Though the writing gets a bit overdramatic (and name-dropp-y) the facts in this book are important to know. We all know that social media uses algorithms to decide what we see and when. This tracking, of our habits, our likes and dislikes, is touted as a boon to users--internet tailored to our needs! What we don't hear is what these companies do with the tracking information, how algorithms use our information, and what the companies behind these sites are really doing with our information. A necessary read for anyone who interacts with social media.

Ten Arguments was closer to ten very similar arguments than to ten distinct reasons for deleting social media. I was attracted to the book by the title and the premise. I found the author's reasoning to be informative, if repetitive. I read the book on Kindle, which made the footnotes really easy to access and made the content much richer. I recommend the format and it is for that reason I went with 4 stars. Don't get me wrong, I think the points raised are valid, I wanted more detail within the book itself. Have I deleted my social media? Bit by bit, I am reducing my presence, so I think the promise of the premise has been proven.

It was interesting but it felt preachy. While I agree social media has negative influences, I don't feel like the arguments were compelling enough for me to want to delete all of my social media accounts right now.

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist who has contributed to the field of virtual reality. He is not a Luddite, so I thought it should be worth reading his arguments against social media. His arguments weren't new to me, but they're significant because of the source. For me, the main takeaway is the reminder that social media users are not the customers, they're the product. If you forget that, you're more likely to allow yourself to be manipulated by the real social media customers – the advertisers.

This review is based on an electronic advance reading copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley.

Love this book. This is a must-read for anyone who is addicted to the negative spiral of social media. Full of insight. HIghly recommended!

I became interested in Jaron Lanier after someone recommended listening to Ezra Klein's interview with him on his podcast. I thought his perspective was really unique and interesting, and I listened to another interview with him as well and found it enlightening. His criticisms of social media were valid and he seemed to have some ideas for improving the platforms. I haven't read any of his other books but I found his writing in this book to be convoluted, condescending, and viciously cynical in a way that his interviews were not. He used a lot of acronyms that were kind of edgy and weird, which was fun but got confusing. Like most people, I have a love/hate relationship with social media where I want to keep in touch with my friends but not be a party to political extremism for advertising dollars. I think maybe it's better to stick with long-form journalism and podcasts on the topic, it's just too heavy of a topic for a book for a casual observer like myself.

There are definitely good reasons to consider deleting social media accounts, however I had some issues with how they were presented in this book. Some of the arguments just seemed a bit thin, and a little too much like ranting instead of the cogent arguments that I was hoping for. Reading this book made me feel more conscious of the decisions I am making by opting in to social media sites (such as this one), which made the book worth reading for me.

I really like the kindle version, because the footnotes are filled with links to great content! And I appreciated how the author stated he was liberal but proposed his arguments in a way that spoke to conservatives and liberals. I was also strongly reminded that a user of social media (ie. me, you, us) is the PRODUCT of social media; the CUSTOMER is advertisers.

I really loved how the book started out ("In a world of dogs, be a cat."), but towards the end, the material started becoming quite repetitive and the distinct reasons to quit social media started to blur together.

If you are on social media you need to stop right now and read this book. Written by a expert with decades in Silicone Valley as a Computer Scientist. and engineer , He illustrates for the reader how how online lives are being not only monitored daily but controlled by algorithms that make other people very rich at the expense of our well being and mental health. He documents how the paid for algorithms can determine our mood, and enable the trolls. How the social media giants only concern is more wealth accumulated with no regard to how what they enable online affects their public. This is a excellent guide to why we should all be more aware and perhaps consider cancelling our social media. He has a very credible argument considering what just occurred with Facebook . This is a easy read, very well researched and highly recommended. Well Done.

This book was written by someone in the computer world, so I was really fascinated with his point of view. Social media has totally changed how we interact with one another in a negative way at times. I never realized what a negative impact social media has had on our economy, either. This is an interesting and eye-opening read.

Paranoid in an interesting way. The author makes some compelling arguments for reducing your social media presence for your own good, but I don't know that I'm compelled to delete Facebook from my phone just yet.

Facebook, Google and The Rapture

Jaron Lanier wants to be known for his music and his appreciation of cats (He likes to say he is one). But where he is best known, and most useful, is in his appreciation of the internet. In You Are Not A Gadget (2010), he created a manifesto to free us from the clutches of the corporations installing their systems in our daily lives. Now, things are much worse. Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now is a more specific and desperate appeal. The social media corporates have improved their models to be far more intrusive and behavior-modifying than anything we have ever seen outside of fiction. They no longer even bother to sugar-coat it. They make billions from personal data, even if it’s just clicks. Their customers use it to change user behavior. Because it works.

Lanier creates a new acronym, BUMMER, which stands for Behavior of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent. BUMMER reduces freedom, ends economic dignity and destroys souls. It is an inherently cruel con game, he says. “We have enshrined the belief that the only way to finance a connection between two people is through a third person who is paying to manipulate them.”

Memes feed the BUMMER machine, spreading negativity and reinforcing artificial intelligence’s (AI) ability to digest anything humans create. Facebook and the others of its ilk are becoming the new ransomware of the internet, he says. He gives the example of Facebook offering whole onsite teams to both the Trump and Clinton campaigns in 2016. (Only Trump accepted.) Facebook is a gatekeeper to brains, and/or an existential mafia. Lanier says it is like paying indulgences to the medieval Roman Catholic Church.

Every meme and trope sends the BUMMER AI machine creating new buckets to sort users, stereotype them, and sell the results to advertisers. It really doesn’t matter what users like or who they follow. Whatever they click adds to their demise as persons and adds to their value as targets.

This is strong stuff, and Lanier’s easy text draws readers into a very dark tale. The ten arguments in a nutshell:

1. You are losing your free will. If you don’t quit, "you are not creating the space in which Silicon Valley can act to improve itself".
2. Quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times. It’s more efficient at harming society than at improving it. Simply quitting can change the world.
3. Social media is making you into an asshole. Lanier says Donald Trump is a victim of his own addiction to twitter (37,400 tweets). For the most powerful politician in the world, his behavior is no better than a teenaged troll. He is not alone.
4. Social media is undermining truth. A twitter account called Blacktivist turns out to be owned and operated by the Russians. “They’re using our pain for their gain,” says Tawanda Jones, a real black activist. The twitter account @realJaronLanier isn’t. He has no account.
5. Social media is making what you say meaningless.
6. Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.
7. Social media is making you unhappy.
8. Social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity. This is the most jarring argument. Lanier says the free model everyone pushed for in the 80s and 90s gave rise to the ad model, and with it the ability to create uncountable millions of fake humans and their corresponding spam and troll activity.
9. Social media is making politics impossible. “There are so few independent news sites, and they’re precious ... Our huge nation is only a few organizations away from having no independent newsrooms with resources and clout.“
10. Social media hates your soul. Facebook’s statement of purpose now says it is “assuring“ that “every single person has a sense of purpose and community” to which Lanier adds “because it presumes that was lacking before. If that is not a new religion, I don’t know what is.” Google has funded a project to “solve death”, to which Lanier adds “I’m surprised the religions of the world didn’t serve Google with a copyright infringement takedown notice.” Google’s Ray Kurzweil’s stated purpose is to upload everyone’s consciousness to Google’s servers. His “Singularity” is AI’s answer to The Rapture, Lanier says.

I don’t agree with everything Lanier writes. He spends a lot of time misapplying the solitary/pack switch. People act differently as solitary operators than they do in a pack (So do wolves, birds, and electrons). He narrows it to the point where he can apply it to social media: independent operators aren’t irrational trolls because they don’t follow pack rules and pack sheltering. In a pack, users can hide and be as obnoxious as they want, because nearly everyone is obnoxious at some point, and it is no longer outrageous. The solitary person is self-reliant, independent, and self-conscious. S/he can supposedly walk away from troll taunts and clickbait, and not contribute any either.

He gives the false example of Linked In, which he considers the least corrupted social media service. But people on Linked In are the most packbound and cowed of all. They are all afraid to step out of line lest it wreck their career path. Everything everyone posts there is Pabulum.

The pack, for better or for worse, is the condition of all mankind today because our numbers are too high to tolerate loners. We need traffic lights and everyone must obey them. We need sanitation facilities because we produce far more refuse than the planet can absorb. Noise ordinances kick in at 10PM. Loners are automatically suspect. Security defeats freedom. We have no choice but to bow to the pack.

The book is a straight line descent from the friendly to the fiendish. It gets heavier and more worrying with every step. But the solution is always present, at least to Lanier. It’s the subscription model. If people have to pay, the fake people will disappear, fewer will sign up, services will become manageable and reliable, the quality of the discussion will improve and the overall value will skyrocket. Assumptions and generalizations about Homo sapiens will diminish and AI will have a harder time taking over.

Good luck with that. Really.

David Wineberg

Reading this review and thinking of checking your Twitter feed? Mind overwhelmed right now by something you read that made you mad on Facebook? Perhaps you should pick up this book. In it, tech pioneer Jaron Lanier discusses how his decades in the computing industry has made him fearful of what social media has done to people and our perceptions of the world.

Jaron calls social media companies the BUMMER machine. BUMMER stands for "Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent". Throughout his short book, Jaron makes the case that this BUMMER Machine, through algorithms designed to keep adjusting to our usage, have essentially created separate tailored realities for all of us that result in both feeding of negative emotions, and a pack mentality that divides us and reduces our empathy and understanding of other viewpoints. He makes it clear that through subtle manipulation of these algorithms, like with the Russian infiltration of social media in the 2016 election, opinions can be solidified without people realizing it.

He also talks about how social media has hurt our economy and media, as we've made so much of the content free, there is less money going to the people who develop the content, and more to those who track it and turn it into data. This has slowly eroded our media, artistic communities, and helped lead to a rise of a gig economy where people are forever chasing money without any real safety net or comfort.

Lanier makes a compelling argument that social media wasn't designed for evil, its need to attract and keep eyeballs has turned it into an addiction for many that has led to many serious issues for both the individual and society.

If you've ever questioned whether your time on Facebook or Twitter is good or bad, take the time to read Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. It may convince you to drop your smartphone and pick up another book.

In a very one-sided, short and somewhat repetitive book, Lanier lists key arguments for deleting social media accounts so that we are able to reset and relaunch; part of the arguments is based on a notion that (perhaps) unintended consequences from profit-maximizing algorithms have significantly violated user privacy and made social media into a force of no-good. This is, of course, a radical pendulum swing - previous authors focused on the ability of social media to amplify good - Clay Shirky - for example. Lanier has been consistent in his warnings right from his earlier work (You are not a gadget).

In this book, he outlines some intertwined arguments on deleting social media. The arguments are not novel and do not contribute any new viewpoint - loss of privacy, empathy, context, hyper personalization leading to echo chambers, ....etc - the entire gamut of complaints that others have discussed. Where the author adds value is in the use of good analogies and a framework (whose usage sometimes gets tedious in the book) that helps a reader put these arguments in good perspective. However, there is no nuance in any of the arguments and this binary approach is a lost opportunity. Though he provides some subtle differentiations (paragraphs on LinkedIn, and use of recommendation engines in Netflix), the narrative is very one-sided (as the title implies).

Each of the arguments (some merely a few pages long) come with a generous set of citations - a mishmash of magazine/newspaper articles, academic literature, and researchers' blogs. Some of these citations are truly insightful. The brevity of the arguments (and the book in general) makes one wonder if this was better off as a series of blog posts that could've continuously expanded - Lanier himself provides a somewhat selfserving answer to that question, buried deep in a footnote (he doesnt want to get tangled up with reviewer's comments).

In the end, the author doesn't convince to delete the accounts, but generate a bit more attention to how the social media uses you just as much as you use their services; perhaps that was the intent of the book.

One of the things I want to point out to my students when we discuss this book is that it's written by someone in the Silicon Valley industry. This is an insider who has seen the development and growth of social tech, and is now able to see the unintentional end game. While it doesn't mean that we should listen to him without thinking for ourselves, it does lend some credibility to the facts he proffers up that most people are unaware of...use them when making your own decisions. Some of the author's arguments are better than others. He lost me when he went off on a long-winded tangent about the 2016 election. While that may be what spurred people to begin looking at social media differently, it was simply the end result of many years of abuse...and I don't think it warranted as many pages as it received. We'll be cutting that section much shorter in class.