Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now was written by Jaron Lanier in 2018.

Lanier is a computer scientist, visual artist, computer philosophy writer, technologist, futurist, and contemporary classical music composer from the United States.

Lanier is the author of several best-selling books, including You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future.

In this book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier discusses his serious concerns about social media's influence, and many of his criticisms of social media will sound familiar to observers of American politics and culture.

In her book on predators, Anna Salter reminded readers of a sign warning hikers that "the mountains don't care". From Lanier's book, "The Algorithm Doesn't Care," I gathered an analogous lesson. The indomitable apathy and boundless distance encountered by a concerned, lost hiker in the foreboding mountains. A social media junkie experiences the same thing, but in a more dangerous, insidious way.

The mountains, on the other hand, do not exploit and commodify endangered hikers in order to profit malicious actors, and endangered hikers do not usually deceive themselves into believing they are secure and prospering when facing imminent death.

Here’s a summary of Lanier’s arguments for why we should delete social media accounts right now,

1. We are being controlled by social media. By simply logging on, we are forfeiting our free will.
2. Quitting social media is the most finest method to resist the insanity of our times.
3. Without our knowledge, social media is driving us to become assholes.
4. Social media is undermining the truth.
5. Social media forces us to engage in worthless trash talk and bullshits.
6. Social media is destroying our ability to emphathize.
7. Social media is making us unhappy.
8. Social media doesn’t want us to have economic dignity.
9. Social media is making politics impossible.
10. SOCIAL MEDIA HATES OUR SOUL.

💡 If you'd like to see some specific examples, I'll include some in a future article.

I completely agree with Lanier's points of view.

Lanier is clearly intelligent and has had a front-row seat to the show that Silicon Valley has become, but he is also clearly disillusioned.

Technology has done a lot of good, but it's also done a lot of irreversible damage, and it's becoming increasingly impossible to discern the difference.

💡 One of the most related concepts for me was that personalized news feeds and data flows prevent us from seeing what others are seeing, what we are supposed to be seeing, and what we were hoping to see here.

Lanier, like the majority of the "Awakens," despises the behavioral consequences of social media, such as addiction, trolling, vulnerability to bullies, identity theft, fake news, and insane competitiveness, among other things.

Lanier would like us all to follow his lead and ditch our enthusiasm for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and go back to using modern communications and computer technology the way it should have been utilized like ten years ago.

I like how Lanier compares social media to an "automobile.”

He says, “SELL YOUR AUTOMOBILE TO IMPROVE YOUR QUALITY OF LIFE!”

Automobile was one of the most significant inventions of the late period of the Industrial Revolution. However, it’s also the bane of modern society. Its invention and development are responsible for the global physical degradation of the environment as well as increasing moral laxity. There would be no traffic accidents or uninsured drivers if the automobile did not exist. The abolition of the automobile would halt the uncontrolled spread of suburbs, significantly improve the quality of life in cities, and promote agricultural employment. Public transportation will regain political importance. Individually, the sale of your car will encourage walking and its accompanying benefits such as physical well-being and psychological relaxation. Road rage will be a thing of the past, and disposable income will rise dramatically.

Wouldn't removing social media have the same impact on individuals?

We must not neglect the importance of social media awareness in today's society; nevertheless, we must find a way to balance the trash and meaningful stuff, and we must lay down our phones from time to time in order to reclaim the control of our lives as they were ten years ago.

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