Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now Quotes

“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

“Let’s suppose an algorithm is showing you an opportunity to buy socks or stocks about five seconds after you see a cat video that makes you happy. An adaptive algorithm will occasionally perform an automatic test to find out what happens if the interval is changed to, say, four and a half seconds. Did that make you more likely to buy? If so, that timing adjustment might be applied not only to your future feed, but to the feeds of thousands of other people who seem correlated with you because of anything from color preferences to driving patterns.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Here’s Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of user growth at Facebook: The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.… No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem—this is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem.… I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds—even though we feigned this whole line of, like, there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of, we kind of knew something bad could happen.… So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other. And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years.2”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

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

“the problem isn’t behavior modification in itself. The problem is relentless, robotic, ultimately meaningless behavior modification in the service of unseen manipulators and uncaring algorithms.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“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 might also be nasty, hidden creeps who want to undermine democracy. So I prefer to call this class of person a manipulator.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“we love dogs, we don’t want to be dogs, at least in terms of power relationships with people, and we’re afraid Facebook and the like are turning us into dogs.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“The software that matters most is the most hidden, the least revealed.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Addiction is associated with anhedonia, the lessened ability to take pleasure from life apart from whatever one is addicted to, and social media addicts appear to be prone to long-term anhedonia.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“social media companies talk about this problem is that they’ll say, “Sure we make you sad, but we do more good in the world than harm.” But then the good things they brag about are all things that are intrinsic to the internet, that could—so far as we know—be had without the bad stuff, without BUMMER. 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”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“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.10”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“A wonderful way to notice social perception is to travel to a country where you don’t speak the language. You’ll find that you are suddenly very attuned to what other people are doing and what they are paying attention to, because that’s the only way to know what’s going on.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“we notice one another’s reactions in order to help us each get our own bearings. If everyone around you is nervous about something, you will get nervous, too, because something must be going on. When everyone is relaxed, you’ll tend to relax.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“collective processes make the best sense when participants are acting as individuals.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

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

“When people are locked in a competitive, hierarchical power structure, as in a corporation, they can lose sight of the reality of what they’re doing because the immediate power struggle looms larger than reality itself.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“But the benefits of networks only appear when people use the same platform.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust.”
― 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.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust. Fight-or-flight responses occur in seconds, while it can take hours to relax.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Originally, many of us who worked on scaling the internet16 hoped that the thing that would bring people together—that would gain network effect and lock-in—would be the internet itself. But there was a libertarian wind blowing, so we left out many key functions. The internet in itself didn’t include a mechanism for personal identity, for instance. Each computer has its own code number, but people aren’t represented at all. Similarly, the internet in itself doesn’t give you any place to store even a small amount of persistent information, any way to make or receive payments, or any way to find other people you might have something in common with. Everyone knew that these functions and many others would be needed. We figured it would be wiser to let entrepreneurs fill in the blanks than to leave that task to government. What we didn’t consider was that fundamental digital needs like the ones I just listed would lead to new kinds of massive monopolies because of network effects and lock-in. We foolishly laid the foundations for global monopolies. We did their hardest work for them. More precisely, since you’re the product, not the customer of social media, the proper word is “monopsonies.”17 Our early libertarian idealism resulted in gargantuan, global data monopsonies.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“This book is about how to be a cat. How can you remain autonomous in a world where you are under constant surveillance and are constantly prodded by algorithms”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“The obvious example is that the BUMMER-addicted U.S. president, the social media addict-in-chief, turns everything into a contest over who can destroy someone else most completely with a tweet, or else who gets good treatment in exchange for total loyalty.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“The poorest snowflake of them all, however, is Donald Trump, who exhibits the same behavior. I met him a few times over several decades, and I didn’t like him, but he wasn’t a BUMMER addict back then. He was a New York City character, a manipulator, an actor, a master at working the calculus of chums and outcasts. But as a character he was in on his own joke. Even reality TV didn’t really make him lose it. As a Twitter addict, Trump has changed. He displays the snowflake pattern and sometimes loses control. He is not acting like the most powerful person in the world, because his addiction is more powerful. Whatever else he might be, whatever kind of victimizer, he is also a victim.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Watch a cat circus online, and what’s so touching is that the cats are clearly making their own minds up about whether to do a trick they’ve learned, or to do nothing, or to wander into the audience.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“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. 13”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Who cares if I myself am liberal? If you are a principled conservative, do you think you’ve really been well served by BUMMER? My evangelical Christian conservative friends suddenly find themselves wedged into social media communities that support an obscene, cruel philanderer and abuser who made fortunes from gambling and bankruptcies and who has stated, on the record, that he doesn’t need or seek forgiveness from God. 12 Meanwhile my patriotic, hawkish conservative friends now find themselves aligned with a leader who would almost certainly not be in office were it not for cynical, illegal interventions by a hostile foreign power. Look what BUMMER has done to your conservatism.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Here’s some positive spin: The fact that independent journalism is in trouble in BUMMER’s shadow is a sign of its integrity. Journalists have successfully held themselves to higher standards than social media influencers, but they have also paid a price. Now the real news is called “fake news,” because by the standards of BUMMER, what is real is fake; in BUMMER, reality has been replaced by stupid numbers.”
― 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.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now