Jesse Doran

“Even when the readers are real, not fake, algorithms are routing them to particular content, so their choices aren’t really independent. The measurements aren’t valid, by definition. You can’t tell someone where to go and then claim that you discovered something new because you learned where that person went. This is yet another ubiquitous problem that’s as hard to see as air.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“All addictions share, among others, two primary qualities. 1. They embody repetition without progress. 2. They produce incapacity as a payoff.”
― Steven Pressfield, Turning Pro

“The damage to society comes because addiction makes people crazy. The addict gradually loses touch with the real world and real people.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Let’s suppose an algorithm is showing you an opportunity to buy socks or stocks about five seconds after you see a cat video that makes you happy. An adaptive algorithm will occasionally perform an automatic test to find out what happens if the interval is changed to, say, four and a half seconds. Did that make you more likely to buy? If so, that timing adjustment might be applied not only to your future feed, but to the feeds of thousands of other people who seem correlated with you because of anything from color preferences to driving patterns.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now