TEN ARGUMENTS FOR DELETING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS RIGHT NOW

By Jaron Lanier

146 pp. Henry Holt & Company. $18.

My self-justifications were feeble. They could be described as hypocritical even. I had written a book denouncing Facebook, yet maintained an account on Mark Zuckerberg’s manipulation machine. Despite my comprehensive awareness of the perils, I would occasionally indulge in the voyeurism of the News Feed, succumb to zombie scrolling and would take the hit of dopamine that Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, has admitted is baked into the product. In internal monologues, I explained my behavior as a professional necessity. How could I describe the perniciousness of the platform if I never used it?

Critics of the big technology companies have refrained from hectoring users to quit social media. It’s far more comfortable to slam a corporate leviathan than it is to shame your aunt or high school pals — or, for that matter, to jettison your own long list of “friends.” As our informational ecosystem has been rubbished, we have placed very little onus on the more than two billion users of Facebook and Twitter. So I’m grateful to Jaron Lanier for redistributing blame on the lumpen-user, for pressing the public to flee social media. He writes, “If you’re not part of the solution, there will be no solution.”

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Over the past year, a backlash against the big tech companies has arrived suddenly and unexpectedly. But Lanier has been there for a long time. During the 1980s, he helped invent virtual reality. Because of his immersion in technology and his integrity as a thinker, he saw the perils of corporate concentration in technology before most; he knew that the data amassed by these companies could be used to exploit the psychic weaknesses of users. In the early years of this decade, he published two excellent books — “You Are Not a Gadget” and “Who Owns the Future?” — that were strident, lucid and personable. Books about technology often quickly come to feel like a flip-phone, antiquated and destined for the intellectual junk drawer. But Lanier’s books have aged marvelously.