Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now
Jaron Lanier
Having read it
★★★★★
A fantastic read that clearly offers well thought out perspectives that explain why it is better to not be dependent on social media to interact with the world and, like the author colloquially mentions once or twice, if you do (over) use social media to operate, that approach is a bummer!
A good passage
There’s a long line of researchers studying this topic, starting with Abraham Maslow in the 1950s and continuing with many others, including Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (joined by writers like Daniel Pink). Instead of applying the simple mechanisms of behaviourism, we need to think about people in more creative ways, if we expect them to be creative. We need to foster joy, intellectual challenge, individuality, curiosity, and other qualities that don’t fit into a tidy chart.
A second good passage
If owning everyone’s attention by making the world terrifying happens to be what earns the most money, then that is what will happen, even if it means that bad actors are amplified. If we want something different to happen, then the way money is earned has to change.
A third good passage
We’re talking about an industry that supports some of the richest companies the world has ever known, and it’s all driven by data that comes from people who are often being told that they’re about to be obsolete, that they’ll need to go on the public dole with a basic income system. It just isn’t right to tell people they are no longer valuable to society when the biggest companies exist only because of data that comes from those same people.