Tag Archives: essays

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now – Jaron Lanier

Posted on by
Reply

I grew up in an era where we were told too much television would rot our brains. Turns out, our brains are rotting because of a little device that every person in the world, toddlers even, carry around in their pockets. I can see my high school students rolling their eyes at me: blame it on the phones, boomer. They don’t know a life when phones weren’t melded to their palms, though. They don’t actually know what they’re missing and what’s being stolen from them.

When Facebook was launched in 2004, I had two young children and no interest. I think I called it FaceDevil or something. But then FOMO kicked in; all my friends were on there and I just gave in and joined. For a while it was okay, I guess. It was nice to catch up with people I hadn’t seen in a long time and share a little bit of my life. There are all sorts of reasons why the platform has become shittier over the last few years and I opted out in January 2025. Don’t miss it at all. Yes, I still have Instagram; yes, that has to go too.

Jaron Lanier, a well-known computer scientist, author, and philosopher makes a compelling pitch to ditch your social media accounts in his book of essays Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. His argument, that social media platforms are turning us into nasty sheeple lacking in critical thinking skills and ripe for being duped by bad actors, is both horrifying and motivating. Lanier encourages us to be like a cat (which is an apt simile since cute cat videos started taking over the Internet in 2005. And let’s face it, who doesn’t love watching cats get scared out of their wits by tinfoil?) Cats, Lanier suggests

have done the seemingly impossible: They’ve integrated themselves into the modern high-tech world without giving themselves up. They are still in charge. There is no worry that some stealthy meme crafted by algorithms and paid for by a creepy, hidden oligarch has taken over your cat

We, however, are not cats. Every interaction on social media is being tracked or, as Lanier explains, is a BUMMER (Behavior of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent). BUMMER, simply put, is a “statistical machine that lives in the clouds. It gathers data from users to whom it has no responsibility and uses that data to manipulate the user and make tremendous profit while simultaneously undermining the economic dignity of the user…with Google and Facebook we are not the customers, we are the product.” (Law & Liberty)

Big Brother is watching and he’s not benevolent.

It is hard to be optimistic about the state of the world given the current political landscape. Lanier’s argument in the essay “Social media is undermining truth” is that

People are clustered into paranoia peer groups because then they can be more easily and predictable swayed….The only reason BUMMER reinforces this stuff is that paranoia turns out, as a matter of course, to be an efficient way of corralling attention.

…

In order to benefit in the long term as technology improves, we have to find a way to not let our improved comfort and security turn into cover for a lazy drift into perilous fantasy. Media forms that promote truth are essential for survival, but the dominant media of our age do no such thing.

I come from a generation of newspaper readers. The paper came every evening and we all read it. We watched the supper hour news. News was impartial (or, okay, at least somewhat objective.) Journalism has been steadily eroded and more and more young people get their news from TikTok influencers. Truth, so it seems, is fluid. Or, if you’re Fox News, optional.

In his essay “Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy”, Lanier argues that our “worldview is distorted” and that we “have less awareness of other people’s worldviews.” Empathy, let’s face it, has been seriously eroded as we are pitted against each other by the powers that be. They’re coming for your jobs; interaction with trans or gay people will make you trans or gay. One of my favourite lines from Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird is when Atticus tells Scout “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” It’s one of the things I love about teaching high school English, encouraging my students to read widely and see that there are other ways of looking at things, that not everyone has the same experience that you have. Of course, as Trump defunds schools and libraries and bans books, well, I guess that’s a topic for another day. (I should also point out that I am Canadian and watching the dumpster fire that is what is happening in the US with abject horror.)

Lanier isn’t a fan of Trump either but he says “What’s really going on is that we see less than ever before of what others are seeing, so we have less opportunity to understand each other.” It seems like the exact opposite of what the Internet should/could be facilitating: a way to see that we share the planet and the human experience and we should be working together for the betterment of both of those things.

But it doesn’t, and that’s a bummer.

As Lanier says, “Delete your accounts!”

Reading, Writing and Leaving Home – Lynn Freed

Posted on by
Reply

Although I have never read any of Lynn Freed’s fiction, I was interested in her collection of essays, Reading, Writing and Leaving Home: Life on the Page because as a high school writing teacher I am always looking for writing advice to share with my students. You know, something like King’s “If you don’t time to read, you don’t have the time or tools to write.” While there aren’t necessarily any pithy quotes in this collection, it was an interesting book because Freed herself has had an interesting life.

Born and raised in South Africa, Freed’s parents were actors, and she grew up – the youngest of three girls – surrounded by books.

Most of the books in the house were kept in my parent’s study, a cosy room with leather chairs, teak bookshelves, leaded windows, and piles of scripts stacked around on the floor. It was there that my mother was to be found during the day, either timing scripts or drilling a new actor. And there that I was allowed to read whatever was available – mostly plays, but also opera libretti, the odd history, a few biographies, a selection of popular novels – as long as I didn’t interrupt.

Her writing career began when she wrote “ninety tedious pages” for an AFS scholarship application. The following year, when she actually landed in New York after having won the scholarship, she was told that the organization had put a two-page limit on the essay because of her entry. That story and those characters continued to swirl around in Freed’s head and eventually found their way into her novel. But none of it was easy.

The world I was writing about was the same world I had tackled for AFS, but now  could life it from the restraints of myth and detail and report and do with it anything I pleased. Or, at least, so I thought.

Freed writes about writing as I believe writing is: hard freakin’ work. Frustrating. Painstaking. A labour of love, sure, but it’ll kick your sorry ass.

…I would suggest that one should never overlook two essential elements in the development of the writer: long years of practice and a ruthless determination to succeed. Writers come to their material in different ways, but come they must if they are to succeed.

Even though this sounds like advice, Leaving Home isn’t actually a how-to book. The book chronicles Freed’s journey from girlhood to adulthood and covers everything from her relationship with her sisters to a trip back to the house she’d once called home – and all if it is fodder for her writing. If, as she claims, she has chosen truth over safety in her writing – I suspect her novels would be worth a look. I certainly enjoyed this collection of essays.