## Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now ### Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now  #### Metadata * Author: [[Jaron Lanier]] * Full Title: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now * Category: #books #### Highlights * Cats have done the seemingly impossible: They've integrated themselves into the modern high-tech world without giving themselves up. They are still in charge. There is no worry that some stealthy meme crafted by algorithms and paid for by a creepy, hidden oligarch has taken over your cat. No one has taken over your cat; not you, not anyone. (Location 28) * Originally, food treats were the most common reward used in behaviorist experiments, though the practice goes back to ancient times. Every animal trainer uses them, slipping a little treat to a dog after it has performed a trick. Many parents of young children do it, too. One of the first behaviorists, Ivan Pavlov, famously demonstrated that he didn't need to use real food. He would ring a bell when a dog was fed, and eventually the dog would salivate upon hearing the bell alone. Using symbols instead of real rewards has become an essential trick in the behavior modification toolbox. (Location 136) * That sounds innocent enough, but it can be the first stage of an addiction that becomes a problem both for individuals and society. Even though Silicon Valley types have a sanitized name for this phase, "engagement," we fear it enough to keep our own children away from it. Many of the Silicon Valley kids I know attend Waldorf schools, which generally forbid electronics. Back to the surprising (Location 155) * A touch of randomness is more than easy to generate in social media: because the algorithms aren't perfect, randomness is intrinsic. But beyond that, feeds are usually calculated to include an additional degree of intentional randomness. The motivation originally came from basic math, not human psychology. (Location 168) * and others. Social concerns are not optional features (Location 203) * A corpus of academic research compares the powers of positive and negative feedback, but that is not the key question for the design of commercial social media platforms, which are primarily concerned with reducing costs and increasing performance, thereby maximizing profit. 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. (Location 225) * 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. (Location 229) * Originally, many of us who worked on scaling the internet16 hoped that the thing that would bring people together—that would gain network effect and lock-in—would be the internet itself. But there was a libertarian wind blowing, so we left out many key functions. The internet in itself didn't include a mechanism for personal identity, for instance. Each computer has its own code number, but people aren't represented at all. Similarly, the internet in itself doesn't give you any place to store even a small amount of persistent information, any way to make or receive payments, or any way to find other people you might have something in common with. (Location 276) * 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. (Location 313) * our species. There is one particular high-tech thing, however, that is toxic even in small quantities. One new development that must be quashed. It's important to define the problem as accurately as possible, lest we confuse ourselves even more. The problem is in part that we are all carrying around devices that are suitable for mass behavior modification. But that's not quite the right framing of our problem. After all, our devices can be used for other purposes, and often are. (Location 325) * The problem is all of the above plus one more thing. As explained in the first argument, the scheme I am describing amplifies negative emotions more than positive ones, so it's more efficient at harming society than at improving it: creepier customers get more bang for their buck. (Location 337) * BUMMER platforms have proudly reported on how they've experimented with making people sad, changing voter turnout, and reinforcing brand loyalty. (Location 412) * 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. (Location 451) * The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes. Here I have put forward a hypothesis that our problem is not the internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms. Instead, the problem that has made the world so dark and crazy lately is the BUMMER machine, and the core of the BUMMER machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people. (Location 472) * 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. (Location 490) * You know the adage that you should choose a partner on the basis of who you become when you're around the person? That's a good way to choose technologies, too. (Location 539) * Leaving aside explicitly fake people like Alexa, Cortana, and Siri, you might think that you've never interacted with a fake person online, but you have, and with loads of them. You decided to buy something because it had a lot of good reviews, but many of those reviews were from artificial people. You found a doctor by using a search engine, but the reason that doctor showed up high in the search results was that a load of fake people linked to her office. (Location 703) * According to reporting by the New York Times, the going rate for fake people on Twitter in early 2018 was $225 for the first 25,000 fake followers.3 The fake accounts might be mash-ups of accounts from real people; on casual inspection, they seem real. Celebrities, businesses, politicians, and a more modern pool of cyber-bad-actor customers all make use of fake-people factories. The companies that sell fake people are often fake as well. (The Times found that one prominent bot service listed a fake address.) (Location 718) * BUMMER replaces your context with its context. From the point of view of the algorithms, you are no longer a name, but a number: the number of followers, likes, clicks, or other measures of how much you contributed to the BUMMER machine, moment to moment. (Location 823) * One newsroom I visited recently had big screens up all over the place, similar to a NASA control room, but showing up-to-the-second statistics about each post created by someone in the room. Presumably the writers and other creators are supposed to be glued to these numbers in order to maximize "engagement." They are forced to become components of the BUMMER machine. I feel sorry for them. (Location 835) * Some other questions need to be asked. First, why believe the numbers? As discussed in the previous argument, much of the online world is fake. Fake readers, fake commenters, fake referrals. 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. (Location 855) * This doesn't mean the site is fudging its numbers. Instead, a manager probably hired a consulting firm that used an algorithm to optimize the choice of metrics services to relate the kind of usage statistics the site could use to attract advertisers. In other words, the site's owners didn't consciously fudge, but they kinda-sorta know that their stats are part of a giant fudge cake. (Location 859) * Here's some positive spin: The fact that independent journalism is in trouble in BUMMER's shadow is a sign of its integrity. Journalists have successfully held themselves to higher standards than social media influencers, but they have also paid a price. 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. (Location 873) * A wonderful way to notice social perception is to travel to a country where you don't speak the language. You'll find that you are suddenly very attuned to what other people are doing and what they are paying attention to, because that's the only way to know what's going on. One time I noticed people in a jungle in Thailand paying attention to a certain direction, so I did too, just in time to get out of the way of speeding army jeeps that came out of nowhere. Social perception saved my life. It has always been part of how humanity has survived. But 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. (Location 923) * A thought experiment can help expose how weird our situation has become. Can you imagine if Wikipedia showed different versions of entries to each person on the basis of a secret data profile of that person? Pro-Trump visitors would see an article completely different from the one shown to anti-Trump people, but there would be no accounting of all that was different or why. This might sound dystopian or bizarre, but it's similar to what you see in your BUMMER feed. Content is chosen and ads are customized to you, and you don't know how much has been changed for you, or why. (Location 935) * 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. Theory of mind is at the core of any sense of respect or empathy, and it's a prerequisite to any hope of intelligent cooperation, civility, or helpful politics. It's why stories exist. (Location 989) * 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. (Location 1003) * 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. (Location 1009) * The cheerful rhetoric from the BUMMER companies is all about friends and making the world more connected. And yet science reveals1 the2 truth.3 Research4 shows a world that is not more connected,5 but instead suffers from a heightened sense of isolation. (Location 1015) * Read the papers in the footnotes to dig into research that supports the thesis that social media makes you sad. You'll also find a variety of hypotheses about why it is so: the setting of unreasonable standards for beauty or social status, for instance, or vulnerability to trolls. (Location 1037) * Based on the research, there are trends in the forms that unhappiness takes, so I could guess about what's going on with you. You might have less sex than you seek in proportion to the amount of time you use apps to seek sex.16 You're sitting there swiping at a screen. You might spend less time with your family in proportion to the cuteness of the presentation of your family life you put out there on social media. (Location 1049) * 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. (Location 1062) * The BUMMER algorithms behind companies like Facebook and Google are stored in some of the few files in the world that can't be hacked; they're kept that secret. The deepest secrets of the NSA21 and the CIA22 have leaked, repeatedly, but you can't find a copy of Google's search algorithm or Facebook's feed algorithm on the dark web. (Location 1077) * And let me remind you that negative emotions are more readily accessible and more profitable BUMMER magnets for people than positive ones. 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. (Location 1143) * Whatever else the BUMMER companies brought into the world, the feature that caught the public's imagination most in the beginning was probably that they were free. You didn't need to pay Google for a search or to upload or watch a video on YouTube; there was no fee to join Facebook or Twitter. (Location 1174) * That means that a BUMMER company can build a model of you in software—and control what you see in a manipulative feed—by running programs exclusively on their own computers. (Location 1195) * Those computers are placed in super-secure locations you'll never visit. Their software is super-hyper secret. Every other kind of file has been breached by hackers, but not the search or feed algorithms of the big BUMMER companies. The secret code to manipulate you is guarded like crown jewels. The software that matters most is the most hidden, the least revealed. Guess what? BUMMER software usually runs on a foundation of free and open software (like the Linux/Apache stack). But no one can know what is done on top of that free and open foundation. The open-software movement failed absolutely in the quest to foster openness and transparency in the code that now runs our lives. (Location 1197) * One way is to directly monetize services such as search and social media. You'd pay a low monthly fee to use them, but if you contributed a lot—if your posts, videos, or whatever are popular—you could also earn some money. A large number of people, instead of the tiny number of token stars in the present system, would earn money. (I acknowledge, of course, that there would have to be a way of making services available to those who couldn't afford to pay even a small fee.) I'm making a fuss about the potential to earn because a system like this would help address looming losses of employment due to AI and automation. We're talking about an industry that supports some of the richest companies the world has ever known, and it's all driven by data that comes from people who are often being told that they're about to be obsolete, that they'll need to go on the public dole with a basic income system. It just isn't right to tell people they are no longer valuable to society when the biggest companies exist only because of data that comes from those same people. (Location 1239) * What we call AI should never be understood as an alternative to people, but instead as a mislabeled new channel of value between real people. (Location 1259) * BUMMER was originally sold as a barter deal. "Let us spy on you and in return you'll get free services." This might seem like a reasonable deal in the short term, but in the long term it's terrible. (Location 1270) * This hypothesis needs to be tested more, but it is possible that when we enter into a new era in which people are paid for the value their data brings to the online world, then that world will become less dark and crazy. (Location 1287) * It might sound undesirable to someday have to pay for things that are currently free, but remember, you'd also be able to make money from those things. (Location 1312) * were founded. It was sacrilege to challenge it. But then companies like Netflix and HBO convinced people to pay a monthly fee, and the result is what is often called "peak TV." Why couldn't there also be an era of paid "peak social media" and "peak search"? (Location 1316) * They meet early successes, often spectacular, ecstatic successes, but then the world turns sour, as if by magic. BUMMER ultimately fuels loudmouthed assholes and con artists more than it does the initial groups of hip, young, educated idealists, because in the longer term BUMMER is more suited to sneaky, malevolent manipulation than to any other purpose. (Location 1367) * tolerate moderate or pragmatic politics. BUMMER undermines the political process and hurts millions of people, but so many of those very same people are so addicted that all they can do is praise BUMMER because they can use it to complain about the catastrophes it just brought about. It's like Stockholm syndrome or being tied to an abusive relationship by invisible ropes. The sweet, early idealists lose, all the time thanking BUMMER for how it makes them feel and how it brought them together. (Location 1372) * BUMMER is neither liberal nor conservative; it is just pro-paranoia, pro-irritability, and pro–general assholeness. (Location 1439) * An interesting detail that came out a year after the election is that Facebook had offered both the Clinton and Trump campaigns onsite teams to help them maximize their use of the platform, but only Trump's campaign accepted the offer.18 Maybe if Clinton had agreed to have Facebook employees in her office, she would have won. The election was so close that any little thing that moved the needle in her direction could have tipped the result. (Location 1462) * 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." They're becoming the existential mafia. (Location 1468) * BUMMER was gradually separating people into bins and promoting assholes by its nature, before Russians or any other client showed up to take advantage. When the Russians did show up, they benefited from a user interface designed to help "advertisers" target populations with tested messages to gain attention. All the Russian agents had to do was pay BUMMER for what came to BUMMER naturally. (Location 1490) * None of this means that Facebook prefers one kind of voter to another. That's up to Facebook's customers, who are not you, the users. Facebook doesn't necessarily know what's going on. A social media company is in a better position if it doesn't know what's going on, because then it makes just as much money, but with less culpability. (Location 1518) * One example of Component F in the 2016 U.S. election was an account called Blacktivist, which was run by the Russians. A year after the elections, the true power behind Blacktivist was revealed and reporters asked genuine black activists what they thought about it.22 Some, fortunately, still had access to outrage. One activist reportedly said, "They are using our pain for their gain. I'm profoundly disgusted." That is an informed, reasonable statement, and a brave one, for it is not easy to accept that one has been tricked. (Location 1534) * At the end of the day, BUMMER moneymaking caused black social media to unintentionally elevate a new tool optimized for voter suppression. As if there weren't enough voter suppression tools out there already. As if gerrymandering, inaccessible polling stations, and biased registration rules weren't enough. (Location 1542) * Behavior-modification cages can only manipulate one creature at a time, but when the whole society is being manipulated in a coordinated way, we must seek a grander explanatory framework. There aren't many choices. The clearest one is probably religion. (Location 1567) * The first argument is about free will. Free will is a mysterious idea; a leap of faith. Does it even make sense? Maybe there is no free will; maybe it is an illusion. But religions generally propose that free will is real. It must exist in order for you to choose to change your karma for the better, or to make moral choices that get you into heaven. Even the most ethereal Buddhist must start with free will in order to freely seek a state that transcends it. (Location 1578) * Another similarity to religions? Maybe my objection to BUMMER is like when Protestants objected to indulgences. There is a long history of people rejecting a structure connected with a religion while not rejecting the core. (Location 1599) * Believing something only because you learned it through a system is a way of giving your cognitive power over to that system. BUMMER addicts inevitably at least tolerate a few ridiculous ideas in order to partake at all. You have to believe sufficiently in the wisdom of BUMMER algorithms to read what they tell you to read, for instance, even though there's evidence that the algorithms are not so great. (Location 1614) * The purpose of life, according to BUMMER, is to optimize. According to Google: "Organize the world's information." But per the typical Silicon Valley worldview, everything is information. Matter will be hacked, the human body will be hacked, and so on. Therefore, 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. (Location 1658) * The purpose of your life is now to optimize. You have been baptized.4 (Location 1662) * Note: Chasing citatiokn numbers is form of baptism. A conversion * AI is a fantasy, nothing but a story we tell about our code. It is also a cover for sloppy engineering. Making a supposed AI program that customizes a feed is less work than creating a great user interface that allows users to probe and improve what they see on their own terms—and that is so because AI has no objective criteria for success. Who is to say what counts as intelligence in a program? Back in the 1990s, my friends and I made the first programs that could track a person's face to turn it into an animated rendering of a creature or another person making the same expressions in real time. It didn't occur to us to call that AI. It was just an example of fancy image processing. But now, that capability is often called AI. (Location 1692) * 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. (Location 1698) * People who translate between languages are being told they're becoming obsolete. Not only are they losing their livelihoods, but they are being robbed of dignity, because the narrative of their obsolescence is a lie. They are still valuable. They are needed because without their manually created data, there would be no "automatic" translation service. (Location 1702) * 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 (Location 1717) * 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. (Location 1732) * gradually start to believe it. If this new challenge to personhood were only a question of spiritual struggle within each person, then perhaps we could say it is each person's responsibility to deal with it. But there are profound societal consequences. (Location 1736) * You don't need to give up friends: Email your friends instead of using social media, but use accounts that aren't read by the provider—so no Gmail, for instance. No need for a sneaky company between you and your friends. (Location 1760) * 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. (Location 1762) * You can even still watch YouTube videos, for now at least, without a Google account. Watching without an account and with some privacy plugins will give you access to a much less manipulative experience. (Location 1767) * Quit 'em all! Instagram and WhatsApp are still Facebook and still scoop your data and snoop on you. Don't tweet about how you quit Facebook or post to Facebook about how you quit Twitter. (Location 1770) # Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now  ## Metadata - Author: [[Jaron Lanier]] - Full Title: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now - Category: #books ## Highlights - Cats have done the seemingly impossible: They’ve integrated themselves into the modern high-tech world without giving themselves up. They are still in charge. There is no worry that some stealthy meme crafted by algorithms and paid for by a creepy, hidden oligarch has taken over your cat. No one has taken over your cat; not you, not anyone. (Location 28) - Originally, food treats were the most common reward used in behaviorist experiments, though the practice goes back to ancient times. Every animal trainer uses them, slipping a little treat to a dog after it has performed a trick. Many parents of young children do it, too. One of the first behaviorists, Ivan Pavlov, famously demonstrated that he didn’t need to use real food. He would ring a bell when a dog was fed, and eventually the dog would salivate upon hearing the bell alone. Using symbols instead of real rewards has become an essential trick in the behavior modification toolbox. (Location 136) - That sounds innocent enough, but it can be the first stage of an addiction that becomes a problem both for individuals and society. Even though Silicon Valley types have a sanitized name for this phase, “engagement,” we fear it enough to keep our own children away from it. Many of the Silicon Valley kids I know attend Waldorf schools, which generally forbid electronics. Back to the surprising (Location 155) - A touch of randomness is more than easy to generate in social media: because the algorithms aren’t perfect, randomness is intrinsic. But beyond that, feeds are usually calculated to include an additional degree of intentional randomness. The motivation originally came from basic math, not human psychology. (Location 168) - and others. Social concerns are not optional features (Location 203) - A corpus of academic research compares the powers of positive and negative feedback, but that is not the key question for the design of commercial social media platforms, which are primarily concerned with reducing costs and increasing performance, thereby maximizing profit. 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. (Location 225) - 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. (Location 229) - Originally, many of us who worked on scaling the internet16 hoped that the thing that would bring people together—that would gain network effect and lock-in—would be the internet itself. But there was a libertarian wind blowing, so we left out many key functions. The internet in itself didn’t include a mechanism for personal identity, for instance. Each computer has its own code number, but people aren’t represented at all. Similarly, the internet in itself doesn’t give you any place to store even a small amount of persistent information, any way to make or receive payments, or any way to find other people you might have something in common with. (Location 276) - 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. (Location 313) - our species. There is one particular high-tech thing, however, that is toxic even in small quantities. One new development that must be quashed. It’s important to define the problem as accurately as possible, lest we confuse ourselves even more. The problem is in part that we are all carrying around devices that are suitable for mass behavior modification. But that’s not quite the right framing of our problem. After all, our devices can be used for other purposes, and often are. (Location 325) - The problem is all of the above plus one more thing. As explained in the first argument, the scheme I am describing amplifies negative emotions more than positive ones, so it’s more efficient at harming society than at improving it: creepier customers get more bang for their buck. (Location 337) - BUMMER platforms have proudly reported on how they’ve experimented with making people sad, changing voter turnout, and reinforcing brand loyalty. (Location 412) - 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. (Location 451) - The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes. Here I have put forward a hypothesis that our problem is not the internet, smartphones, smart speakers, or the art of algorithms. Instead, the problem that has made the world so dark and crazy lately is the BUMMER machine, and the core of the BUMMER machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people. (Location 472) - 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. (Location 490) - You know the adage that you should choose a partner on the basis of who you become when you’re around the person? That’s a good way to choose technologies, too. (Location 539) - Leaving aside explicitly fake people like Alexa, Cortana, and Siri, you might think that you’ve never interacted with a fake person online, but you have, and with loads of them. You decided to buy something because it had a lot of good reviews, but many of those reviews were from artificial people. You found a doctor by using a search engine, but the reason that doctor showed up high in the search results was that a load of fake people linked to her office. (Location 703) - According to reporting by the New York Times, the going rate for fake people on Twitter in early 2018 was $225 for the first 25,000 fake followers.3 The fake accounts might be mash-ups of accounts from real people; on casual inspection, they seem real. Celebrities, businesses, politicians, and a more modern pool of cyber-bad-actor customers all make use of fake-people factories. The companies that sell fake people are often fake as well. (The Times found that one prominent bot service listed a fake address.) (Location 718) - BUMMER replaces your context with its context. From the point of view of the algorithms, you are no longer a name, but a number: the number of followers, likes, clicks, or other measures of how much you contributed to the BUMMER machine, moment to moment. (Location 823) - One newsroom I visited recently had big screens up all over the place, similar to a NASA control room, but showing up-to-the-second statistics about each post created by someone in the room. Presumably the writers and other creators are supposed to be glued to these numbers in order to maximize “engagement.” They are forced to become components of the BUMMER machine. I feel sorry for them. (Location 835) - Some other questions need to be asked. First, why believe the numbers? As discussed in the previous argument, much of the online world is fake. Fake readers, fake commenters, fake referrals. 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. (Location 855) - This doesn’t mean the site is fudging its numbers. Instead, a manager probably hired a consulting firm that used an algorithm to optimize the choice of metrics services to relate the kind of usage statistics the site could use to attract advertisers. In other words, the site’s owners didn’t consciously fudge, but they kinda-sorta know that their stats are part of a giant fudge cake. (Location 859) - Here’s some positive spin: The fact that independent journalism is in trouble in BUMMER’s shadow is a sign of its integrity. Journalists have successfully held themselves to higher standards than social media influencers, but they have also paid a price. 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. (Location 873) - A wonderful way to notice social perception is to travel to a country where you don’t speak the language. You’ll find that you are suddenly very attuned to what other people are doing and what they are paying attention to, because that’s the only way to know what’s going on. One time I noticed people in a jungle in Thailand paying attention to a certain direction, so I did too, just in time to get out of the way of speeding army jeeps that came out of nowhere. Social perception saved my life. It has always been part of how humanity has survived. But 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. (Location 923) - A thought experiment can help expose how weird our situation has become. Can you imagine if Wikipedia showed different versions of entries to each person on the basis of a secret data profile of that person? Pro-Trump visitors would see an article completely different from the one shown to anti-Trump people, but there would be no accounting of all that was different or why. This might sound dystopian or bizarre, but it’s similar to what you see in your BUMMER feed. Content is chosen and ads are customized to you, and you don’t know how much has been changed for you, or why. (Location 935) - 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. Theory of mind is at the core of any sense of respect or empathy, and it’s a prerequisite to any hope of intelligent cooperation, civility, or helpful politics. It’s why stories exist. (Location 989) - 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. (Location 1003) - 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. (Location 1009) - The cheerful rhetoric from the BUMMER companies is all about friends and making the world more connected. And yet science reveals1 the2 truth.3 Research4 shows a world that is not more connected,5 but instead suffers from a heightened sense of isolation. (Location 1015) - Read the papers in the footnotes to dig into research that supports the thesis that social media makes you sad. You’ll also find a variety of hypotheses about why it is so: the setting of unreasonable standards for beauty or social status, for instance, or vulnerability to trolls. (Location 1037) - Based on the research, there are trends in the forms that unhappiness takes, so I could guess about what’s going on with you. You might have less sex than you seek in proportion to the amount of time you use apps to seek sex.16 You’re sitting there swiping at a screen. You might spend less time with your family in proportion to the cuteness of the presentation of your family life you put out there on social media. (Location 1049) - 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. (Location 1062) - The BUMMER algorithms behind companies like Facebook and Google are stored in some of the few files in the world that can’t be hacked; they’re kept that secret. The deepest secrets of the NSA21 and the CIA22 have leaked, repeatedly, but you can’t find a copy of Google’s search algorithm or Facebook’s feed algorithm on the dark web. (Location 1077) - And let me remind you that negative emotions are more readily accessible and more profitable BUMMER magnets for people than positive ones. 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. (Location 1143) - Whatever else the BUMMER companies brought into the world, the feature that caught the public’s imagination most in the beginning was probably that they were free. You didn’t need to pay Google for a search or to upload or watch a video on YouTube; there was no fee to join Facebook or Twitter. (Location 1174) - That means that a BUMMER company can build a model of you in software—and control what you see in a manipulative feed—by running programs exclusively on their own computers. (Location 1195) - Those computers are placed in super-secure locations you’ll never visit. Their software is super-hyper secret. Every other kind of file has been breached by hackers, but not the search or feed algorithms of the big BUMMER companies. The secret code to manipulate you is guarded like crown jewels. The software that matters most is the most hidden, the least revealed. Guess what? BUMMER software usually runs on a foundation of free and open software (like the Linux/Apache stack). But no one can know what is done on top of that free and open foundation. The open-software movement failed absolutely in the quest to foster openness and transparency in the code that now runs our lives. (Location 1197) - One way is to directly monetize services such as search and social media. You’d pay a low monthly fee to use them, but if you contributed a lot—if your posts, videos, or whatever are popular—you could also earn some money. A large number of people, instead of the tiny number of token stars in the present system, would earn money. (I acknowledge, of course, that there would have to be a way of making services available to those who couldn’t afford to pay even a small fee.) I’m making a fuss about the potential to earn because a system like this would help address looming losses of employment due to AI and automation. We’re talking about an industry that supports some of the richest companies the world has ever known, and it’s all driven by data that comes from people who are often being told that they’re about to be obsolete, that they’ll need to go on the public dole with a basic income system. It just isn’t right to tell people they are no longer valuable to society when the biggest companies exist only because of data that comes from those same people. (Location 1239) - What we call AI should never be understood as an alternative to people, but instead as a mislabeled new channel of value between real people. (Location 1259) - BUMMER was originally sold as a barter deal. “Let us spy on you and in return you’ll get free services.” This might seem like a reasonable deal in the short term, but in the long term it’s terrible. (Location 1270) - This hypothesis needs to be tested more, but it is possible that when we enter into a new era in which people are paid for the value their data brings to the online world, then that world will become less dark and crazy. (Location 1287) - It might sound undesirable to someday have to pay for things that are currently free, but remember, you’d also be able to make money from those things. (Location 1312) - were founded. It was sacrilege to challenge it. But then companies like Netflix and HBO convinced people to pay a monthly fee, and the result is what is often called “peak TV.” Why couldn’t there also be an era of paid “peak social media” and “peak search”? (Location 1316) - They meet early successes, often spectacular, ecstatic successes, but then the world turns sour, as if by magic. BUMMER ultimately fuels loudmouthed assholes and con artists more than it does the initial groups of hip, young, educated idealists, because in the longer term BUMMER is more suited to sneaky, malevolent manipulation than to any other purpose. (Location 1367) - tolerate moderate or pragmatic politics. BUMMER undermines the political process and hurts millions of people, but so many of those very same people are so addicted that all they can do is praise BUMMER because they can use it to complain about the catastrophes it just brought about. It’s like Stockholm syndrome or being tied to an abusive relationship by invisible ropes. The sweet, early idealists lose, all the time thanking BUMMER for how it makes them feel and how it brought them together. (Location 1372) - BUMMER is neither liberal nor conservative; it is just pro-paranoia, pro-irritability, and pro–general assholeness. (Location 1439) - An interesting detail that came out a year after the election is that Facebook had offered both the Clinton and Trump campaigns onsite teams to help them maximize their use of the platform, but only Trump’s campaign accepted the offer.18 Maybe if Clinton had agreed to have Facebook employees in her office, she would have won. The election was so close that any little thing that moved the needle in her direction could have tipped the result. (Location 1462) - 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.” They’re becoming the existential mafia. (Location 1468) - BUMMER was gradually separating people into bins and promoting assholes by its nature, before Russians or any other client showed up to take advantage. When the Russians did show up, they benefited from a user interface designed to help “advertisers” target populations with tested messages to gain attention. All the Russian agents had to do was pay BUMMER for what came to BUMMER naturally. (Location 1490) - None of this means that Facebook prefers one kind of voter to another. That’s up to Facebook’s customers, who are not you, the users. Facebook doesn’t necessarily know what’s going on. A social media company is in a better position if it doesn’t know what’s going on, because then it makes just as much money, but with less culpability. (Location 1518) - One example of Component F in the 2016 U.S. election was an account called Blacktivist, which was run by the Russians. A year after the elections, the true power behind Blacktivist was revealed and reporters asked genuine black activists what they thought about it.22 Some, fortunately, still had access to outrage. One activist reportedly said, “They are using our pain for their gain. I’m profoundly disgusted.” That is an informed, reasonable statement, and a brave one, for it is not easy to accept that one has been tricked. (Location 1534) - At the end of the day, BUMMER moneymaking caused black social media to unintentionally elevate a new tool optimized for voter suppression. As if there weren’t enough voter suppression tools out there already. As if gerrymandering, inaccessible polling stations, and biased registration rules weren’t enough. (Location 1542) - Behavior-modification cages can only manipulate one creature at a time, but when the whole society is being manipulated in a coordinated way, we must seek a grander explanatory framework. There aren’t many choices. The clearest one is probably religion. (Location 1567) - The first argument is about free will. Free will is a mysterious idea; a leap of faith. Does it even make sense? Maybe there is no free will; maybe it is an illusion. But religions generally propose that free will is real. It must exist in order for you to choose to change your karma for the better, or to make moral choices that get you into heaven. Even the most ethereal Buddhist must start with free will in order to freely seek a state that transcends it. (Location 1578) - Another similarity to religions? Maybe my objection to BUMMER is like when Protestants objected to indulgences. There is a long history of people rejecting a structure connected with a religion while not rejecting the core. (Location 1599) - Believing something only because you learned it through a system is a way of giving your cognitive power over to that system. BUMMER addicts inevitably at least tolerate a few ridiculous ideas in order to partake at all. You have to believe sufficiently in the wisdom of BUMMER algorithms to read what they tell you to read, for instance, even though there’s evidence that the algorithms are not so great. (Location 1614) - The purpose of life, according to BUMMER, is to optimize. According to Google: “Organize the world’s information.” But per the typical Silicon Valley worldview, everything is information. Matter will be hacked, the human body will be hacked, and so on. Therefore, 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. (Location 1658) - The purpose of your life is now to optimize. You have been baptized.4 (Location 1662) - Note: Chasing citatiokn numbers is form of baptism. A conversion - AI is a fantasy, nothing but a story we tell about our code. It is also a cover for sloppy engineering. Making a supposed AI program that customizes a feed is less work than creating a great user interface that allows users to probe and improve what they see on their own terms—and that is so because AI has no objective criteria for success. Who is to say what counts as intelligence in a program? Back in the 1990s, my friends and I made the first programs that could track a person’s face to turn it into an animated rendering of a creature or another person making the same expressions in real time. It didn’t occur to us to call that AI. It was just an example of fancy image processing. But now, that capability is often called AI. (Location 1692) - 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. (Location 1698) - People who translate between languages are being told they’re becoming obsolete. Not only are they losing their livelihoods, but they are being robbed of dignity, because the narrative of their obsolescence is a lie. They are still valuable. They are needed because without their manually created data, there would be no “automatic” translation service. (Location 1702) - 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 (Location 1717) - 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. (Location 1732) - gradually start to believe it. If this new challenge to personhood were only a question of spiritual struggle within each person, then perhaps we could say it is each person’s responsibility to deal with it. But there are profound societal consequences. (Location 1736) - You don’t need to give up friends: Email your friends instead of using social media, but use accounts that aren’t read by the provider—so no Gmail, for instance. No need for a sneaky company between you and your friends. (Location 1760) - 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. (Location 1762) - You can even still watch YouTube videos, for now at least, without a Google account. Watching without an account and with some privacy plugins will give you access to a much less manipulative experience. (Location 1767) - Quit ’em all! Instagram and WhatsApp are still Facebook and still scoop your data and snoop on you. Don’t tweet about how you quit Facebook or post to Facebook about how you quit Twitter. (Location 1770)