Lanier, Jaron > Quotes

“To free yourself, to be more authentic, to be less addicted, to be less manipulated, to be less paranoid … for all these marvelous reasons, delete your accounts.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“The problem isn’t any particular technology, but the use of technology to manipulate people, to concentrate power in a way that is so nuts and creepy that it becomes a threat to the survival of civilization.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle528-529). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“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. BUMMER rejects it.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1755-1757). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“It might sound like a contradiction at first, but it isn’t; collective processes make the best sense when participants are acting as individuals.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle670-671). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“You might not have thought about Google’s worldview or mission, but you buy into it when you optimize your presence to rank high in search or optimize your video for views. The purpose of your life is now to optimize. You have been baptized. 4

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1769-1771). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“The better analogy is paint that contains lead. When it became undeniable that lead was harmful, no one declared that houses should never be painted again. Instead, after pressure and legislation, lead-free paints became the new standard.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“Your ability to know the world, to know truth, has been degraded, while the world’s ability to know you has been corrupted. Politics has become unreal and terrifying, while economics has become unreal and unsustainable: two sides of the same coin.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1665-1667). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“Using symbols instead of real rewards has become an essential trick in the behavior modification toolbox.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“That means that a BUMMER company can build a model of you in software— and control what you see in a manipulative feed— by running programs exclusively on their own computers. Those computers are placed in super-secure locations you’ll never visit. Their software is super-hyper secret. Every other kind of file has been breached by hackers, but not the search or feed algorithms of the big BUMMER companies. The secret code to manipulate you is guarded like crown jewels.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1277-1280). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“Remember, with old-fashioned advertising, you could measure whether a product did better after an ad was run, but now companies are measuring whether individuals changed their behaviors, and the feeds for each person are constantly tweaked to get individual behavior to change.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“Fake people are typically not operated by the same people who operate BUMMER platforms; instead, fake people are manufactured in a new underworld. There is now an industry that sells counterfeit humans.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle765-766). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“Empathy2 is the fuel that runs a decent society. Without it, only dry rules and competitions for power are left.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1011-1012). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“I want to be authentically nice, and certain online designs seem to fight against that with magical force. That’s the core reason why I don’t have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, 2 Instagram, Snapchat, or any of the rest.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle595-597). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“The problem is in part that we are all carrying around devices that are suitable for mass behavior modification.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“If you hang out in Silicon Valley, you’ll hear a lot of chatter about how money is becoming obsolete, how we’re creating forms of power and influence that transcend money. Yet everybody still seems to be chasing money!”
― Lanier, Jaron

“Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward. The relative ease of using negative emotions for the purposes of addiction and manipulation makes it relatively easier to achieve undignified results. An unfortunate combination of biology and math favors degradation of the human world. Information warfare units sway elections, hate groups recruit, and nihilists get amazing bang for the buck when they try to bring society down.The unplanned nature of the transformation from advertising to direct behavior modification caused an explosive amplification of negativity in human affairs. We’ll return to the higher potency of negative emotions in behavior modification many times as we explore the personal, political, economic, social, and cultural effects of social media.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“BUMMER is economically unsustainable, which is even worse, perhaps, than its being unfair. Bringing down a society to get rich is a fool’s game, and Silicon Valley is acting foolishly.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1347-1349). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“Watch the end credits on a movie on Netflix or HBO. It’s good discipline for lengthening your attention span! Look at all those names scrolling by. All those people who aren’t stars made their rent by working to bring you that show.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1406-1407). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“We need to foster joy, intellectual challenge, individuality, curiosity, and other qualities that don’t fit into a tidy chart.
But there’s something about the rigidity of digital technology, the on-and-off nature of the bit, that attracts the behaviorist way of thinking. Reward and punishment are like one and zero.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“Awareness is the first step to freedom.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“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.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle577-579). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“Inherent in the BUMMER business model is the assertion that there is only one possible way for digital services to work, which is that you, the individual user, must be made subservient. That is not true. The prevalence of this message is one of the best reasons to quit social media.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1309-1310). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“Instead, the problem that has made the world so dark and crazy lately is the BUMMER machine, and the core of the BUMMER machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle508-510). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“Instead of trying to shut down BUMMER companies, we should ask them to innovate their business models, for their own good.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1397). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“This hypothesis needs to be tested more, but it is possible that when we enter into a new era in which people are paid for the value their data brings to the online world, then that world will become less dark and crazy.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1372-1373). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“Even successful and pleasant BUMMER addicts, like top social media influencers, have reported that they must not be too nice to others, for that shows weakness1 in a highly competitive fishbowl. One must be followed more than one follows, for appearances’ sake.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle554-556). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“Deleting your accounts now will improve the chances that you’ll have access to better experiences in the future.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“The more specifically we can draw a line around a problem, the more solvable that problem becomes.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle506-507). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“When people act as solitary wolves, then each person is in a unique position in society and thinks in a unique way.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle666-667). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron

“Before the BUMMER era, any time a new technology came along that made a set of human roles obsolete, new roles appeared that were less physical. Car drivers instead of horsemen. Indeed, the new roles that came into being because of tech disruptions were often more creative and professional than the old ones. Robotics programmers instead of ironworkers. This meant that more and more people gained prestige and economic dignity.

Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1360-1363). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.”
― Lanier, Jaron