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

Staff review by Chris Saliba

A computer scientist brings a humanistic approach to the problem of social media.

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, musician and writer. He offers a unique perspective on issues to do with technology and society by way of his long history with the tech community. Both an insider and outsider, he has voiced concerns in books such as You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future about how the open internet culture of Facebook and Google has reduced human expression and potential, while taking our data and monetizing it for huge profits.

In the short and snappy Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier explains how social media is degrading language, spreading misinformation, exploiting cheap labour, alienating people from reality, distorting how they see the world and also making us angry, lonely and irritable.  Quite a list!

Social media is designed to be addictive. Lanier sees it as a form of hypnosis, but a dangerous one.

“Hypnosis might be therapeutic so long as you trust your hypnotist, but who would trust a hypnotist who is working for unknown third parties? Who? Apparently billions of people.”

Lanier coins an acronym to describe the algorithmic machines that track everything we do online in order to create customised feeds: “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent. BUMMER.” In humourous tones reminscent of science fiction writers Kurt Vonnegut and Stanislaw Lem, the reader is warned of how the BUMMER machine is undermining just about every aspect of our lives, from democracy and public discourse to how we see and think about ourselves. BUMMER technology is causing mass isolation. One of the most depressing points that the book raises is how hard it is to know other people now because we don’t know the customised feeds that individuals – billions of individuals – are exposed to. Once upon a time we were all roughly on the same page, but now no one is on the same page.

Ten Arguments is for the most part cheerful and optimistic, firm in its belief that we can keep the internet and smart phones, we simply need to get rid of the BUMMER machine. Beneath the jollity and jokes, Lanier is an erudite and philosophical writer with a gentle, poetic nature. He’s a rare, humanist voice on the subject of computer technology and its impact on us. The book’s final argument for deleting your social media accounts is one of self-knowledge and awareness. “Whatever a person might be,” writes Lanier, “if you want to be one, delete your accounts.”

If you want to gain insights into how invidious social media really is, read Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.

Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, by Jaron Lanier. Published by Jonathan Cape. ISBN: 9781847925398  RRP: $24.99

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Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

Staff Review by Chris Saliba

As an idealist from the generation of computer scientists that helped create the internet, Jaron Lanier now feels that something has gone terribly wrong. Too much power is concentrated in the hands of too few. In Lanier's new book, he provides a wide ranging and deeply considered discussion paper on this very dilemma. 

Humanist, musician and computer scientist Jaron Lanier’s main claim to fame is the invention of virtual reality, a term he popularised. He currently works at Microsoft in one of their research labs. In addition to his many accomplishments he is now making a name for himself as a writer. His first book, You Are Not a Gadget, was a critique of Web 2.0 culture. Facebook and similar sites, he claimed,  had reduced our human potential, not expanded it. In this new book, Who Owns the Future?, Lanier tackles the economics of the internet: who wins, who loses, and how we should aim to spread the wealth around.

Lanier’s argument is really an age old one. Those who control the new technologies (in this case information technology) become enormously powerful, often putting the common good at peril. In the information age, power becomes concentrated in the servers of big corporations like Google and Facebook. Lanier calls these big servers ‘siren servers’: they transfix us with their dazzling allure but there is danger. While we might download free music, for example, this is eating away the music industry.

Those attracted to the siren server’s offer of freebies and treats may find themselves unable to obtain work in the industry of their choice. The upfront freebies that the internet gives may provide quick and easy gratification, but it also blinds us to their more serious long terms effects. We create an economy where a few become rich and powerful, while the rest of us must try to eke out a living on what's left. Surprisingly, Lanier’s argument is almost that of a Luddite: the new technology destroys many jobs and leaves few new ones behind to fill the gap.

The answer to this dilemma is a pretty standard one: redistribute the wealth. Seeing wealth in the internet age is built by controlling information about people, Lanier suggests that we should all get nanopayments for the bits and pieces of information we surrender to the siren servers. This would create a modest income for people and make their contribution valued. It would also be a way of preserving the middle class, which is seeing its ranks diminished. At the moment, this value is not recorded in the internet’s accounting system, it’s ‘off the books’. How would this be done? Lanier doesn’t give many details. As he readily admits, he’s really just throwing around ideas, but the rough answer is the internet would be retrofitted as a two way system so users could track who was using their information and then claim some type of payment. The information revolution would roll back the other way.

Of course this all sounds impossible and totally unlikely to ever happen. Who Owns the Future? can’t really be taken seriously as a prescription for a future internet economy. It seems too way out, or maybe we've all been too seduced by the power of the 'siren servers', and can't see any other alternatives to the current system.

Despite the book’s dubious utility, there are plenty of reasons why you should read Who Owns the Future? Lanier is a brilliant writer whose prose is rich and lovely. He has a broad range of ideas about the internet age that he discusses in a way that is accessible to the lay reader lacking in computer expertise (like this reviewer). Lanier has obviously thought long and deeply about a lot of wide ranging issues. He has quite a capacious mind and a philosopher’s temperament. In the final analysis he argues for balance and humanistic values when weighing up the internet's huge potential.

For example:

Making choices of where to place the barrier between ego and algorithm is unavoidable in the age of cloud software. Drawing the line between what we forfeit to calculation and what we reserve for the heroics of free will is the story of our time.

Also:

And if, as I argue, the world must eventually become somewhat artificial in order to thrive, must experience enabled by the Machine be forever inauthentic, infertile or shallow in comparison?


Jaron Lanier has a utopian vision of the internet as a humanist economy, one that sustains a broad middle class, rather than concentrating wealth at the top. He’s undoubtedly a hippie idealist. Who Owns the Future? will free your mind and open it to a world of wonderful possibilities. It will also hopefully kick start a discussion in the wider community about these vital issues.

Who Owns the Future?  by Jaron Lanier. Published by Allen Lane. ISBN: 9781846145223 RRP: $45.00

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lannier

 
Staff Review by Chris Saliba


Computer scientist Jaron Lannier was at the forefront of computer innovation in the 1980s and 90s, but now feels something has gone awry with the open Internet culture of Facebook, Google and even Wikipedia. In this fascinating manifesto, he argues that Web 2.0 culture has reduced expression and narrowed human potential. In the 2000s we consume an increasingly infantilised web content.

Jaron Lannier is a pioneering computer technologist and scientist. His main claim to fame is as the innovator of Virtual Reality. Spiritually and philosophically he belongs to the pre-Web 2.0 period, before social media became dominant. In the 1980s and 90s he was at the forefront of the digital revolution, and held high hopes that computer technology would make the world a better place. He dreamt of mass audiences for artists and writers, who would be able to make decent living selling their product online.

He believed that digital communication would herald an era of heightened consciousness and intellectual achievement, as everyone exchanged ideas at a greater velocity. Alas, little if any of this came to pass according to Lannier. Instead the Internet has produced an abundance of content, which has considerably lowered it value (think of all the free downloads that are now taken for granted). Intellectually, we don’t exchange ideas so much as shout abuse, often anonymously.

Reading Jaron Lannier you get the impression of a dreamily idealistic utopian. His basic argument in You Are Not a Gadget is that Web 2.0 culture has reduced expression and narrowed human potential. In the 2000s we fit our personalities into Facebook profiles and consume an increasingly infantilised Internet content.

This is certainly a contentious book, and readers will find much to challenge and argue about. What is so fascinating about Lannier is that he from within the computer culture, but is also critical of its mainstream thinking. An open web culture does have its downside.

Lannier writes in a soft, musing tone, often making interesting philosophical digressions. He aims to persuade by careful argument, and is ever ready to anticipate and concede the reader’s objections. This is a book for deep intellectual involvement, not easy black and white answers to complex questions.

While You Are Not a Gadget doesn’t really provide any answers to the myriad of problems that its author outlines, it certainly does leave a lot to think about. Lannier is obviously widely read and has thought long and hard about his subject. You Are Not a Gadget reads like the first philosophy book of the Internet age.

For those who despair of the mind numbing aspects of Web 2.0 culture, this book may provide a degree of solace. Computer boffins should find the book interesting too, as Lannier is also a computer scientist. Heavy Facebook and Twitter users may wonder what all the fuss is over.

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lannier. Published by Allen Lane, 2010. ISBN 9780141049113. RRP: $22.95