Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier

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.

Prohibitions are engines of corruption that split societies into official and criminal sectors. Laws work best when they are reasonably aligned with incentives.

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

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. Do ordinary users get to say as much about the context in which they are placed by BUMMER schemes?

BUMMER replaces your context with its context. From the point of view of the algorithms, you are no longer a name, but a number: the number of followers, likes, clicks, or other measures of how much you contributed to the BUMMER machine, moment to moment.

Recall that Component C of BUMMER—Cramming experiences into your life—means that algorithms determine what you see. That means you don’t know what other people are seeing, because Component C is calculating different results for them. You can’t know how much the worldviews of other people are being biased and shaped by BUMMER. Personalized search, feeds, streams, and so on are at the root of this problem.

I have no way of seeing your social media feed, however. I therefore have lessened powers to empathize with what you think and feel. 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. Empathy2 is the fuel that runs a decent society. Without it, only dry rules and competitions for power are left.

A common and correct criticism of BUMMER is that it creates “filter bubbles.”3 Your own views are soothingly reinforced, except when you are presented with the most irritating versions of opposing views, as calculated by algorithms. Soothe or savage: whatever best keeps your attention.

This is an epochal development. The version of the world you are seeing is invisible to the people who misunderstand you, and vice versa.

The cheerful rhetoric from the BUMMER companies is all about friends and making the world more connected. And yet science reveals1 the2 truth.3 Research4 shows a world that is not more connected,5 but instead suffers from a heightened sense of isolation.6 The pattern7 has become so clear8 that even research published by social media companies shows how they make you sad. Facebook researchers have practically bragged9 that they could make people unhappy without the people realizing why.

The business plan of BUMMER is to sneakily take data from you and make money off it. Look at how rich BUMMER companies are and remember that their wealth is made entirely of the data you gave them. I think companies should get rich if they make things people want, but I don’t think you should be made less and less secure as part of the bargain. Capitalism isn’t supposed to be a zero-sum game.

The stupidity of the BUMMER approach to human value transcends economic unsustainability; it is a breach of human dignity. That dimension will be explored in the tenth argument, on spiritual concerns.

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. Art might be created automatically from data stolen from multitudes of real artists, for instance. So-called AI art creation programs are already practically worshiped. Then, robotic nurses might run on data grabbed from multitudes of real nurses, but those real nurses will be working for less because they’re competing with robotic nurses.

The above sketch of an alternate business model for what are now BUMMER services like social media and search is only one possibility. I suspect there are others. This particular idea was pitched in a book of mine called Who Owns the Future? Lately, this approach to the future of digital economics has become known as “Data as Labor.”2 DaL has gained traction in economics circles and is surely worth further exploration. It won’t be perfect, but it will be better than BUMMER.

One of the world’s great human rights catastrophes is the plight of the Rohingya population of Myanmar. As it turns out, this crisis corresponded to the arrival of Facebook, which was quickly inundated by shitposts aimed at the Rohingya.3 At the same time, viral lies about child abductions, in that case mostly on Facebook’s WhatsApp, have destabilized parts of India.4 According to a United Nations report, social media is also a massively deadly weapon, literally, in South Sudan—because of shitposts.5 Mysterious authors flood social media feeds with bizarre claims of wrongdoing—variations of the blood libel—supposedly perpetrated by a targeted group. Memes to stimulate genocide often report something horrible that is said to have been done to children. As always with BUMMER, the nastiest, most paranoid messaging gets the most attention, and emotions spiral out of control as a byproduct of engagement spiraling out of control.

Gamergate became a feeder and model for the alt-right.

The next stage in BUMMER politics is the one in which assholes realize they’re favored by BUMMER. All kinds of assholes appear. They get enough attention to outpace the well-meaning people who just won victories. They exhume horrible prejudices and hatreds that haven’t seen the light of day for years, and they make those hatreds mainstream. Then it turns out that even bigger assholes manipulate the early-adopter assholes. Then big bad things start to happen. Horrific, giant assholes get elected, stupid xenophobic projects are elevated, ordinary people suffer horrible, needless material losses, and wars loom. In the case of the United States, astonishingly extreme anti-LGBTQ figures were elevated to the highest offices11 even though LGBTQ dignity and rights issues were untouchable in terms of argument during the election itself. It’s not that BUMMER disfavors LGBTQ people. BUMMER could care less. It’s that it favors con artists and assholes. These are Components A and F, the wind in BUMMER’s sails.

The same thing happens to liberals. Remember Bernie Bros? Remember how it became cool in some liberal circles to cruelly ridicule Hillary, as if doing so were a religion? In the age of BUMMER you can’t tell what was organic and what was engineered.

When a candidate, or any other customer, buys access to user attention through Facebook, the amount of access isn’t just determined by how much is spent, but by how well Facebook’s algorithms determine the customer is also promoting and increasing the use of Facebook. 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.

Facebook and other BUMMER companies are becoming the ransomware of human attention. They have such a hold on so much of so many people’s attention for so much of each day that they are gatekeepers to brains.

Meanwhile, racism became organized over BUMMER to a degree it had not been in generations. I wish I didn’t have to acknowledge this heartbreak. A lot of what goes on at a user-to-user level in BUMMER is wonderful if you look at it while ignoring the bigger picture in which people are being manipulated by BUMMER. If you can draw a small enough frame to include only the stuff that people are directly aware of on BUMMER, then it often looks exquisite.

A year after the election, the truth started to trickle out. It turns out that some prominent “black” activist accounts were actually fake fronts for Russian information warfare. Component F. The Russian purpose was apparently to irritate black activists enough to lower enthusiasm for voting for Hillary. To suppress the vote, statistically.

I am not saying that critiques of Hillary were invalid, or that voter sentiment was uninformed; I am saying that voter emotion was tweaked just a bit, enough to lower voter turnout.

Don’t forget that Facebook had already noisily published research proving it can change voter turnout.19 In the published research, Facebook used the cheerful example of boosting voter turnout. But since Facebook is all about targeting and can calculate your political affiliation, among many other things,20 and since it has also proven it can make people sad,21 it is likely that social networks can also be used to suppress voters who have been targeted because of how they are likely to vote. None of this means that Facebook prefers one kind of voter to another. That’s up to Facebook’s customers, who are not you, the users. Facebook doesn’t necessarily know what’s going on. 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.

BUMMER makes more money when people are irritated and obsessed, divided and angry—and that suited Russian interests perfectly. BUMMER is a shit machine. It transforms sincere organizing into cynical disruption. It’s inherently a cruel con game.

Each of the arguments for deleting your accounts is at first glance about a practical issue, such as trust, but on closer inspection, the arguments confront the deepest and most tender concerns about what it means to be a person. When you use BUMMER, you implicitly accept a new spiritual framework. It is like the EULA agreement—the user agreement—that you clicked “OK” on without reading. You have agreed to change something intimate about your relationship with your soul. If you use BUMMER, you have probably, to some degree, statistically speaking, effectively renounced what you might think is your religion, even if that religion is atheism. You have been inducted into a new spiritual framework. I am not speaking rhetorically or being cute. This is a sincere effort to illuminate what is happening.

You probably know the word “meme” as meaning a BUMMER posting that can go viral. But originally, “meme” suggested a philosophy of thought and meaning. The term was coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins proposed memes as units of culture that compete and are either passed along or not, according to a pseudo-Darwinian selection process. Thus some fashions, ideas, and habits take hold, while others become extinct. The concept of memes provides a way of framing everything non-nerds do—the whole of humanities, culture, arts, and politics—as similar instances of meme competition, mere subroutines of a higher-level algorithm that nerds can master. When the internet took off, Dawkins’s ideas were in vogue, because they flattered techies.

Memes might seem to amplify what you are saying, but that is always an illusion. You might launch an infectious meme about a political figure, and you might be making a great point, but in the larger picture, you are reinforcing the idea that virality is truth. Your point will be undone by whatever other point is more viral. That is by design. The architects of BUMMER were meme believers.