First published in 2018, Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now is Jaron Lanier’s shortest and arguably most important book to date. On re-reading it five years on, many of his arguments remain compelling and there are still many valid reasons to delete your social media accounts.
I’m not really equipped to write a review of this book. If you’d like one, here it is: it’s brilliant. Jaron Lanier is absolutely on form and is very persuasive. By the end, you will at least consider deleting your social media accounts. Maybe you’ll only partially delete your social media, but even this small change will feel valuable to you and benefits society.
Reasons to delete your social media
How can deleting your social media accounts be so important? Whilst you should definitely read this book cover to cover (which won’t take long, it’s only about 140 pages) let’s take a look at the 10 reasons to delete your social media.
Reason #1: You are losing your free will
If social media is a cage that goes everywhere with us, then we, the users, are the lab rats in the 21st century’s greatest experiment. And like caged lab rats, our engagement in the process is being subtly tweaked by positive and negative feedback when we push the levers in the corners of our cage.
When you interact with social media, you may be rewarded for a great post or punished for anti-social behaviour. We don’t always get tonnes of engagement with every picture or musing we share, but the potential for interaction keeps us hooked. As a result, we don’t express ourselves freely anymore, in a bid to conform and get our rewards.
Reason #2: Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times
A confusingly named rule that is actually one of Lanier’s most important arguments. In this argument he introduces his definition of social media’s business model; Behaviours of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent. He also introduces the six A-to-F-labelled components that are critical to the BUMMER machine.
The rest of the arguments rely on an understanding of this model. Not all internet services, or even social media are problematic, just the BUMMER ones. The BUMMER social media services are reliant on third parties paying for advertising to reach us. To make the advertising as targeted, and therefore as valuable as possible, advertisers need to believe that their ads are being shown to users with whom their ads are most likely to resonate.
The behaviour modification elements of BUMMER are there to keep users categorised and hooked to their feeds. A well-modified user base is by far the most valuable empire for rent. That’s BUMMER.
Reason #3: Social media is making you into an asshole
Component A of BUMMER: A is for Attention Acquisition leading to Asshole supremacy. The biggest assholes get the most attention, but surely we can’t all be assholes? It’s true that we’re probably not, but we’ve all descended into a heated exchange on social media at some point. Our blood boils and we must crush our foolish opponent at all costs.
And if we want to avoid such confrontations in future, we live our lives being fake nice to stay out of trouble. We find out who our allies are and we stick by them, falling into groups and we stick to our packs. BUMMER loves this as it makes us easier to categorise and rent advertising space to.
Whether you’re more of an asshole on social media or overly nice, it’s more than likely that you’re not expressing yourself authentically.
Reason #4: Social media is undermining truth
Users who act inauthentically, or are downright fake (like a bot) propagate falsehoods. Lanier takes the spreading of anti-vax conspiracies as an example. Shocking and bold claims spread more easily among users. Because users are categorisable it’s easy for social media to target users that are likely to be susceptible with information they’re likely to spread.
Lanier is able to work this argument about anti-vax conspiracies towards his own parenthood and how he’d prefer that his children are surrounded by other children who have been vaccinated. You could save children; delete your social media.
Jaron Lanier, the virtual reality legend of Silicon Valley who argues why you should delete your social media
Reason #5: Social media is making what you say meaningless
This is an argument about context and how BUMMER platforms strip this away to make content more shareable and provocative. Think of a time you’ve seen a provocative video of a fight or an argument on social media. We’re shown content that gets us worked-up, but we don’t know how the confrontation began, we can’t make an objective judgement of who is in the wrong or the wider story about how this came about.
Lanier contrasts this with the uneroded medium of podcasts. Because we take the time to consume podcasts in their entirety, we get the whole context of their discussions. Now imagine a podcast curating super-AI that is able to splice together a host of podcast excerpts to create a new mash-up podcast. You could search a term like ‘fly fishing’ and listen to a disorientating bricolage of podcast snippets that, without their context, no longer make much sense.
If an audible feed like this would be so jarring, why do we so readily accept the informational ones that BUMMER platforms offer us?
Reason #6: Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy
To empathise with others, we need to understand their point of view. For generations, shared histories, significant cultural events and even advertising that we all watched on TV were seen by everybody in our society. It didn’t mean we all had the same responses to these events, but we all understood the journey that those around us had been on.
Massive events like this still occur. For example, the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 is remembered well in western society. Whilst the responses to events that followed his death differ, we’re able to understand the perspectives of others because we all experienced the same event.
Now that BUMMER platforms are able to construct feeds of information that are detailed and unique to every individual, we no longer know what those who don’t agree with us have seen. We haven’t seen the same news stories as them, nor been exposed to the same revelations. Their worldview stops making any sense and so our ability to empathise with them is diminished.
Reason #7: Social media is making you unhappy
This rule is simple. Social Media doesn’t make us happy. It makes us insecure. If we only present the best of our own lives on social media, then that means everybody else is too.
We’re surrounded by other people on social media presenting wealthier, happier and trouble-free accounts of their lives that are not true. This leaves us playing a rigged game in which we feel judged to a higher standard, and for what?
But how about a simpler litmus test? Whenever you stop browsing social media, are you always happy? Or are you sometimes angered, saddened or frustrated by what you’ve read or watched. If you want to be happier, delete your social media.
Reason #8: Social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity
Tristan Harris is given credit for the phrase ‘if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product’. This is true of practically all social media platforms and Lanier takes us further into how this may have come to be.
In the early days of Silicon Valley’s dominance of the tech landscape, Google determined that the best solution to keep their products free was to sell advertising space. In a lot of ways, their advertising model is a win-win for both Google and advertisers alike.
Google provides us with free services, like search and email. They then read the search and email data we provide and use this to target us with precision advertising that is, in theory, highly attuned to our needs. Advertisers pay Google for their ads to be placed where they’re most likely to work, instead of paying for advertising space that’s unlikely to get clicks.
Over the last couple of decades, this advertising model has become baked into Sillicon Valley products. To keep services free and spreadable, users agree to pay by providing data to target themselves with ads. Social media platforms are effectively unable to imagine a way to connect two people without a third party paying to be part of the connection.
Lanier proposes replacing the advertising model with a small monthly fee. This may have been unthinkable even five or ten years ago. But with so many of us happily paying subscriptions for on demand entertainment like Netflix, perhaps a social media site that you pay a fee for, in exchange for a less manipulative experience, could really work.
Reason #9: Social media is making politics impossible
Social Media is either not sophisticated enough to, or simply not interested in, understanding the nuances of your personal politics. Social media finds it much easier to lump you into categories depending on how you engage with certain topics.
For example, if you’re a Christian conservative, you may be presumed to be a republican and therefore you may be presumed to be a Trump supporter. You may be presumed to be more supportive of the military and more skeptical of climate policy.
Similarly if you’ve expressed sympathy for the Black Lives Matter cause online, you may be presumed to be more receptive to content that is critical of capitalism, or more supportive of LGBT causes and unlikely to be socially conservative.
These patterns feel familiar, perhaps even logical, but for many critically thinking individuals, these connections are nonsense and reason they exist is that social media is attempting to find more topics you engage with to categorise you.
Social Media manipulates its users to out themselves into these categories, commit to a side and join their tribes. The next step is to throw content at you that you disagree with or makes you angry. Angry users click more. When users click more, social media makes more money.
Reason #10: Social media hates your soul
The final reason is Lanier’s least literal. He constructs a comparison between social media and religion on the basis that they’re both manipulation of people’s behaviour en masse. He runs the previous nine reasons through the religion filter and comes up with some interesting angles, but ultimately it’s a metaphor that, for me, is less compelling than the arguments that have come before.
Conclusion: 10 Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts
I first read Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now shortly after it was published. It was compelling to have someone as coherent as Jaron Lanier explain what was happening to us when we use social media.
At the time, I was convinced to try and close my Facebook account, but in the end I was forced to keep it as it is the sole communication channel for some of the bands I work with. However, I’ve been able to avoid browsing Facebook, feeding it data and have hopefully reduced its ability to work its magic on me.
On second reading, I was quick to delete a TikTok account I wasn’t particularly taken with anyway. Next in the crosshairs is Instagram and Threads. These platforms don’t seem to serve any particular job for me, so perhaps they’re ripe for removal.
Lanier is honest and didactic, but not demeaning. You don’t have to delete your social media if you don’t want to. You could delete some accounts and re-open some later when you understand how they can be useful to you.
Ultimately, I think we would all benefit from being more mindful of whether we need our social media accounts. I highly recommend reading Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier. You might discover more reasons to delete your social media.
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