Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

Author:Jaron Lanier
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

THE WRONG END OF THE BUMMER

What I will do is dig into why I’ve found that certain online designs, including most social media, make me unhappy. My discontent is related to all the arguments that have come before, because BUMMER places me in a subordinate position. It’s structurally humiliating.

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.

I started to notice the bad feelings from the earliest prototypes of social media, which go way back to the 1980s. Even with ancient services like early Usenet, I found that there was a strange, unfamiliar hollow in me after a session. It was something I had not felt since I was a child. An insecurity, a feeling of not making the grade, a fear of rejection, out of nowhere.

I thought I must be at fault, because here was a more advanced technology, and surely that meant it was better than primitive analog media like telephones and newspapers.

This feeling was coincident with discovering my inner troll, which I described in the argument about assholes, but it could also be felt distinctly. I took an experimental approach to myself. If I felt bad after using an internet design, what were its qualities? How was it different from designs that left me happy? Here is one thing I discovered about myself: I don’t mind being judged if the judges put in real effort, and a higher purpose is being honestly served, but I really don’t like it when a crowd judges me casually, or when a stupid algorithm has power over me.

I don’t like it when a program counts whether I have more or fewer friends than other people, whether people like me, or if I am in some way better, cooler, more likely to get rich, or whatever. BUMMER algorithms must put you into categories and rank you in order to do anything BUMMER at all. The whole purpose of BUMMER is turning you and changes to your behavior into a product. The algorithms fundamentally work to favor platform owners and advertisers, and those parties need abstractions of you in order to manipulate you.

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.23

Part of the reason is that 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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.