Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

# Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now ## Details ![Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81lDFAeF7xL._SY160.jpg) Title: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B079DTVVG8) ISBN: 125019668X Author: Jaron Lanier, [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Jaron-Lanier/e/B00J1ZK6S6/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1) ## Notes ## Related ## References 1. <q class="blue">Statistics are reliable, but only as idiot demons.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 74, loc. [74](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=74) 2. <q class="pink">What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 82, loc. [82](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=82) 3. <q class="blue">Here’s Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of user growth at Facebook: The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works.… No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem—this is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem.… I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds—even though we feigned this whole line of, like, there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of, we kind of knew something bad could happen.… So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other. And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 110, loc. [110](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=110) 4. <q class="pink">The core process that allows social media to make money and that also does the damage to society is behavior modification. Behavior modification entails methodical techniques that change behavioral patterns in animals and people. It can be used to treat addictions, but it can also be used to create them.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 138, loc. [138](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=138) 5. <q class="pink">Using symbols instead of real rewards has become an essential trick in the behavior modification toolbox.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 152, loc. [152](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=152) 6. <q class="pink">Back to the surprising phenomenon: it’s not that positive and negative feedback work, but that somewhat random or unpredictable feedback can be more engaging than perfect feedback.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 170, loc. [170](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=170) 7. <q class="blue">It’s healthy for a scientist to be fascinated by a pattern that doesn’t quite make sense. Maybe that means there’s something deeper to be discovered. And it’s a great tool to exploit if you’re writing a script. A little incongruity makes a plot or a character more fascinating.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 177, loc. [177](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=177) 8. <q class="blue">The allure of glitchy feedback is probably what draws a lot of people into crummy “codependent” relationships in which they aren’t treated well.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 180, loc. [180](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=180) 9. <q class="blue">Let’s suppose an algorithm is showing you an opportunity to buy socks or stocks about five seconds after you see a cat video that makes you happy. An adaptive algorithm will occasionally perform an automatic test to find out what happens if the interval is changed to, say, four and a half seconds. Did that make you more likely to buy? If so, that timing adjustment might be applied not only to your future feed, but to the feeds of thousands of other people who seem correlated with you because of anything from color preferences to driving patterns.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 186, loc. [186](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=186) 10. <q class="blue">A mutation is a wild card that adds new possibilities, a jarring jump. Every once in a while a mutation adds a weird, new, and enhancing feature to a species.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 202, loc. [202](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=202) 11. <q class="pink">Our brains surely include adaptive processes; brains might be adapted to seek out surprises, because nature abhors a rut.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 204, loc. [204](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=204) 12. <q class="pink">Because the stimuli from the algorithm don’t mean anything, because they genuinely are random, the brain isn’t adapting to anything real, but to a fiction. That process—of becoming hooked on an elusive mirage—is addiction. As the algorithm tries to escape a rut, the human mind becomes stuck in one.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 207, loc. [207](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=207) 13. <q class="pink">Occasionally, pioneers of the gambling world complain about how social media companies ripped off their ideas and made more money, but mostly they talk about how social media is helping them identify the easiest marks.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 211, loc. [211](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=211) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10899-015-9525-2 14. <q class="blue">Whether or not positive feedback might in theory be more effective in certain cases, negative feedback turns out to be the bargain feedback, the best choice for business, so it appears more often in social media.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 245, loc. [245](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=245) 15. <q class="pink">Negative emotions such as fear and anger well up more easily and dwell in us longer than positive ones. It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust. Fight-or-flight responses occur in seconds, while it can take hours to relax.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 247, loc. [247](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=247) 16. <q class="blue">There is no evil genius seated in a cubicle in a social media company performing calculations and deciding that making people feel bad is more “engaging” and therefore more profitable than making them feel good. Or at least, I’ve never met or heard of such a person.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 249, loc. [249](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=249) 17. <q class="pink">The prime directive to be engaging reinforces itself, and no one even notices that negative emotions are being amplified more than positive ones. Engagement is not meant to serve any particular purpose other than its own enhancement, and yet the result is an unnatural global amplification of the “easy” emotions, which happen to be the negative ones.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 252, loc. [252](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=252) 18. <q class="blue">Instead of applying the simple mechanisms of behaviorism, we need to think about people in more creative ways, if we expect them to be creative. We need to foster joy, intellectual challenge, individuality, curiosity, and other qualities that don’t fit into a tidy chart.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 260, loc. [260](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=260) 19. <q class="pink">The term “engagement” is part of the familiar, sanitized language that hides how stupid a machine we have built. We must start using terms like “addiction” and “behavior modification.”</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 267, loc. [267](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=267) 20. <q class="blue">What started as advertising morphed into what would better be called “empires of behavior modification for rent.” That transformation has often attracted new kinds of customers/manipulators, and they aren’t pretty.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 275, loc. [275](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=275) 21. <q class="blue">Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results. An unfortunate combination of biology and math favors degradation of the human world. Information warfare units sway elections, hate groups recruit, and nihilists get amazing bang for the buck when they try to bring society down.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 278, loc. [278](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=278) 22. <q class="blue">Digital networks genuinely deliver value to us. They allow for great efficiencies and convenience. That’s why so many of us worked so hard to make them possible.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 287, loc. [287](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=287) 23. <q class="blue">The unfortunate result is that once an app starts to work, everyone is stuck with it. It’s hard to quit a particular social network and go to a different one, because everyone you know is already on the first one. It’s effectively impossible for everyone in a society to back up all their data, move simultaneously, and restore their memories at the same time.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 292, loc. [292](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=292) 24. <q class="pink">One of the main reasons to delete your social media accounts is that there isn’t a real choice to move to different social media accounts. Quitting entirely is the only option for change. If you don’t quit, you are not creating the space in which Silicon Valley can act to improve itself.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 307, loc. [307](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=307) 25. <q class="blue">There’s no such thing as perfectly free will. Our brains are constantly changing their ways to adapt to a changing environment. It’s hard work, and brains get tired! Sometimes they take a break, zone out, and run on autopilot. But that’s different from being driven by hidden manipulators.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 315, loc. [315](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=315) 26. <q class="blue">When mutual behavior modification gets good, it might be part of what we talk about when we talk about love.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 319, loc. [319](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=319) 27. <q class="pink">So the problem isn’t behavior modification in itself. The problem is relentless, robotic, ultimately meaningless behavior modification in the service of unseen manipulators and uncaring algorithms.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 322, loc. [322](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=322) 28. <q class="pink">To free yourself, to be more authentic, to be less addicted, to be less manipulated, to be less paranoid … for all these marvelous reasons, delete your accounts.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 336, loc. [336](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=336) 29. <q class="pink">Remember, with old-fashioned advertising, you could measure whether a product did better after an ad was run, but now companies are measuring whether individuals changed their behaviors, and the feeds for each person are constantly tweaked to get individual behavior to change.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 358, loc. [358](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=358) 30. <q class="blue">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.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 376, loc. [376](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=376) 31. <q class="blue">They can’t reasonably expect to earn money, for instance. Ordinary users can gain only fake power and wealth, not real power or wealth. So mind games become dominant.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 411, loc. [411](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=411) 32. <q class="blue">If you’re reading this on an electronic device, for instance, there’s a good chance an algorithm is keeping a record of data such as how fast you read or when you take a break to check something else.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 421, loc. [421](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=421) 33. <q class="blue">You might be targeted before an election with weird posts that have proven to bring out the inner cynic in people who are similar to you, in order to reduce the chances that you’ll vote.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 442, loc. [442](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=442) 34. <q class="pink">When Facebook emphasized “news” in its feed, the entire world of journalism had to reformulate itself to BUMMER standards. To avoid being left out, journalists had to create stories that emphasized clickbait and were detachable from context. They were forced to become BUMMER in order to not be annihilated by BUMMER.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 463, loc. [463](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=463) 35. <q class="orange">Facebook announced that it will deemphasize news in its feed; the journalism world celebrated, for the most part, because now it might become freer to connect to audiences on its own terms.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 476, loc. [476](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=476) 36. <q class="pink">Underlying incentives tend to overpower policies. The way that people get around rules in order to chase incentives often makes the world into a darker and more dangerous place. Prohibitions generally don’t work. When the United States attempted to outlaw alcohol in the early twentieth century, the result was a rise of organized crime. The ban had to be rescinded. When marijuana was outlawed later in the century, the same thing happened. Prohibitions are engines of corruption that split societies into official and criminal sectors. Laws work best when they are reasonably aligned with incentives.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 485, loc. [485](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=485) 37. <q class="blue">Fake people are present in unknown but vast numbers and establish the ambiance. Bots, AIs, agents, fake reviewers, fake friends, fake followers, fake posters, automated catfishers: a menagerie of wraiths.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 501, loc. [501](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=501) 38. <q class="blue">Which companies are BUMMER? This can be debated! A good way to tell is that first-rank BUMMER companies are the ones that attract efforts or spending from bad actors like Russian state intelligence warfare units. This test reveals that there are pseudo-BUMMER services that contain only subsets of the components, like Reddit and 4chan, but still play significant roles in the BUMMER ecosystem.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 515, loc. [515](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=515) 39. <q class="blue">Similarly, hypnotism isn’t in itself a BUMMER. But if your hypnotist is replaced by someone you don’t know who is working for someone else you don’t know, and you have no way of knowing what you’re being hypnotized to do, then that would be a BUMMER.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 526, loc. [526](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=526) 40. <q class="pink">The deeply addicted person’s rhythm becomes nervous, a compulsive pecking at his situation; he’s always deprived, rushing for affirmation. Addicts become anxious, strangely focused on portentous events that aren’t visible to others. They are selfish, so wrapped up in their cycle that they don’t have much time to notice what others are feeling or thinking about. There’s an arrogance, a fetish for exaggeration, that by all appearances is a cover for profound insecurity. A personal mythology overtakes addicts. They see themselves grandiosely and, as they descend further into addiction, ever less realistically.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 542, loc. [542](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=542) 41. <q class="blue">A gambler is addicted not to winning, exactly, but to the process in which losing is more likely. A junkie is addicted not just to the high, but to the vertiginous difference between the lows and the highs.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 550, loc. [550](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=550) 42. <q class="blue">When conservative BUMMER addicts dislike liberal college students with BUMMER addictions, they sometimes use the insult “poor little snowflake.”</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 558, loc. [558](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=558) 43. <q class="pink">As a Twitter addict, Trump has changed. He displays the snowflake pattern and sometimes loses control. He is not acting like the most powerful person in the world, because his addiction is more powerful. Whatever else he might be, whatever kind of victimizer, he is also a victim.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 562, loc. [562](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=562) 44. <q class="blue">Sometimes, out of nowhere, I would get into a fight with someone, or a group of people. It was so weird. We’d start insulting each other, trying to score points, getting under each other’s skin. And about incredibly stupid stuff, like whether or not someone knew what they were talking about when it came to brands of pianos. Really.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 569, loc. [569](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=569) 45. <q class="blue">I would feel this weird low-level boiling rage inside me. Or I’d feel this absurd glow when people liked what I wrote, even if what they said didn’t indicate that they had paid much attention to it. Comment authors were mostly seeking attention for themselves.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 588, loc. [588](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=588) 46. <q class="blue">I don’t think I’m better than you because I don’t have social media accounts. Maybe I’m worse; maybe you can handle the stuff better than I can. But I’ve observed that since social media took off, assholes are having more of a say in the world.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 599, loc. [599](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=599) 47. <q class="blue">It doesn’t matter if it’s an online platform, a relationship, or a job. Your character is like your health, more valuable than anything you can buy. Don’t throw it away.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 613, loc. [613](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=613) 48. <q class="orange">I’ve been talking about the relationship between the Solitary setting and personal character, but there are other reasons to keep the switch in the Solitary position.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 646, loc. [646](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=646) 49. <q class="orange">For now, think of the jar in this example as being like your identity, as it is presented through social media. Your identity is Packified by BUMMER. By putting yourself out there, you are erasing yourself. As long as people are thinking for themselves, then collectively they’ll guess the number of jelly beans in the jar, but that won’t work if they’re in a pack and stuck in groupthink.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 658, loc. [658](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=658) 50. <q class="orange">When people act as solitary wolves, then each person is in a unique position in society and thinks in a unique way. Another example: Democratic elections are a genuine commingling of ideas, and have historically helped societies find paths forward despite controversy, but only so long as people are switched to Solitary. Democracy fails when the switch is set to Pack. Tribal voting, personality cults, and authoritarianism are the politics of the Pack setting.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 667, loc. [667](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=667) 51. <q class="orange">When you’re in a pack, social status and intrigues become more immediate than the larger reality. You become more like an operator, a politician, or a slave.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 679, loc. [679](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=679) 52. <q class="blue">Careers are physical, real processes that generate sustenance. They are not only real but also nonfungible. Each career is both unique and indispensable to a person. LinkedIn users aren’t all seeking exactly the same career, so they aren’t forced precisely into direct conflict or politics with one another. They aren’t each assigned a popularity number, like social media aspirants who are thrust into a single global competition.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 692, loc. [692](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=692) 53. <q class="blue">But I am also asking you to notice, within your own mind, in genuine secrecy—don’t share this—if you are feeling the temptation to strike out at someone else online. Maybe that other person started it. Whatever. It isn’t worth it. Leave the platform. Don’t post that insult video, don’t tweet in retaliation.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 714, loc. [714](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=714) 54. <q class="blue">Hyperpartisan outlets like Fox News can therefore be thought of as part of Component F. They are chunks of legacy media that have been jury-rigged to become part of the BUMMER machine.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 789, loc. [789](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=789) 55. <q class="blue">It is absolutely not my place to judge what is authentic for you or how you construct your online persona. I’m criticizing a power relationship, not proposing a theory of authenticity. When a teenager fakes an Instagram account, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Becoming literate in the ways of one’s society is essential if one is to become a first-class citizen in it; if the society is based on fake people, you’d better learn how to make a fake person yourself.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 802, loc. [802](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=802) 56. <q class="blue">You might think I’m being elitist when I am more appalled that “educated” parents, who are more likely to be affluent, foment dangerous nonsense, but isn’t the whole point of education supposed to be that it diminishes people’s susceptibility to dangerous nonsense?</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 819, loc. [819](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=819) 57. <q class="pink">There wasn’t anyone sitting in a tech company who decided to promote anti-vaccine rhetoric as a tactic. It could just as easily have been anti-hamster rhetoric. The only reason BUMMER reinforces the stuff is that paranoia turns out, as a matter of course, to be an efficient way of corralling attention.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 831, loc. [831](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=831) 58. <q class="blue">Public health measures and modern medicine have doubled our life spans. Doubled! The unintended result is that now some of us can believe nonsense and not pay for that belief with our lives. At least for a while.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 836, loc. [836](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=836) 59. <q class="blue">Online, we often have little or no ability to know or influence the context in which our expression will be understood. The easiest way to understand the principle is to note extreme examples.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 853, loc. [853](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=853) 60. <q class="blue">These extreme examples occur only because the rules of the game in BUMMER are that you don’t know the context in which you are expressing anything and you have no reliable way of knowing how it will be presented to someone else.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 866, loc. [866](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=866) 61. <q class="pink">Speaking through social media isn’t really speaking at all. Context is applied to what you say after you say it, for someone else’s purposes and profit.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 874, loc. [874](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=874) 62. <q class="orange">What will these systems be? Hopefully people will develop direct relationships, even more hopefully with subscriptions, to sources of news and other content.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 899, loc. [899](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=899) 63. <q class="pink">A news source will keep tweaking what it does until further tweaks no longer yield better results. After that, repetition. That’s why so much clickbait is so similar. There’s only this one weird trick to optimize clickbait.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 904, loc. [904](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=904) 64. <q class="pink">Feedback is a good thing, but overemphasizing immediate feedback within an artificially limited online environment leads to ridiculous outcomes.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 908, loc. [908](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=908) 65. <q class="yellow">What if listening to an inner voice or heeding a passion for ethics or beauty were to lead to more important work in the long term, even if it measured as less successful in the moment? What if deeply reaching a small number of people matters more than reaching everybody with nothing?</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 910, loc. [910](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=910) 66. <q class="blue">I note that news sites that are trying to woo advertisers directly often seem to show spectacularly greater numbers of readers for articles about products that might be advertised—like choosing your next gaming machine—than for articles about other topics.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 914, loc. [914](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=914) 67. <q class="blue">Don’t blame the site. There are so few independent news sites, and they’re precious. They’ve been backed into a corner by BUMMER and they’re incredibly vulnerable. News organizations—especially those supporting expensive investigative journalism—have been told for twenty years that it’s up to them to be nimble enough to come up with new business plans that will stand up to the “disruptions” of the big tech companies, but no one has ever come up with actual good advice.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 919, loc. [919](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=919) 68. <q class="pink">Even when the readers are real, not fake, algorithms are routing them to particular content, so their choices aren’t really independent. The measurements aren’t valid, by definition. You can’t tell someone where to go and then claim that you discovered something new because you learned where that person went. This is yet another ubiquitous problem that’s as hard to see as air.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 928, loc. [928](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=928) 69. <q class="blue">Now the real news is called “fake news,” because by the standards of BUMMER, what is real is fake; in BUMMER, reality has been replaced by stupid numbers.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 933, loc. [933](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=933) 70. <q class="blue">In the middle of a mush of fragments of politics podcasts, a voice would talk about how a politician is running a child sex ring in the basement of a pizza parlor.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 955, loc. [955](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=955) 71. <q class="blue">when we’re all seeing different, private worlds, then our cues to one another become meaningless. Our perception of actual reality, beyond the BUMMER platform, suffers.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 989, loc. [989](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=989) 72. <q class="pink">The speed, idiocy, and scale of false social perceptions have been amplified to the point that people often don’t seem to be living in the same world, the real world, anymore.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 993, loc. [993](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=993) 73. <q class="pink">the most common form of online myopia is that most people can only make time to see what’s placed in front of them by algorithmic feeds.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 037, loc. [1037](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1037) 74. <q class="blue">The ability to theorize about what someone else experiences as part of understanding that person is called having a theory of mind. To have a theory of mind is to build a story in your head about what’s going on in someone else’s head.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 054, loc. [1054](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1054) 75. <q class="pink">In the same way, if you don’t see the dark ads, the ambient whispers, the cold-hearted memes, and the ridicule-filled customized feed that someone else sees, that person will just seem crazy to you.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 062, loc. [1062](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1062) 76. <q class="pink">Trump supporters seem nuts to me, and they say liberals seem nuts to them. But it’s wrong to say we’ve grown apart and can’t understand each other. What’s really going on is that we see less than ever before of what others are seeing, so we have less opportunity to understand each other.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 068, loc. [1068](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1068) 77. <q class="blue">The degree of difference between what is shown to someone else and what I can guess is being shown is itself unknowable. The opacity of our times is even worse than it might be because the degree of opacity is itself opaque. I remember when the internet was supposed to bring about a transparent society. The reverse has happened.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 074, loc. [1074](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1074) 78. <q class="pink">What bums me out is not some particular surface pattern—like seeing everyone else misrepresent their lives as being more wealthy, happy, and trouble-free than they are—but instead it’s the core BUMMER system. Being addicted and manipulated makes me feel bad, but there’s more to it than that. BUMMER makes me feel judged within an unfair and degrading competition, and to no higher purpose.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 135, loc. [1135](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1135) 79. <q class="blue">if everyone could see how present-day artificial intelligence and other revered cloud programs really worked, they would be alarmed. They’d realize how arbitrary the results can sometimes be. (This randomness was explored in the first argument.) The algorithms are only fractionally, statistically useful, and yet that thinnest thread of utility has built the greatest fortunes of our time.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 156, loc. [1156](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1156) 80. <q class="blue">Facebook, for instance, puts you into categories based on your political leaning and many other factors.24 These categories are BUMMER’s answer to horoscopes.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 170, loc. [1170](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1170) 81. <q class="yellow">The judgments of the BUMMER algorithms that classify you might not be meaningful or reliable in a scientific sense, but they really do matter in real life. They play into what news you see, whom you’re introduced to as a potential date, what products you are offered. Judgments based on social media might determine what loans you can get,25 which countries you can visit,26 whether you get a job,27 what education you can receive,28 the outcome of your auto insurance claim,29 and your freedom to congregate with others.30 (In many of these examples, third parties are applying their own judging algorithms to BUMMER data instead of relying on the categories created by BUMMER companies directly.)</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 172, loc. [1172](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1172) 82. <q class="blue">The other level of judgment is based on mathematical correlations that people might not ever see or be able to interpret. These are sometimes called intermediate-layer interpretations because of how they are generated within machine learning algorithms.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 189, loc. [1189](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1189) 83. <q class="blue">Why aren’t you sent as many cool pictures as your friend? Why aren’t you followed as much? This constant dosing of social anxiety only gets people more glued in. Deep mechanisms in the social parts of our brains monitor our social standing, making us terrified to be left behind, like a runt sacrificed to predators on the savannah.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 194, loc. [1194](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1194) 84. <q class="pink">If ordinary people were to get all happy and satisfied, they might take a moment away from the obsession with social media numbers and go frolic in the flowers or even pay direct attention to each other. But if they’re all on edge about whether they’re popular enough, worried about whether the world is imploding, or furious at morons who are thrust into the middle of their connections with friends and families, then they dare not disengage. They are hooked because of provoked natural vigilance.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 222, loc. [1222](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1222) 85. <q class="pink">Facebook is the first public company controlled by one person.32 I mean, I don’t personally have anything against Mark Zuckerberg. It isn’t about him. But why would you subordinate a big part of your life to any one stranger?</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 228, loc. [1228](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1228) 86. <q class="pink">The fundamental commercial product of BUMMER is absurd and deleterious. You can’t make a society wealthy by making it crazy. The only way out is to change the business model so that today’s BUMMER companies can make money in a different way. That will chart the way for other companies like Uber that rely on similar cloud services and personal devices to adopt sustainable, dignified business models. And they can!</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 318, loc. [1318](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1318) 87. <q class="blue">I think companies should get rich if they make things people want, but I don’t think you should be made less and less secure as part of the bargain. Capitalism isn’t supposed to be a zero-sum game.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 345, loc. [1345](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1345) 88. <q class="blue">Before the BUMMER era, any time a new technology came along that made a set of human roles obsolete, new roles appeared that were less physical. Car drivers instead of horsemen. Indeed, the new roles that came into being because of tech disruptions were often more creative and professional than the old ones. Robotics programmers instead of ironworkers. This meant that more and more people gained prestige and economic dignity.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 360, loc. [1360](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1360) 89. <q class="blue">BUMMER reversed the trend. Now, if you bring insight, creativity, or expertise into the world, you are on notice that sooner or later BUMMER will channel your value through a cloud service—probably a so-called AI service—and take away your financial security, even though your data will still be needed.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 364, loc. [1364](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1364) 90. <q class="blue">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. I might have to wait a while, but it’ll be worth it.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 419, loc. [1419](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1419) 91. <q class="pink">What social media did at that time, and what it always does, is create illusions: that you can improve society by wishes alone; that the sanest people will be favored in cutting contests; and that somehow material well-being will just take care of itself. What actually happens, always, is that the illusions fall apart when it is too late, and the world is inherited by the crudest, most selfish, and least informed people. Anyone who isn’t an asshole gets hurt the most.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 484, loc. [1484](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1484) 92. <q class="blue">The gaming world is wonderful in a lot of ways, but it really isn’t meeting its potential. Gaming should be turning into the new way we learn and talk about complicated issues. That’s happening to a small extent, but the biggest productions tend to target the same demographic over and over again. You’ve got guns, you’re traversing terrain, and you’re shooting at something. Over and over. The industry needs to spread its wings more.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 502, loc. [1502](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1502) 93. <q class="pink">The movement to destroy critics of the gaming world was called “Gamergate.” It’s impossible to talk to anyone who supports it, because they live in an alternate universe of conspiracy theories and dense jungles of stupid arguments fueled by the pettiest of illusions, bursting with insecure rage.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 513, loc. [1513](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1513) 94. <q class="blue">The next stage in BUMMER politics is the one in which assholes realize they’re favored by BUMMER. All kinds of assholes appear. They get enough attention to outpace the well-meaning people who just won victories. They exhume horrible prejudices and hatreds that haven’t seen the light of day for years, and they make those hatreds mainstream.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 523, loc. [1523](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1523) 95. <q class="pink">The situation reminds me of the medieval practice of indulgences, in which the Catholic Church of the time would sometimes demand money for a soul to enter heaven. Indulgences were one of the main complaints that motivated Protestants to split off. It’s as if Facebook is saying, “Pay us or you don’t exist.”</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 566, loc. [1566](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1566) 96. <q class="pink">BUMMER makes more money when people are irritated and obsessed, divided and angry—and that suited Russian interests perfectly. BUMMER is a shit machine. It transforms sincere organizing into cynical disruption. It’s inherently a cruel con game.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 627, loc. [1627](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1627) 97. <q class="blue">the empathy others might offer you is challenged because you can’t know the context in which you’ll be understood.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 663, loc. [1663](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1663) 98. <q class="blue">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.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 674, loc. [1674](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1674) 99. <q class="orange">Why not conceive of people as naturally evolved machines, but machines nonetheless? People could then be programmed to behave well, and the human project could flourish. Behaviorists, Communists, and now Silicon Valley social engineers have all tried to achieve that end.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 686, loc. [1686](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1686) 100. <q class="blue">I’ve been using both the term “spiritual” and the term “religious,” and here’s why: Religions generally are connected with specific truth claims, while spirituality might not be. Spirituality can usually coexist a little more easily with Enlightenment thinking.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 726, loc. [1726](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1726) 101. <q class="pink">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 off, Dawkins’s ideas were in vogue, because they flattered techies.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 732, loc. [1732](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1732) 102. <q class="orange">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.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 740, loc. [1740](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1740) 103. <q class="pink">When we talk about politics, culture, art, or law, it’s possible that quantity can’t replace quality, even though we can’t say what quality is. It’s possible that the algorithms we know how to write simply can’t distinguish terrorists or foreign intelligence agents from normal people who aren’t trying to destroy the world. The foundation of the search for truth must be the ability to notice one’s own ignorance. Acknowledging ignorance is a beautiful feature that science and spirituality hold in common. BUMMER rejects it.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 752, loc. [1752](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1752) 104. <q class="blue">Google’s mission statement reads, within tech culture, as “Organize all reality.” That’s why Google started all those weird Alphabet companies. You might not have thought about Google’s worldview or mission, but you buy into it when you optimize your presence to rank high in search or optimize your video for views. The purpose of your life is now to optimize. You have been baptized.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 767, loc. [1767](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1767) 105. <q class="blue">Facebook also plays the game. The Facebook page of a deceased person becomes a shrine that one can only visit as a member, and to be a member you must implicitly become an adherent.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 780, loc. [1780](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1780) 106. <q class="blue">Google’s director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, promotes the idea that Google will be able to upload your consciousness into the company’s cloud, like the pictures you take with your smartphone. He famously ingests a whole carton of longevity pills every day in the hope that he won’t die before the service comes online. Note what’s going on here. The assertion is not that consciousness doesn’t exist, but that whatever it is, Google will own it, because otherwise, what could this service even be about?</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 782, loc. [1782](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1782) 107. <q class="orange">This is not just metaphysics, but metaphysical imperialism. If you buy into any of this stuff, explicitly or just through practice, you cannot even call yourself an atheist or agnostic. You are a convert.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 788, loc. [1788](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1788) 108. <q class="blue">All kinds of different programs might or might not be called AI at a given time, so when a program is called AI, the inevitable result is that the criteria for success become vague. AI is a role-playing game for engineers, not in itself an actual technical achievement.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 808, loc. [1808](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1808) 109. <q class="pink">We can acknowledge experience, we can enjoy it, we can have an emotional reaction to the mystery of it, perhaps even a pleasant one. Acknowledging that experience exists might make us kinder, since we understand people to be more than machines. We might be a little more likely to think before hurting someone if we believe there’s a whole other center of experience cloaked in that person, a whole universe, a soul.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 828, loc. [1828](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1828) 110. <q class="pink">This is a big problem with human-machine equivalence. Imagine a metaphorical circle of empathy that informs your actions. Within your circle are those you accept and humanize. If you make your circle too wide, it is diluted; you make your empathy absurd and become blind to how you are hurting real people.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 835, loc. [1835](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1835) 111. <q class="blue">If you design a society to suppress belief in consciousness and experience—to reject any exceptional nature to personhood—then maybe people can become like machines.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 845, loc. [1845](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1845) 112. <q class="blue">You can still get news online: Read news websites directly (instead of getting news through personalized feeds), especially sites that hire investigative reporters. Get a feel for the editorial voice of each site, which is only available when you go direct. Subscribe to great news sites! Read three a day and you’ll be better informed than social media users, and in less time. Consider using browser extensions that block the comments.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 877, loc. [1877](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1877) 113. <q class="blue">To conclude, I must remind you that the goal here isn’t to convince you of what to think or what to do. It is not my job to change you, any more than it should be a BUMMER company’s job. However, unless and until you know yourself, even you won’t have standing to argue about what’s right for you. And you can’t know yourself unless you go to the trouble to experiment a bit.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 900, loc. [1900](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1900) 114. <q class="yellow">You need to make sure your own brain, and your own life, isn’t in a rut. Maybe you can go explore wilderness or learn a new skill. Take risks. But whatever form your self-exploration takes, do at least one thing: detach from the behavior-modification empires for a while—six months, say? Note that I didn’t name this book Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and Keeping Them Deleted Forever. After you experiment, you’ll know yourself better. Then decide.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 905, loc. [1905](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1905) 115. <q class="pink">Hannah Arendt and more recent thinkers like Masha Gessen point out that aimless, rootless, unfulfilled people are the fuel of authoritarian dysfunction. If the most lucrative business of the world is the AI race, which gives machines meaning at the expense of people, then that is a recipe for global authoritarianism.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 948, loc. [1948](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1948) 116. <q class="blue">I wonder, and I ask you to wonder, whether hearing that people will soon be made obsolete by AI—and hearing it from the richest and most lauded institutions in our society4, over5 and over6—might be contributing to an ambient fear of “replacement.”</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 957, loc. [1957](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1957) 117. <q class="orange">Researchers have detected an unprecedented level of “negative partisanship,”8 meaning that people no longer vote for anything, but against other groups of people; indeed when ideas or plans are at stake, there’s an emerging new norm of “no to everything.”</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 967, loc. [1967](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1967) 118. <q class="blue">Challenging you to delete emphasizes that you do have personal responsibility in our era. You do have the potential to be more aware of your role via platforms even when those platforms are opaque, controlled by others, and are designed to “engage and persuade” you in tricky ways.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 992, loc. [1992](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=1992) 119. <q class="blue">I don’t take these pessimistic stories as examples of defeat, but as progress. Soon enough, the writers will realize there’s no reason to accept that the business model can’t change. When that moment comes, there will be demands for change, and then the BUMMER world will start to dissolve into something better.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 030, loc. [2030](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=2030) 120. <q class="pink">Research continues to show that cats understand more than they let on because they are inner directed; they resist meeting the expectations of trainers.16 There’s still time to become a cat!</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 040, loc. [2040](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=2040) 121. <q class="pink">A monopoly exists when there is only one seller, while a monopsony exists when there is only one buyer. You could say that the iOS and Android smartphone platforms are a duopoly, because they are effectively the only channels for smartphone apps, but you could also say they are a duopsony, because any money that flows into apps has to go through them.</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 110, loc. [2110](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=2110) 122. <q class="yellow">The best-known quote from the alt-right writer “Mencius Moldbug” goes: “In many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.”</q> Jaron Lanier, *Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now*. pg. 430, loc. [2430](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B079DTVVG8&location=2430)