I just finished listening to Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier on audiobook. I first heard of Jaron Lanier when I clicked on a profile of him in GQ titled The Conscience of Silicon Valley, and was compelled to read this, his latest book, after seeing him interviewed in The Social Dilemma.

A few months ago I accomplished the goal I articulated in this website’s first essay by deleting my Twitter, and in doing so removing myself from all social media. Even though I picked up the book as a full convert in deleting social media, I still found the book to be thought provoking and containing new insight.

“I want people to see there’s a problem happening in the tech industry, and it doesn’t have a name” says Tristan Harris at the beginning of The Social Dilemma. The movie does a great job scaring the shit out of you; elucidating and illustrating social media’s responsibility for rising political polarization, suicide rates, and disinformation. But the movie makes no attempt to name this nameless problem in tech. As such, some critics have said the movie is light on solutions; how can we prescribe a treatment when we have no diagnosis, only symptoms?

In his book, Jaron Lanier has no trouble giving a name to this problem in tech, and as such has an easy time arguing his proposed solution. The root cause of our discontent is not “Social Media” as a genre, it’s more nuanced (and farther reaching) than that. It’s companies which follow the business model he describes as “Behavior of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent”. BUMMER companies, for short.

Lanier does an excellent job framing BUMMER companies “engagement strategies” in terms of behavior modification; and explains how advertisement sold on top of this behavior is essentially renting out that behavior modification scheme. After this well-defined topic has been established, he proposes his solution: to delete your accounts. The ten arguments then explore the negative affects BUMMER companies have on an individual’s autonomy, character, self-esteem, creativity and empathy, as well as on one’s ability to participate in political and economic life.

Importantly, Lanier does acknowledge the positive social change and organizational movements that have been brokered by BUMMER companies, namely, The Arab Spring and the Black Lives Matter movement. However, he posits that the tools which allowed these groups to coalesce are the fulfillment not of Facebook’s or Twitter’s correct functioning, but of the internet at general; these companies have merely harnessed the internet’s freely offered utility of connectivity for their own profitable aims.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn all fall into this BUMMER category, yes, but so do non-“social” companies powered by advertising like Google and Amazon. Lanier does not make an attempt to exhaustively list all the qualifying corporations, but instead works to show the intricacies of the business model so that the reader can be mindful, herself, of when companies may be employing the BUMMER model.

In leaving social media, I had been struggling with the same unanswered question from The Social Dilemma; I felt like I was addressing my symptoms, but what exactly am I working to avoid? Ten Arguments, despite citing Social Media in the title, inspects the exact breed of the problem, and helped me articulate a broader, but firm policy around my new relationship with the web:

An example of this outside social media: as part of adjusting to my life post-Twitter, I signed up for Apple News+ in order to stay up-to-date on the news. But I quickly got sick of it. I realized that it was just more of the same: some interesting content mixed in with inflammatory garbage, and ads. Apple News+ requires a subscription, but that really just provides a revenue floor. It also runs on ads, and is incentivized to maximize the air time of those ads. As such, the BUMMER model becomes the most lucrative way to provide all parties - ostensibly - with what they want.

Now I’m paying for a few individual subscriptions for newspapers, which costs some money but costs far less than being on social media. I consume news on my own terms, and OH BOY have I been thankful this week for my separation from the social media & political sensationalism BUMMER machine. As a former member of the People Of Praise and an acquaintance of current Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett - topic of the current news cycle - my life has been a flurry of texts and calls from old friends asking for my take on Amy, the P.O.P., or one of the many articles making the rounds online. It’s been a reckoning with my own past, and also a deep ambivalence about how my former community should best be represented. I can’t imagine going through this emotional turmoil and also being exposed to the countless memes, videos, posts and misinformed articles plastering the feeds of some of my friends who have also been bombarded.

This essay is a follow-up to an earlier one, titled Privacy & Autonomy in the Age of Big Tech. For reasons explained in that essay, I’ve recently started using a VPN to route all my web traffic through a server outside of the United States. Just as getting rid of social media and limiting my news intake has slowed down my connection to the online frenzy, routing all my internet surfing through Canada has literally slowed down my connection to the internet. When I was addicted to social media, I was never able to work with VPN slow downs long-term; when I needed a hit, I needed a hit. Now though, I find myself enjoying the moments waiting for web pages to load. I take the pause to marvel at the power of the internet, the programs running in my browser and on computers far away, the programmers that work so hard to bring it to me, and how lucky I am to have so much information (and television) at my fingertips 🙂. I never thought “mindfulness” about my internet use could extend beyond setting time limits & not using certain sites, but I have to say that recently it’s transforming into quite a peaceful experience.