Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
by: Jaron Lanier
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13 Highlights | 4 Notes
Location: 3 
Those of us with options must explore our options or they will remain only theoretical.
Note: Intro summary: Become a cat. Remain autonomous. Explore your options.Social media engages in behavior modification. Algorithms look for short term peak 'engagement' -> negative reactions. People are changed slowly, subtly because of reward, pushishment and the irregularity of the two.
Location: 23
Addiction gradually turns you into a zombie. Zombies don't have free will … You become more like a zombie, more of the time, than you otherwise would.
Note: the more time you spend on social mediaLocation: 28
BUMMER - Behaviour of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent.
Location: 29
Ordinary people are brought together in a setting in which the main - of often the only - reward available is attention.
Location: 42
(What's bad) It's the business model. The incentive for the companies. Not the technology.
You know the adage that you should choose a partner on the basis of who you become when you're around the person? That's a good way to choose technologies, too.
Location: 49
When you are a solitary wolf, …
… You take on the qualities of an artist.
When you're in a pack, … You become more like an operator, a politician, or a slave.
… You take on the qualities of an artist.
When you're in a pack, … You become more like an operator, a politician, or a slave.
Location: 51
If, when you participate in online platforms, you notice a nasty thing inside yourself, an insecurity, a sense of low self-esteem, a yearning to lash out, to swat someone down, Then leave the platform. Simple.
Note: These social network platforms make you your naturally worst self. No one knows why.Location: 0
What if listening to an inner voice or hiding a passion for ethics or beauty were to lead to more important work in the long term, even if it measured as less successful in the moment? What if deeply reaching a small number of people matters more than reaching everybody with nothing?
Note: - Seth Godin champions for reaching out to your tribe as opposed to the mass market.
- By drowning out signal in too much noise, social media is jamming the signal.
- Assumption of social media as it is today - Only way to sustain connection between 2 people is through a 3rd person who pays to manipulate the 1st and 2nd.
- The Freemium model
- How to pay users for content?
- What is 'Data as labor' model?
Location: 128
The important change is that you now have less free will, and a few people you don't know have more of it. Some of your free will has been transferred to them. Free will has become like money in a gilded age.
It is the stuff of those religions that have proposed that only leaders have a mandate from heaven.
It is the stuff of those religions that have proposed that only leaders have a mandate from heaven.
Location: 129
A strict religion might demand that adherents believe certain things that are not supported by evidence, or that are countered by it.
Believing something only because you learned it through a system is a way of giving your cognitive power over to that system.
Believing something only because you learned it through a system is a way of giving your cognitive power over to that system.
Location: 130
The term coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. Dawkins proposed memes as units of culture that compete and are either passed along or not, according to a pseudo-Darwinian selection process.
Location: 131
Here are some tough truths: We currently don't have a scientific description of a thought or a conversation. We don't know how ideas are represented in a brain. We don't know what an idea is, from a scientific point of view.
Location: 132
The foundation of the search for truth must be the ability to notice one's own ignorance. Acknowledging ignorance is a beautiful feature that science and spirituality hold in common.