I’ve done quite a bit of thinking about social media over the last year. It’s been prompted by world events, an almost complete collapse of their usefulness to me, personally and professionally, and by the change I’ve seen in others. I have friends who I know as intelligent and compassionate people, but whose online presence now seems paranoid, unhappy and hateful. Social media has little positive to offer in 2025, and far too many negative effects to ignore.
Jaron Lanier spotted a lot of these dangers a while ago, and in 2018 published this book, Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now. The title riffs on Jerry Mander’s 1978 classic Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, and there are similarities. Mander was an ad executive who brought an insider’s perspective to his writing. So does Lanier, with a diverse portfolio of Silicon Valley interests going back to the early 80s, now a multi-disciplinary researcher at Microsoft. Mander believed the problem with television was inherent and so the whole technology should be abolished. Lanier likewise sees no real solution to social media. We should delete our accounts and have nothing to do with it.
Why? Among the chapter titles here are arguments such as ‘social media is undermining truth’, ‘making you unhappy’, and ‘making politics impossible’ – all of these borne out by events over the last few years. At heart, Lanier argues, social media isn’t about facilitating social exchanges. It’s about behaviour modification – getting you to click things, to keep coming back, to engage more in the content shown to you. That means algorithms finely tuned to your own habits, that can read your moods, and that can sell your attention to advertisers.
Lanier doesn’t see malign intent behind this. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t an evil genius. We are hoisted by our own human petard, because negative emotions such as fear or anger arise more easily and get a stronger reaction from us than positive emotion. Over time, the algorithms push more controversy and conflict towards us because that’s what gets engagement. That’s what they are coded to do, rewarding the platform and its advertisers with more engagement.
These curated streams, endlessly refined and tweaked, come to serve us our own personalised window on the world. This risks ‘destroying your capacity for empathy’, warns Lanier. In order to understand each other, we need a shared reality. “When we’re all seeing different, private worlds, then our cues to one another become meaningless… The speed, idiocy and scale of false social perceptions have been amplified to the point that people often don’t seem to be living in the same world, the real world, any more.”
This loss of a shared reality makes it impossible to understand one another. One person’s walkable neighbourhood is another’s dystopian prison. An obscure sub-discipline of legal academia becomes a Marxist plot to destroy Christian America. On all sides, the most hysterical takes rise to the top.
Lanier’s book is an accessible explanation of how social media fails us, articulating what a lot of us probably sense but don’t have language for. However, the problem is ten times worse than it was seven years ago, and so the book does feel slightly out of time. Musk’s takeover of Twitter is a new category of shamelessness. The tech barons sitting in the front row at Trump’s inauguration suggests the damage is done, and meekly deleting one’s accounts isn’t going to be enough.
More positively, the social media world has diversified and a more open social media looks possible in ways that it didn’t in 2018. With the possible exception of Bluesky it isn’t mainstream yet, but it looks viable and there may be alternatives out there. You might not want to walk away from social media entirely, but it’s definitely worth thinking it through and being more deliberate about our engagement with it, and this book might help.
- You can buy Ten Arguments… from Earthbound Books
The Earthbound Report 