Delete your account

Critiquing social media these days is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. Singling out the almost mindless narcissism is an easy target, as is pointing to the social media users’ susceptibility to fake news, whether it’s coming out of Russia or Fox News. And with Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, even the most quotidian social media user—the ones who gleefully post photo updates, funny memes, or mild political rants—are starting to rethink their relationship with these platforms, with many (1 in 10 Americans, according to a Techpinions survey) deleting their accounts in protest.

But precious few have considered their relationship with social media—or sought account deletion—with the seriousness that Jaron Lanier has. The virtual reality pioneer, musician, and author has been around Silicon Valley for much of his 58 years, and has consulted for a number of its giants (he is currently a researcher affiliated with Microsoft). He’s also spent much of that time worrying, loudly and eloquently, about the risks of the things those companies make.

His new book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, examines how a technology designed to bring people together (remember Mark Zuckerberg’s ongoing dream of “connecting” the world) has instead helped tear apart humanity’s delicate social fabric. People, he argues, are becoming angrier, less empathetic, more isolated yet tribal, and sadder, crazier even. With every post and scroll, users feed a system built to influence behavior, in a sort of reward feedback loop. And as the 2016 elections demonstrated, the same system that’s used to sell you deodorant online can also be hijacked to wreak havoc on your political system. Lanier, who hasn’t been on social media for years, now likes to refer to Facebook and Google as “behavior modification empires.”

“How did we get here, and how did we end up creating this mass surveillance system and applying principles of psychology to manipulating people all the time when what we set out to do was create a more open society for the benefit of everybody,” Lanier says in a phone call. “How did this thing go so wrong?”

Lanier says he has long been interested in how the internet could be used to control people. Back in 1995, he published an article titled “Agents of Alienation,” arguing that “agents”—which is what AI bots were being called at the time—would get to know people by hanging out with them, so to speak, figuring everything out and delivering custom content to the user.

“If info-consumers see the world through agent’s eyes, then advertising will transform into the art of controlling agents, through bribing, hacking, whatever,” Lanier wrote, presciently. “You can imagine an arms race” between armor-plated agents and hacker-laden ad agencies. Lovely . . . An agent’s model of what you are interested in will be a cartoon model, and you will see a cartoon version of the world through the agent’s eyes.”

How it all went wrong

Lanier began noticing Silicon Valley’s dabbling in behavior modification around 1992. In a sense, it was a problem with the web from very early on.