Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now Quotes

“Cuando usamos las redes sociales, recibimos el equivalente tanto de las recompensas como de las descargas eléctricas.”
― Jaron Lanier, Diez razones para borrar tus redes sociales de inmediato

“The Enlightenment emphasized ways of learning that weren’t subservient to human power hierarchies. Instead, Enlightenment thinking celebrates evidence-based scientific method and reasoning. The cultures of sciences and engineering used to embrace Enlightenment epistemology, but now they have been overridden by horribly regressive BUMMER epistemology. 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 of, Dawkins’s ideas were in vogue, because they flattered techies. There was a ubiquitous genre of internet appreciation from the very beginning in which someone would point out the viral spread of a meme and admire how cute that was. The genre exists to this day. Memes started out as a way of expressing solidarity with a philosophy I used to call cybernetic totalism that still underlies BUMMER. 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.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Google famously funded a project to “solve death.”6 This is such a precisely religious pretension that I’m surprised the religions of the world didn’t serve Google with a copyright infringement take-down notice.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Lo que las redes sociales hicieron entonces, y lo que hacen siempre, es crear ilusiones: de que podemos mejorar la sociedad con solo desearlo; de que las personas más sensatas saldrían ganadoras en las contiendas; y de que, de alguna manera, la cuestión del bienestar material se resolvería sola. Lo que sucede en realidad, siempre, es que los espejismos se disipan cuando ya es demasiado tarde, y el mundo lo heredan las personas más toscas, egoístas e ignorantes. Aquel que no sea un idiota será quien peor parado salga.”
― Jaron Lanier, Diez razones para borrar tus redes sociales de inmediato

“Las experiencias con las plataformas INCORDIO oscilan entre dos extremos: o bien sus usuarios forman una turba virtual de idiotas, o bien todo el mundo es sumamente cuidadoso y artificialmente amable.”
― Jaron Lanier, Diez razones para borrar tus redes sociales de inmediato

“To become a number is to be explicitly subservient to a system. A number is a public verification of reduced freedom, status, and personhood.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“People are clustered into paranoia peer groups because then they can be more easily and predictably swayed.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Moving in with people might have been for cats what advancing technology has been for people.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“According to reporting by the New York Times, the going rate for fake people on Twitter in early 2018 was $225 for the first 25,000 fake followers.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“There are almost no investigative local news organizations left in the United States. Our huge nation is only a few organizations away from having no independent newsrooms with resources and clout.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“If Twitter ceased operations tomorrow, not only would Trump not be able to tweet, obviously, but also I believe he’d become a nicer, better person at all hours.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

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

“One of the world’s great human rights catastrophes—unfolding as I write—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”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“hate raining on dreams, but if you think you are about to make a living as an influencer or similar, the statistics are voraciously against you, no matter how deserving you are and no matter how many get-rich-quick stories you’ve been fed.5 The problem isn’t that there are only a few stars; that’s always true, by definition. The problem is that BUMMER economics allow for almost no remunerative roles for near-stars.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“We’re being hypnotized little by little by technicians we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know. We’re all lab animals now.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“A lot of potential Hillary voters were infused with a not-great feeling about Hillary, or about voting at all. Were you one of them? If so, please think back. Were you seeing any information customized for you before the election? Did you use Twitter or Facebook? Did you do a lot of online searches? You were had. You were tricked. Your best intentions were turned against you.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“It’s as if Facebook is saying, “Pay us or you don’t exist.” They’re becoming the existential mafia.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“It’s random that BUMMER favored the Republicans over the Democrats in U.S. politics, but it isn’t random that BUMMER favored the most irritable, authoritarian, paranoid, and tribal Republicans.14 All those qualities are equally available on the left. If a U.S. version of Hugo Chavez had come along, he could have been president. Maybe it will happen in the future. Yuck. As a lefty, I don’t think a BUMMER-style lefty leader would be any better than Trump. Debasement is debasement, whatever direction it comes from.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“When social media companies are paid directly by users instead of by hidden third parties, then they will serve those users. It’s so simple. Someone will be able to pay to see poisonous propaganda, but they won’t be able to pay to have that poison directed at someone else. The incentive for poisoning the world will be undone. I won’t have an account on Facebook, Google, or Twitter until I can pay for it—and I unambiguously own and set the price for using my data, and it’s easy and normal to earn money if my data is valuable.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“It might sound undesirable to someday have to pay for things that are currently free, but remember, you’d also be able to make money from those things. And paying for stuff sometimes really does make the world better for everyone. Techies who advocated a free/open future used to argue that paying for movies or TV was a terrible thing, and that the culture of the future would be made of volunteerism, with the digital distribution funded by advertising, of course. This was practically a religious belief in Silicon Valley when the big BUMMER companies were founded. It was sacrilege to challenge it. But then companies like Netflix and HBO convinced people to pay a monthly fee, and the result is what is often called “peak TV.” Why couldn’t there also be an era of paid “peak social media” and “peak search”? 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. BUMMER only supports stars.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“One way is to directly monetize services such as search and social media. You’d pay a low monthly fee to use them, but if you contributed a lot—if your posts, videos, or whatever are popular—you could also earn some money. A large number of people, instead of the tiny number of token stars in the present system, would earn money. (I acknowledge, of course, that there would have to be a way of making services available to those who couldn’t afford to pay even a small fee.)”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“One way is to directly monetize services such as search and social media. You’d pay a low monthly fee to use them, but if you contributed a lot—if your posts, videos, or whatever are popular—you could also earn some money. A large number of people, instead of the tiny number of token stars in the present system, would earn money.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“the advertising business model. Advertising would allow search to be free, music to be free, and news to be free. (That didn’t mean that musicians or reporters got a piece of the pie, for the techies considered them replaceable.) Advertising would become the dominant business in the information era. This didn’t feel dystopian at first. The original ads on Google were cute and harmless. But as the internet, the devices, and the algorithms advanced, advertising inevitably morphed into mass behavior modification. This is how BUMMER was born. As often happens with people, we forgot that we made a choice. Now we feel helpless. But the choice remains, and we can remake it.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Some have compared social media to the tobacco industry,5 but I will not. The better analogy is paint that contains lead. When it became undeniable that lead was harmful, no one declared that houses should never be painted again. Instead, after pressure and legislation, lead-free paints became the new standard.6 Smart people simply waited to buy paint until there was a safe version on sale. Similarly, smart people should delete their accounts until nontoxic varieties are available.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Fake people are a cultural denial-of-service attack.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“I am conscious. I have faith that you are also conscious.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now