How to Escape: Adding Jaron Lanier’s Reasons to Delete Social Media
Social media; the backbone of all things Gen Z. We all have it and most of us love it. It’s where we stay connected with our friends and can stay entertained for hours. What so many of us think of as a blessing; authors such as Jenny Odell and Jaron Lanier disagree and have different opinions on the matter. In Odell’s book, How to Do Nothing, she mentions Jaron Lanier as a “technology writer” and “cultural critic.” Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, artist, and author who wrote the book Ten Arguments for Deleting Social Media Right Now. Both of these books are a form of activism and “How to” guides to resisting or deleting the technology that most of us use without any hesitation. Lanier’s book is exactly how it states, it is an argument containing ten distinct reasonings…
- You are losing your free will
- Quitting Social Media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times
- Social media is making you into an asshole
- Social media is undermining truth
- Social media is making what you say meaningless
- Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy
- Social media is making you unhappy
- Social media doesn’t want you to have economic dignity
- Social media is making politics impossible
- Social media hates your soul
Lanier understands how hard it is to break the addiction from social media but simply wants to help people “free” themselves and no longer be manipulated by it. He does this in a much more insistent and commanding way compared to Odell. Odell only mentions Lanier’s name and I think that using pieces of his arguments could help further why resisting the attention economy and more specifically social media is a good idea.
Lanier starts his book with an archetype of the distinct difference between cats and dogs. He commends cats on their unpredictability and the fact that “[they] have done the seemingly impossible: They’ve integrated themselves into the modern high-tech world without giving themselves up” (Lanier 2). He is straight with us and tells us that we are becoming obedient dogs when we should really be like cats and not manipulated by social media’s ruse. Lanier’s tone throughout this book only becomes more assertive, but like Odell, he is knowledgeable enough to know the sheer difficulty of quitting social media and resisting the attention economy. Although he knows this, the entirety of his book is urging people to abandon social media completely while Odell only attempts to teach people how to resist technology and redirect our attention to other things. Odell’s book is,
“a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy […] a simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough” (xi).
Odell is drawn to Lanier’s writing because he is so passionate about what certain types of media are doing to society which is what she is trying to preach too. The only difference between the two is that Lanier truly believes that deleting social media needs to be immediate. I think that Lanier’s tone is what really helps his argument though. As someone who is knowingly addicted to social media, it makes me take a step back and evaluate what has become of my social media use when he says things like,
“Addiction gradually turns you into a zombie. Zombies don’t have free will. Once again, this result isn’t total but statistical. You become more like a zombie, more of the time than you otherwise would be” (Lanier 23).
I feel that Odell’s objective is to free users of being zombies controlled by the attention economy. It would help Odell’s writing if she pivoted from more of a friendly dog stance to an unpredictable cat like Lanier. Odell nicely teaches us how we can view productivity in a different way while Lanier gives constructive criticism on how to be different and not give ourselves up to technology. Odell’s overall argument would be helped by Lanier’s reasoning to be a “cat.” To increase productivity without technology I think that can be started by deleting social media and by using any of Lanier’s assertive ten arguments it would help advance her argument.
Books like these are so important to read because without them our society is developing addictions to social media and we only know a fraction of how it works. We need to know that big corporations are controlling what is relayed into our minds whether we like acknowledging it or not. Lanier’s purpose in this book is to give us that information about how we are being manipulated through our screens and to possibly incite change in our lives that could better us. I think that if Odell added more of Lanier’s philosophy from these arguments it would help further her reasons as to why people should resist the attention economy. In chapter 5, Odell talks about filter bubbles. She explains what dangers there would be if real life was controlled by filter bubbles like the internet is, “If we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changes — never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege” (Odell 138). Lanier repeatedly talks about the correlation of how people react to certain posts personalizes their feed. He explains how this is a part of behavior modification and how it can even change the turn out of votes in an election. The effects of this are so subtle that most people do not even notice that social media is shaping how they behave and think. Filter bubbles are what keep people invested in the attention economy and there is no hope of escaping without the knowledge about how it functions. Lanier explains filter bubbles as being, “drawn into a corral with other people who can be maximally engaged along with you as a group. […] the term should be ‘manipulate,’ not ‘engage,’ since it’s done in the service of unknown third parties who pay BUMMER companies to change your behavior” (Lanier 77). (BUMMER is an acronym used to describe social media platforms (Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent)). Odell and Lanier both use the word “coral” because that is exactly what a filter bubble does to control what people are seeing and in turn configure what their opinions and thoughts are on different topics. It is important to know what you are spending hours scrolling on and that is exactly why Odell and Lanier wrote their books and why people like Odell reference other sources because there are people not following technology like a dog.
Instead of quoting people who are anti-technology, Lanier decided to quote the former president and vice president of Facebook for their perspective. They explain the “social-validation feedback loops” and the vulnerabilities that apps like Facebook exploit. Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of Facebook, said, “This is a global problem… I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds — even though we feigned this whole line of, like, there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences” (Lanier 9). This is a perspective I did not see in Odell’s writing and Lanier including this validates his entire argument because even the people doing the manipulation admit that it is occurring. This would be an interesting addition to Odell’s book. Although his tone is much more dramatic than Odell’s and she only mentions Lanier by name I believe that much of her thought process is derived from these ten arguments. Lanier says,
“It’s unlikely that there will be a vast wave of people quitting social media all at once; the combination of mass addiction with network-effect lock is formidable. But as more people become aware of the problems, they — you — can speak to the hearts of the tech industry and have an impact. If you drop accounts even for a while, it helps” (Lanier 143).
This summarizes exactly what both Lanier and Odell seek to achieve. They understand the true function of social media and technology and they aim to educate so that people can make a decision on what is best for themselves.
Jenny Odell uses many different authors and artists to make points in her book, but I feel as though Jaron Lanier’s book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Social Media Right Now, is able to encompass Odell’s objective in every chapter even though it is delivered with a different tone. Because they have very similar points of view additions from Lanier’s book would aid in the activism that Odell is trying to achieve.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. Picador, Henry Holt and Company, 2019.
ODELL, JENNY. HOW TO DO NOTHING: Resisting the Attention Economy. MELVILLE House, 2020.
