10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier

10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier

By: Erreh Svaia

Vivlío Fagitó

Jaron Lanier has previously written two great books, the first You Are Not a Gadget and Who Owns the Future? In both of them, the pioneer of the Internet and virtual reality lashes out in a hard and incisive way against part of the effects of on society, that his "revolution" has brought, a kind of "cultural revolution" of almost "Pavlovian" nature, of search for stimuli and rewards, a dependence almost as harmful as cigarettes are in some people, an addiction to our modern world that seems to be going further and further and whose antidote, as social networks continue to be perfected, will be increasingly difficult to find.

10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now is the new book by Lanier, if you are reading this, it is probably because I ignored it at some point, it is precisely because I still think that in communication issues, I could assure that at least Facebook is superior, talk about Twitter, Instagram, Google + and others, just never seemed effective, talk about Twitter and its limitation of characters that only makes people think of the 140 characters more than the message itself, Instagram, a platform that seems pitiful, superficial in excess and more a showcase for vanity, Google +, well, it's history, in fact, we stay with Facebook, which in my case has served to have much of the information that interests me at hand, being very honest, the social issue is not so relevant, I rarely accept a new "friend", my "network" is not very extensive, of course I try to share information constantly, but also I also look for people who know how to share valuable information, and discern between deceptive topics and those that are not.

The scathing criticism of Lanier focuses on the transformation that the user has suffered through the use of social networks, the rudeness which sometimes comes in the exchange of opinions, the search sometimes for the "shock" that leads to confrontation and above all, the grouping of users into "tribes", something that in some way leads us to the most primitive of our being, and in turn, is reflected in a reality that we currently live in the midst of the rise of nationalism and the polarization of modern society, that "pulverization" of society into tiny tribes that echoes Vargas Llosa's book, "The Call of the Tribe" and that futuristic book by JG Ballard "Hello America".

Today the threat of this "Pavlovian" system that enslaves many in search of a "like", that remodels the personality looking for that reward that we see others receive and that orients our actions towards that goal, many times objectives not initiated by a person , but by an algorithm that knows us perfectly and knows what strings to play to get the desired sound from us, a parade of desperate search for social acceptance and a basic ideology of "like" = a I'm fine, and of indifference, a sign of something I am doing wrong, creating a spiral of anxiety in people generally lacking a defined personality in search of defining their nature.

Although the social networks in the beginning were the great promise of freedom, of the logic of the "free", of the "public", today they seem to mean the opposite, the requirement of a very high payment to "belong", the exclusivity of certain tribes, social aggression towards individual thought, a sort of giant "hive" in which the individual begins to lose the fight against collectivism and in which the tyranny of "like" becomes an oppressive obsession for many, and whose coldness could become a condemnation of harsh consequences in the most defenseless psyche.

Two additional thoughts, one, the danger of the evolution of this addictive machinery of stimuli and rewards in the hands inadequate, today are large corporations who extract portentous amounts of information about our behavior patterns, our motivators and our fears, tomorrow it could be a government with totalitarian aspirations that could be more dangerous than those old secret police that sought to detect dissent and repress it brutally.

On the other hand, they become the perfect tool for ambitious collective projects such as the Chinese government, which is already seeking to apply the "Facebook nation" model to society and to set the guidelines for behavior based on stimuli and rewards, and also of punishments, Black Mirror was not so wrong.