were often more creative and professional than the old ones. Robotics programmers instead of ironworkers. This meant that more and more people gained prestige and economic dignity. BUMMER reversed the trend. Now, if you bring insight, creativity, or expertise into the world, you are on notice that sooner or later BUMMER will channel your value through a cloud service—probably a so-called AI service—and take away your financial security, even though your data will still be needed.

A social media company is in a better position if it doesn’t know what’s going on, because then it makes just as much money, but with less culpability.

Believing something only because you learned it through a system is a way of giving your cognitive power over to that system.

Making a supposed AI program that customizes a feed is less work than creating a great user interface that allows users to probe and improve what they see on their own terms—and that is so because AI has no objective criteria for success.

The BUMMER business is interwoven with a new religion that grants empathy to computer programs—calling them AI programs—as a way to avoid noticing that it is degrading the dignity, stature, and rights of real humans.

if you choose not to notice that you’re experiencing, you can negate your own consciousness.