TL;DR
7/10. A sharp, intelligent polemic lent real weight by the author’s Silicon Valley insider authority, arguing that social media’s harms to psychology, truth, and society are by design. Deliberately one-sided with a delete-everything solution more provocative than practical, but a bracing, thought-provoking counterweight, especially for writers told constant engagement is mandatory.
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier is a short, sharp polemic against social media from one of the people best qualified to make it: a virtual-reality pioneer and Silicon Valley insider who helped build the digital world he’s now warning about. Across ten concise arguments, Lanier contends that the major social platforms are doing real damage to individual psychology, to truth, to politics and to human decency. The rational response, he says, is to quit.
It’s a provocative, intelligent, and unsettling book. When someone who helped build the machine says the machine is rotten, I pay attention, and no outside critic can match that weight.
Lanier’s central frame is captured in his coinage for the business model he indicts, BUMMER (Behaviors of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent): platforms engineered, through pervasive behavioral manipulation, to modify their users, which he argues is corrosive by design instead of by accident.
The insider’s indictment
The book’s distinctive value is its source. Lanier is no technophobe shouting from outside. He’s a respected computer scientist and digital pioneer who understands these systems from within. His core argument is structural. The advertising-driven, engagement-maximizing business model of social media necessarily relies on addiction and behavioral manipulation, and this produces predictable harms regardless of any individual platform’s intentions.
His ten arguments range across the personal and the political. The platforms erode free will, distort truth, corrode empathy, fuel cruelty and tribalism, and undermine the conditions for a functioning society. The case is tightly made, and coming from him it’s hard to wave off as alarmism. The cruelty and tribalism argument hits hardest, since anyone who’s spent ten minutes in a comment section has seen it in action.
Keep reading
Social media for authors: using it without being used by it: Lanier’s critique, in the practical question of how writers should engage online.
Watch: 10 Reasons to Get Off Social Media - Jaron Lanier, The Artificial Intelligence Channel
A bracing, concise polemic
The book’s brevity and directness are strengths: it’s a quick, punchy read that makes its case efficiently and forces the reader to confront questions most people avoid about their own daily social-media use. For a writer, who’s told relentlessly that a social-media presence is mandatory for a career, it’s a valuable counterweight, a reasoned argument for skepticism about platforms most of us use unreflectively, and a prompt to think critically about the trade-offs instead of simply accepting that more social media is always necessary.
The rule that every writer must post daily or vanish is mostly crap, and Lanier hands skeptics some solid ammunition against it. Even a reader who doesn’t delete their accounts comes away more aware of what the platforms are doing to them.
Explore the hub
The Social Media Hub: using, questioning, and managing social media, gathered in one place.
What are the weaknesses of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media?
The caveats are those of any polemic. It’s one-sided by design, an argument for a position instead of a balanced weighing, so it understates the real benefits and the practical realities, connection, community, professional necessity, that keep people, including many writers, on these platforms for good reasons. Its solution, simply delete everything, is more bracing as provocation than practical as advice for those whose livelihoods or relationships depend on the tools, and the book is stronger at diagnosis than at offering realistic alternatives short of total withdrawal.
And being from 2018, the platforms have changed, though the structural critique remains sharp. The delete-everything ending is where he loses me. For a working author, quitting every platform at once makes a fine slogan and lousy career advice.
Is Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media worth reading?
It’s a sharp, intelligent, valuable polemic against social media, lent real weight by Lanier’s insider authority and a structural argument that the platforms’ harms are by design. As a bracing counterweight to the assumption that constant social-media engagement is simply necessary, especially for writers told exactly that, it’s thought-provoking. It loses ground for being deliberately one-sided, understating the real benefits and offering a solution, delete everything, more provocative than practical for those whose work depends on the tools.
Read as a challenge to think critically, it’s well worth the short time it takes. I don’t buy the full prescription, but the diagnosis is dead on, and it should make anyone uneasy about how many hours they hand those apps.
Explore the hub
The Psychology of Writing Hub: technology, attention, and the mind, gathered in one place.
