Name: Liam Ellul's review of The Arguments That You Should Delete All Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier
Item: The Arguments That You Should Delete All Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
Rating: 4
Author: Liam Ellul

Jaron Lanier

'A blisteringly good, urgent, essential read' ZADIE SMITH Jaron Lanier, the world-famous Silicon Valley scientist-pioneer and 'high-tech genius' (Sunday Times) who first alerted us to the dangers of social media, explains why its toxic effects are at the heart of its design, and explains in ten simple arguments why liberating yourself from its hold will transform your life and the world for the better. Social media is making us sadder, angrier, less empathetic, more fearful, more isolated and more tribal. In recent months it has become horribly clear that social media is not bringing us together - it is tearing us apart. In Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now Jaron Lanier draws on his insider's expertise to explain precisely how social media works - by deploying constant surveillance and subconscious manipulation of its users - and why its cruel and dangerous effects are at the heart of its current business model and design. As well as offering ten simple arguments for liberating yourself from its addictive hold, his witty and urgent manifesto outlines a vision for an alternative that provides all the benefits of social media without the harm. So, if you want a happier life, a more just and peaceful world, or merely the chance to think for yourself without being monitored and influenced by the richest corporations in history, then the best thing you can do, for now, is delete your social media accounts - right now. You will almost certainly become a calmer and possibly a nicer person in the process.

The Arguments That You Should Delete All Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR 'A blisteringly good, urgent, essential read' ZADIE SMITH 'Profound . . . Lanier shows the tactical value of appealing to the conscience of the individual. In the face of his earnest argument, I felt a piercing shame about my own presence on Facebook. I heeded his plea and deleted my account' FRANKLIN FOER, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Social media is supposed to bring us together - but it is tearing us apart The evidence suggests it's making us sadder, angrier, less empathetic, more fearful, more isolated and more tribal. Jaron Lanier is the world-famous Silicon Valley scientist-pioneer who first alerted us to the dangers of social media. In this witty and urgent manifesto he explains why its toxic effects are at the heart of its design, and, in ten simple arguments, why liberating yourself from its hold will transform your life and the world for the better.

Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

Claudine

Trevor Rogers

Liam Ellul

Unpretentious and not too negative, I enjoyed the book as a meditation on social media. It was good to be more mindful of the business model of social media and to reflect on our intentions for using it.

A timely call-to-arms from a Silicon Valley pioneer. You might have trouble imagining life without your social media accounts, but virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier insists that we’re better off without them. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier, who participates in no social media, offers powerful and personal reasons for all of us to leave these dangerous online platforms. Lanier’s reasons for freeing ourselves from social media’s poisonous grip include its tendency to bring out the worst in us, to make politics terrifying, to trick us with illusions of popularity and success, to twist our relationship with the truth, to disconnect us from other people even as we are more “connected” than ever, to rob us of our free will with relentless targeted ads. How can we remain autonomous in a world where we are under continual surveillance and are constantly being prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history that have no way of making money other than being paid to manipulate our behavior? How could the benefits of social media possibly outweigh the catastrophic losses to our personal dignity, happiness, and freedom? Lanier remains a tech optimist, so while demonstrating the evil that rules social media business models today, he also envisions a humanistic setting for social networking that can direct us toward a richer and fuller way of living and connecting with our world.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

Erin Darlyn

Thought-provoking and worth the read. I subtracted one star solely because of the unnecessary profanity within; it would have otherwise been a 4-star rating.

"You might have trouble imagining life without your social media accounts, but virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier insists that we're better off without them. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier, who participates in no social media, offers powerful and personal reasons for all of us to leave these dangerous online platforms"--

Leí hasta 54% y lo tuve que abandonar porque me torró. Le da mil vueltas a nimiedades y el acrónimo BUMMER es patéticamente forzado. Son demasiadas páginas para algo que se podría haber dicho en tan solo doce: una de introducción, una de conclusión y una por cada argumento. Sarasa total.

benja

Ron Bronson

Well researched and reasoned
A bit dense given the topic, but I enjoyed "You are not a gadget" way more. Still, the material here will be useful for slidedecks at conferences in the future. A 3.5

Sierra Nguyen

The book does not convince me to delete my social media accounts entirely, however, it does offer a great reminder to be intentional when using this technology. Most of the arguments addressed in the book make me reflect on my personal experience and observation that I have gathered since starting to use social media at age 12, almost a decade ago. Too bad, I happen to agree with Lanier.

While I cannot take back the hours that I have wasted scrolling through social media feeds, from now on I can be a lot more deliberate with my activities when I happen to open these apps (maybe very occasionally now) and use them to stay connected with people I truly care about. 

Lanier offers some really good advice, especially to young people, at the end of the book. If you find yourself being addicted, try disconnecting from social media for a little while to learn more about yourself and then come back if needed. I bet you will learn a lot from not having an algorithm pushing things in front of your eyes for you to see.

(Is Goodreads a social media too? If so, sorry, I'm not deleting my account anytime soon.)

Amr Khater 

this could have been written as an article..

Katie Chua

Safiya 

It wasn't that bad, I liked it because it was very relatable: social media hasn't dome as much good as harm.
The reasoms he advocates should make you delete your soc-media accounts were not rocket-scientists discoveries: I mean that it was obvious that if you are not buying then you are the product, and about the mysterious third parties as well... He made it look as a dystopian reality for sure.
I couldn't agree more on a bulk of what was discussed, but what ached me most were the missing references: in the audiobook version I was hoplessly waiting for footnotes... In vain.
The cat metaphor was a bit not cool... However, the pody-training example was worth it...
Should you read this book to delete your accounts, well at best you'd give it a second thought, unless you've had a bad experience on social media then you surely already did delete them all...
In my case, I didn't feel whatsoever super cool liberation at first, I just sounded like a weirdo everytime I couldn't share my Facebook account for instance, or best case scenario : "That's so nerdy.." while in fact it's just me I couldn't cope with the zeitgeist, it was always too much to keep up with... In short, not my thing.. Needless to say my decision cost me few social awkward moments when I was expected to know stuff I happened to ignore, simply because it was on Facebook..
Anyway not a bad one, I would recommend it to anyone still not decisive about his/her presence on the soc-media...

Edit:

I couldn't spare you this funtastic article by Pr. Dedeo
https://simondedeo.com/?p=705

Simon Elliott Stegall

Lanier writes like a computer scientist, which is what makes this book interesting. His criticisms of social media are juicy and effective, but they are constructive criticisms. He knows of what he speaks, though he speaks not eloquently. He is not utterly against social media,but argues that it could be a benevolent invention if it were constructed in a primarily humanistic way, rather than a primarily capitalist way: if it wasn't a mule of corporate advertising, and if its algorithms weren't designed to promote whatever snags people's attention the fastest, perhaps it would be a primarily useful tool, like LinkedIn, which is constrained by a practical, real-world purpose. And he has a point. After reading this book, even I, social media hater that I am, was softened to the idea that the ills of social media could possibly be reformed. 

All in all, I read this book expecting to agree with most of it. And I did. I don't have any social media, mostly for existential reasons (as Lanier puts it, social media strongly encourages you to flip your existential switch from 'Solitary' to 'Pack'-- enter identity politics) and so I related to Lanier's points there. My only critique is that his proposed solutions to the social media problem are brave but of remote possibility: he proposes a monthly fee for social media users, which would decenter the business model from advertising and data-collection to a more democratic atmosphere. I think it's a great idea, but I struggle to envision it happening.

Either way, Lanier clearly loves technology, and would like to redeem it from the maw of advertising and vitriol that has seized it. But he loves his own soul more. This is what makes the book good. Lanier quit all of his social media years ago, despite the fact that he is a total progressive who believes tech is the future. He quit because he wanted to preserve his own identity in the face of a massive identity melt. This book is mainly about that: why your individuality is important, and why quitting social media is essential to maintaining it. And Lanier, Silicon Valley veteran, practices what he preaches. Respect, bro.

G. Jason Head

sorta scary.  and i totally am trying to figure out how to get the courage to deactivate my facebook account now.

Joseph

If he left his liberal leanings out of this book it would be ok, but he couldn’t resist. 

Talks about how Trump was a “leader who would almost certainly not be in office were it not for cynical, illegal interventions by a hostile foreign power.”

He mocks people for believing in conspiracy theories and then openly supports one, lol. Come on man.

Darren S. Layne

For such a short work, Jaron Lanier's Ten Arguments conjured quite a lot of feelings in me, and most of them smacked of frustration, embarrassment, and exasperation. It's not that I find myself disagreeing with his core ten-point encapsulation of reasons to remove one's self from the influence of social media, which is satisfyingly listed on the back of the book (and which caused me to purchase it in the first place). These feelings are instead much more the product of having so many problems with Lanier's logic, opacity, and style – all of which feel plainly pedestrian and in fact belie the back cover's promise of what should be a vital read.

No question that Lanier has established his chops as a seasoned veteran of Silicon Valley, contributing to the early days of the Internet in both structure and service, including AI and VR tech as well as digital models of economic sustainability. Despite these accomplishments, he is not so adept at putting his ideas down into a digestible form with any semblance of cohesion, flow, or professionalism. The book is therefore a slog and his scattered and terribly flawed presentation undermines the arguments he is attempting to posit.

If the difficulties were all about style and layout, Ten Arguments might be more readily accepted as a definitive treatise on shucking the behavioral control imposed by the social media corps. But even these issues make what should be a simple read into something more akin to copy editing a high-schooler's conspiracy manifesto. Lanier's prose is informal, self-congratulatory, and overly precious, and he repeatedly falls into bad writing habits like incessantly asking questions without answering them in situ, instead choosing to waste space by explaining that he will explore those answers in a later chapter. This happens nearly a dozen times in a 146-page book, which is well beyond annoying. He fails to understand how footnotes should be used, choosing to attach them to word rather than sentence – and this results in one of his sentences having six distinct footnotes where a single one would have sufficed at the end of the sentence. His citations are maddening, almost every one being long strings of arcanely formatted URLs with no titles, dates, or author information contained within. I cannot see anyone in their right minds trying to type some of these in to their browser to further examine his sources; at the very least, a simple title would be far easier to look up. I even checked his personal website (which looks like it was designed in 1987) for live links to these sources, but the only "web resources" associated with the book were self-promotional ones. I also found the titles he has chosen for the many sections within his text to be overly clever, needlessly twee, and often simply irrelevant to the matter that follows.

The real issues with Ten Arguments, however, go beyond Lanier's style and are products of a handful of anemic thought experiments and many pages of pop-psychology standing in for what should be (and apparently could be, if his sources were more incisive) investigative journalism from the unique perspective given to him by his many experiences in the industry. Lanier is a computer scientist, but his bio simply states "scientist", perhaps affording him the freedom to intermittently ramble about utopian philosophies and posit unfounded psychological models ("addiction is a neurological process that we don't understand completely") that come off as uninspired café-counter conversation. He makes some valid points at times, but these are often engulfed by what reads as mental riffing that Lanier, himself, is not necessarily convinced he believes. Terms like "universal cognitive blackmail" and "the unbounded nature of nature" are particularly cringeworthy, as is his forced, ubiquitous acronym of "BUMMER", the anthropomorphized villain of this cautionary tale. The latter is so omnipresent in the text and stands out so greatly on the page that it actually derails the comprehension process of reading the book. And flaccid political statements like "something is drawing young people away from democracy" hang by themselves in the room like dirty jokes cracked at a funeral. There is no exploration, no exposition, no definition of this aphorism, so what, exactly, is its point?

I can appreciate the underlying dangers of which Lanier warns and it would be difficult not to believe the general social trajectory that he describes, but I just don't feel that his arguments are as effective as they could be. Despite the fact that he has witnessed a lot of what happens behind the scenes, he is reluctant to satisfactorily describe what is going into the sausage and who is ultimately to blame. It's a cop-out to repeatedly incriminate Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. while simultaneously condemning the vile "unknown third parties" who are paying these companies to conduct "mass behavior modification" and promulgate destructive "network approach". The fact that he is currently employed by Microsoft might have something to do with that opacity, and this might even be construed to brand Lanier as some measure of evangelical hypocrite, but since I do not know the man, I can only speculate. Yet I cannot help but think that his contribution here would have been better served and more instructive to unmask those third parties, if not with direct evidence, then at least with more detail about the algorithmic secrets that Lanier claims are more closely guarded than national intelligence. Even a mockup of one of these schemes would be more insightful than the final chapter of the book is, which instead argues that social media "hates your soul" and allegorically contends that BUMMER is essentially a religion with a goal of subsuming our free will, which presumably will be sacrificed to the god of virality. That last chapter is a real doozy and closes things out on a pretty low note.

Despite these moral and ethical imperatives that threaten to undo us all, Lanier repeatedly absolves himself of any responsibility for telling us what we should do, and he meekly liberalizes his manifesto by acknowledging that we know what's best for us individually – just in case he appears to step on any toes (thanks for that indulgence!). All of this is then invalidated by his fatuous assertion that "if you want to be a real person, delete your accounts", and others like it throughout the text. Furthermore, Lanier has a tendency to speak of himself as part of the Silicon Valley apparatus from an elitist perspective, claiming that despite all the best intentions that were seeded as the industry was ramping up, everything has gone south and it's now up to the public – who are being used as "product" – to right these wrongs by quitting their social media accounts. This, on the assumption that a mass exodus from corporate behavioral control will somehow then spur his colleagues in Silicon Valley to set up new, less nefarious methods of capitalizing on interpersonal communication in the age of digital media. At one point, he brazenly states, "If you don't quit, you are not creating the space in which Silicon Valley can act to improve itself". Really? Well, I'm sorry, Jaron, but who screwed it all up in the first place? Whose job is it to fix this? Thanks for nothing.

It's not all drek, though, and that is why this review offers two stars to Ten Arguments. Lanier excels when recounting the history of tech in the Valley and is clearly most comfortable when discussing his industry's early intentions and theories about how things perhaps should have gone. He is obviously correct to claim that the widespread use of social media has a marked deleterious effect on interpersonal compassion and empathy, and that big data is being used by hidden parties to manipulate favor and behavior on a grand, international scale. Terms like "invisible social vandalism" and AI being "a cover for sloppy engineering" are adroit and fall directly in Lanier's wheelhouse. Likewise, Lanier's discussion of context being applied to statements on social media after the fact is painfully accurate, and his thought-model on a corporate-controlled Wikipedia is memorable, proving that he can, indeed, enunciate important ideas. I only wish there were more of them. Perhaps in his other books, but I won't have the patience to attempt to read them.

I personally believe, however, that the needlessly meandering and clumsy Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now can be summarized by a single phrase from Argument Three: Social Media is Making You Into an Asshole: "Your character is the most precious thing about you. Don't let it degrade." Now that is clear, concise, and vital writing.

Trevor Rogers &
The Arguments That You Should Delete All Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

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The Arguments That You Should Delete All Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier