Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now Quotes

“Empathy2 is the fuel that runs a decent society. Without it, only dry rules and competitions for power are left.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“This book will argue that the companies on their own can’t do enough to glue the world back together.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“I don't think I'm better than you because I don't have social media accounts. Maybe I'm worse; maybe you can handle the stuff better than I can.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“What if deeply reaching a small number of people matters more than reaching everybody with nothing? (p68)”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Our early libertarian idealism resulted in gargantuan, global data monopsonies.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Either there’s a total shitstorm of assholes (that’s not a mixed metaphor, right?) or everyone is super careful and artificially nice.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Each of us has an inner troll.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Something entirely new is happening in the world. Just in the last five or ten years, nearly everyone started to carry a little device called a smartphone on their person all the time that's suitable for algorithmic behavior modification. [...] We're being tracked and measured constantly, and receiving engineered feedback all the time. [...] Now everyone who is on social media is getting individualized, continuously adjusted stimuli, without a break, so long as they use their smartphones. What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Remember, AI is just fancy statistics on data, and the data comes from you. You are the AI. It’s just that under the present system, your data is taken without pay so it feels like this new creature, the AI, is a real entity, but it isn’t.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“AI is a story we computer scientists made up to help us get funding once upon a time, back when we depended on grants from government agencies. It was pragmatic theater. But now AI has become a fiction that has overtaken its authors.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“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.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“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.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Prohibitions are engines of corruption that split societies into official and criminal sectors.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Awareness is the first step to freedom.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“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.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“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. There is a spotlight on online bullying, as there should be, and you might have experienced being bullied online. Many, many people have. But I am also asking you to notice, within your own mind, in genuine secrecy—don’t share this—if you are feeling the temptation to strike out at someone else online. Maybe that other person started it. Whatever. It isn’t worth it. Leave the platform. Don’t post that insult video, don’t tweet in retaliation.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Each of us has an inner troll. In the early days, before everyone was doing it, the air was clearer and it was easier to notice how bizarre it is when your inner troll starts talking. It’s like an ugly alien living inside you that you long ago forgot about. Don’t let your inner troll take control! If it happens when you’re in a particular situation, avoid that situation! It doesn’t matter if it’s an online platform, a relationship, or a job. Your character is like your health, more valuable than anything you can buy. Don’t throw it away.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“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.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“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. Oh my God! I was back in that same place, becoming an asshole because of something about this stupid technology! I quit—again. Of all the ten arguments in this book, this is the one that really gets to me viscerally. I don’t want to be an asshole. Or a fake-nice person. I want to be authentically nice, and certain online designs seem to fight against that with magical force. That’s the core reason why I don’t have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp,2 Instagram, Snapchat, or any of the rest. You’ll see fake accounts in my name. There’s even a supposed @RealJaronLanier on Twitter. But I have no idea who that is. Not me. I don’t think I’m better than you because I don’t have social media accounts. Maybe I’m worse; maybe you can handle the stuff better than I can.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Briefly I was one of the HuffPost’s top bloggers, always on the front page. But 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.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Addicts also become aggressive, though they feel they are acting out of necessity. The choice is to victimize or be a victim. Even successful and pleasant BUMMER addicts, like top social media influencers, have reported that they must not be too nice to others, for that shows weakness1 in a highly competitive fishbowl. One must be followed more than one follows, for appearances’ sake.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“SOCIAL MEDIA IS MAKING YOU INTO AN ASSHOLE Let me rephrase this argument’s title. I don’t know you. I’m not saying that you personally are definitely turning into an asshole, but many people are, yet they seem to only see that many other people are. I’ve seen myself start turning into an asshole online, and it was scary and depressing. So what I should really say is something like “You’re vulnerable to gradually turning into an asshole, or statistically you might very well be turning into an asshole. So, no offense, but please take the possibility seriously.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“To review: Customized feeds become optimized to “engage” each user, often with emotionally potent cues, leading to addiction. People don’t realize how they are being manipulated. The default purpose of manipulation is to get people more and more glued in, and to get them to spend more and more time in the system.7 But other purposes for manipulation are also tested. For instance, if you’re reading on a device, your reading behaviors will be correlated with those of multitudes of other people. If someone who has a reading pattern similar to yours bought something after it was pitched in a particular way, then the odds become higher that you will get the same pitch.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Ordinary people are brought together in a setting in which the main—or often the only—reward that’s available is attention. They can’t reasonably expect to earn money, for instance. Ordinary users can gain only fake power and wealth, not real power or wealth. So mind games become dominant. With nothing else to seek but attention, ordinary people tend to become assholes, because the biggest assholes get the most attention.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“THE PARTS THAT MAKE UP THE BUMMER MACHINE BUMMER is a machine with six moving parts. Here’s a mnemonic for the six components of the BUMMER machine, in case you ever have to remember them for a test: A is for Attention Acquisition leading to Asshole supremacy B is for Butting into everyone’s lives C is for Cramming content down people’s throats D is for Directing people’s behaviors in the sneakiest way possible E is for Earning money from letting the worst assholes secretly screw with everyone else F is for Fake mobs and Faker society”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“To free yourself, to be more authentic, to be less addicted, to be less manipulated, to be less paranoid … for all these marvelous reasons, delete your accounts.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Addiction gradually turns you into a zombie. Zombies don’t have free will. Once again, this result isn’t total but statistical. You become more like a zombie, more of the time, than you otherwise would be. There’s no need to believe in some myth of perfect people who are completely free of addictions. They don’t exist. You’re not going to become perfect or perfectly free, no matter how many self-help books you read or how many addictive services you quit. There’s no such thing as perfectly free will. Our brains are constantly changing their ways to adapt to a changing environment. It’s hard work, and brains get tired! Sometimes they take a break, zone out, and run on autopilot. But that’s different from being driven by hidden manipulators”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“The unfortunate result is that once an app starts to work, everyone is stuck with it. It’s hard to quit a particular social network and go to a different one, because everyone you know is already on the first one. It’s effectively impossible for everyone in a society to back up all their data, move simultaneously, and restore their memories at the same time. Effects of this kind are called network effects or lock-ins. They’re hard to avoid on digital networks.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Back in its earliest days, online advertising really was just advertising. But before long, advances in computing happened to coincide with ridiculously perverse financial incentives, as will be explained in the next argument. What started as advertising morphed into what would better be called “empires of behavior modification for rent.” That transformation has often attracted new kinds of customers/manipulators, and they aren’t pretty.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“The prime directive to be engaging reinforces itself, and no one even notices that negative emotions are being amplified more than positive ones. Engagement is not meant to serve any particular purpose other than its own enhancement, and yet the result is an unnatural global amplification of the “easy” emotions, which happen to be the negative ones.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now