A few takeaways from Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

Behavior modification empires: Meta's and Google's business is modifying behavior. These wonderfully designed apps deliver short dopamine hits that stir emotions in an effort to keep you engaged. But that tells part of the story. The other part is the social validation these tools provide. This adds another dimension of stimuli. So when you combine these two forces you get a powerfully addictive device. This is owed to our biological wiring. Unlike most animals, humans are born completely helpless, and remain so for years. Tech companies have taken advantage of these primal features of the brain for profit.

Behaviors of Users Modified Made into an Empire for Rent: Jaron Lanier uses the acronym BUMMER as a catch-all term for companies like Meta, Google, and TikTok. His overarching argument is that social media can slightly alter their users behaviors for the benefit of advertisers. Dopamine hits can keep a user engaged so that they spend more time than usual watching ads. Algorithms can be manipulated to trigger certain reactions in cohorts of people so that they consume information or act in certain ways. For example, the human rights catastrophe that exacerbated the plight of the Rohingya population in Myanmar. A crisis that corresponded with the arrival of Facebook in that country, where misinformation ran rampant.

Engagement is addiction in disguise: Social media companies rely on engagement as a key metric for growth. But this word forms part of a familiar sanitized language. Lanier argues that a more appropriate word for engagement is behavior modification or addiction. If that is the case, then what do we make of the customers of social media companies? While many advertisers simply want you to buy into a particular brand, there's been an increasining presence of bad actors who are using social media to further their own interests and even to undermine democracy and the rule of law. So instead of calling them advertisers, Lanier argues we should call them by their real name, manipulators.

Metaphysical imperialism: Companies like Google began with the mission to "organize the world's information". This sentiment is best echoed by Kendall Roy, the fictional protagonist of HBOs Succession who says "Information is going to be more precious than water in the next 100." This Sillicon Valley belief that everything is information, and therefore something that can be hacked. The human body can be hacked, and so our physical limitations. So Google's mission is not to organize information, but to organize all reality. This helps explain why Google changed its name to Alphabet and why Facebook changed its name to Meta. You might not subscribe to this belief but you are an active participant in it whether you like it or not. You buy into this view when you search for something in Google, or when you aim to optimize your presence to rank high in search order. Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google now works to look at the problem of death. So it's not just an issue of metaphysics, but of metaphysical imperialism.

An age of technological feudalism: Indulgences were rife during medieval times. If a soul wanted to enter heaven, the Catholic church would demand a hefty price to absolve the sinner and grant access to heaven. The corruption of the church influenced the rise of Protestanism. Similarly, social media companies behave in a similar way. Apple and Google can demand whatever price and conditions, and if companies do not abide then they're cut out from the rest of the world. Companies have no choice because but to play along since society largely depends on these products. Your work company likely uses G-Suite, your friends are all on twitter and your partner likely has a following on Instagram or Tiktok.