Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

by Jaron Lanier

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.