Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now Quotes

“Negative emotions such as fear and anger well up more easily and dwell in us longer than positive ones. It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust. Fight-or-flight responses occur in seconds, while it can take hours to relax. This is true in real life, but it is even more true in the flattened light of algorithms.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“For instance, when we are afraid that we might not be considered cool, attractive, or high-status, we don’t feel good. That fear is a profound emotion. It hurts.9 Everybody suffers from social anxiety from time to time, and every child has encountered a bully who used social anxiety as a weapon of torture, probably because behaving like a bully lessened the chances that the bully might become a target. That’s why people, even those who would normally be decent, tend to pile on to a victim of social anxiety torture. They’re so afraid of the very real pain that social anxiety brings that they can lose sight of their better natures for a moment. That’s not to say that all social emotions are negative. We can also experience camaraderie, sympathy, respect, admiration, gratitude, hope, empathy, closeness, attraction, and a world of other positive feelings when we interact with other people. On the negative side, we might feel fear, hostility, anxiety, resentment, repulsion, jealousy, and a desire to ridicule.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Social networks bring in another dimension of stimuli: social pressure. People are keenly sensitive to social status, judgment, and competition. Unlike most animals, people are not only born absolutely helpless, but also remain so for years. We only survive by getting along with family members and others. Social concerns are not optional features of the human brain. They are primal. 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. Normal, noncriminal people were coerced into doing horrible things, such as torturing others, through no mechanism other than social pressure.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“When an algorithm is feeding experiences to a person, it turns out that the randomness that lubricates algorithmic adaptation can also feed human addiction. The algorithm is trying to capture the perfect parameters for manipulating a brain, while the brain, in order to seek out deeper meaning, is changing in response to the algorithm’s experiments; it’s a cat-and-mouse game based on pure math. Because the stimuli from the algorithm don’t mean anything, because they genuinely are random, the brain isn’t adapting to anything real, but to a fiction. That process—of becoming hooked on an elusive mirage—is addiction. As the algorithm tries to escape a rut, the human mind becomes stuck in one.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Social media algorithms are usually “adaptive,” which means they constantly make small changes to themselves in order to try to get better results; “better” in this case meaning more engaging and therefore more profitable. A little randomness is always present in this type of algorithm”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“When people get a flattering response in exchange for posting something on social media, they get in the habit of posting more. That sounds innocent enough, but it can be the first stage of an addiction that becomes a problem both for individuals and society. Even though Silicon Valley types have a sanitized name for this phase, “engagement,” we fear it enough to keep our own children away from it. Many of the Silicon Valley kids I know attend Waldorf schools, which generally forbid electronics.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“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

“When people get a flattering response in exchange for posting something on social media, they get in the habit of posting more.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.…”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Suddenly you and other people are being put into a lot of stupid competitions no one asked for.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Your ability to know the world, to know truth, has been degraded, while the world’s ability to know you has been corrupted. Politics has become unreal and terrifying, while economics has become unreal and unsustainable: two sides of the same coin.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

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

“Watch the end credits on a movie on Netflix or HBO. It’s good discipline for lengthening your attention span! Look at all those names scrolling by. All those people who aren’t stars made their rent by working to bring you that show.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

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

“Are you sad, lonely, scared? Happy, confident? Getting your period? Experiencing a peak of class anxiety? So-called advertisers can seize the moment when you are perfectly primed and then influence you with messages that have worked on other people who share traits and situations with you. I say “so-called” because it’s just not right to call direct manipulation of people advertising. Advertisers used to have a limited chance to make a pitch, and that pitch might have been sneaky or annoying, but it was fleeting. Furthermore, lots of people saw the same TV or print ad; it wasn’t adapted to individuals. The biggest difference was that you weren’t monitored and assessed all the time so that you could be fed dynamically optimized stimuli—whether “content” or ad—to engage and alter you.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Statistics are reliable, but only as idiot demons.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.… It’s a social-validation feedback loop”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Mi descontento está relacionado con todas las razones vistas hasta ahora, porque Incordio me sitúa en una posición subordinada: es estructuralmente humillante. Lo que me molesta no es un determinado patrón de superficie - como ver que todo el mundo ofrece una visión distorsionada de su vida para hacer creer que es más adinerada, feliz y apacible de lo que es en realidad- sino el núcleo del sistema incordio. Estar enganchado y notar que me manipulan me hace sentir mal, pero eso no es todo. Incordio hace que me sienta juzgado como parte de una competición injusta y degradante, sin ningún propósito que pueda justificarlo.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“¿Y si conectar a un nivel profundo con un grupo reducido de personas fuese más importante que llegar a todo el mundo de la manera más superficial?”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

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

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

“Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent”?”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Like all well-managed theories, they improve over time through adaptive feedback.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“You, you, you have the affirmative responsibility to invent and demonstrate ways to live without the crap that is destroying society.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“This book doesn’t address problems related to family dynamics, to untenable pressures placed on young people, especially young women (please read Sherry Turkle on those topics), the way scammers can use social media to abuse you, the way social media algorithms might discriminate against you for racist or other horrible reasons (please read Cathy O’Neil on that topic), or the way your loss of privacy can bite you personally and harm society in surprising ways.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“The foundation of the search for truth must be the ability to notice one’s own ignorance. Acknowledging ignorance is a beautiful feature that science and spirituality hold in common. BUMMER rejects it.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Even when the readers are real, not fake, algorithms are routing them to particular content, so their choices aren’t really independent. The measurements aren’t valid, by definition. You can’t tell someone where to go and then claim that you discovered something new because you learned where that person went. This is yet another ubiquitous problem that’s as hard to see as air.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“When what people can be made to perceive is the product sold by some of the richest corporations, then obviously truth must suffer. The loss of truth is the product.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Similarly, a BUMMER addict eventually becomes preternaturally quick to take offense, as if hoping to get into a spat. Addicts also become aggressive, though they feel they are acting out of necessity. The choice is to victimize or be a victim.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Because the stimuli from the algorithm don’t mean anything, because they genuinely are random, the brain isn’t adapting to anything real, but to a fiction. That process—of becoming hooked on an elusive mirage—is addiction.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now