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Go to where you are kindest
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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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.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behavior modification on a titanic scale.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
Here’s a non-geeky framing of the same idea: What if listening to an inner voice or heeding a passion for ethics or beauty were to lead to more important work in the long term, even if it measured as less successful in the moment? What if deeply reaching a small number of people matters more than reaching everybody with nothing?
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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How can you find happiness without authentic self-esteem? How can you be authentic when everything you read, say, or do is being fed into a judgment machine
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
One of the main reasons to delete your social media accounts is that there isn’t a real choice to move to different social media accounts. Quitting entirely is the only option for change. If you don’t quit, you are not creating the space in which Silicon Valley can act to improve itself.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
Memes might seem to amplify what you are saying, but that is always an illusion. You might launch an infectious meme about a political figure, and you might be making a great point, but in the larger picture, you are reinforcing the idea that virality is truth. Your point will be undone by whatever other point is more viral. That is by design. The architects of BUMMER were meme believers.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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Your character is the most precious thing about you. Don’t let it degrade.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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BUMMER is a machine with six moving parts. Here’s a mnemonic for the six components of the BUMMER machine, in case you ever have to remember them for a test: A is for Attention Acquisition leading to Asshole supremacy B is for Butting into everyone’s lives C is for Cramming content down people’s throats D is for Directing people’s behaviors in the sneakiest way possible E is for Earning money from letting the worst assholes secretly screw with everyone else F is for Fake mobs and Faker society
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
With nothing else to seek but attention, ordinary people tend to become assholes, because the biggest assholes get the most attention. This inherent bias toward assholedom flavors the action of all the other parts of the BUMMER machine.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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Speaking through social media isn’t really speaking at all. Context is applied to what you say after you say it, for someone else’s purposes and profit.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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Most users of social media have experienced catfishing (which cats hate), senseless rejection, being belittled or ignored, outright sadism, or all of the above, and worse.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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It might sound like a contradiction at first, but it isn't; collective processes make the best sense when participants are acting as individuals (p48)
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
We have given up our connection to context. Social media mashes up meaning. Whatever you say will be contextualized and given meaning by the way algorithms, crowds, and crowds of fake people who are actually algorithms mash it up with what other people say.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
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. Smart people simply waited to buy paint until there was a safe version on sale. Similarly, smart people should delete their accounts until nontoxic varieties are available.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
As a Twitter addict, Trump has changed. He displays the snowflake pattern and sometimes loses control. He is not acting like the most powerful person in the world, because his addiction is more powerful. Whatever else he might be, whatever kind of victimizer, he is also a victim.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
Trump supporters seem nuts to me, and they say liberals seem nuts to them. But it’s wrong to say we’ve grown apart and can’t understand each other. 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.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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Checking is not a useful thing. It might be a verb, but it’s not a real action. When I started blogging, I always checked my stats for no reason. Then I thought: What’s the outcome of checking? Nothing. You just consume information. I try to keep my “checking” at a minimum. That’s why I deleted all news and social media apps on my phone. I don’t even have email on my phone. Otherwise, I check it all the time. I don’t want that. I only want to check my email when I have time to answer emails.
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Darius Foroux (Do It Today: Overcome Procrastination, Improve Productivity, and Achieve More Meaningful Things)
“
Each of us has an inner troll.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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Either there’s a total shitstorm of assholes (that’s not a mixed metaphor, right?) or everyone is super careful and artificially nice.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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Our early libertarian idealism resulted in gargantuan, global data monopsonies.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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Facebook is not just injurious to health, it's now a full-on humanitarian crisis.
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Abhijit Naskar (Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World)
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If you aren’t part of the solution, there will be no solution.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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And then I delete it and replace it with that fucking crying-laughing face that old people use when they’re being racist on social media.
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Eliza Clark (Boy Parts)
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I don't think I'm better than you because I don't have social media accounts. Maybe I'm worse; maybe you can handle the stuff better than I can.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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What if deeply reaching a small number of people matters more than reaching everybody with nothing? (p68)
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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This book will argue that the companies on their own can’t do enough to glue the world back together.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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Empathy2 is the fuel that runs a decent society. Without it, only dry rules and competitions for power are left.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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The inability to carve out a space in which to invent oneself without constant judgment; that is what makes me unhappy.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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The damage to society comes because addiction makes people crazy. The addict gradually loses touch with the real world and real people.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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If we want something different to happen, then the way money is earned has to change.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
The imbalanced power relationship is in your face all the time. Don’t you feel humiliated using one of the Facebook brands, like Instagram or WhatsApp? Facebook is the first public company controlled by one person.32 I mean, I don’t personally have anything against Mark Zuckerberg. It isn’t about him. But why would you subordinate a big part of your life to any one stranger?
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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The changes were dramatic. People who deleted Facebook became happier, more satisfied with their life, and less anxious. The emotional change was equivalent to 25 to 40 percent of the effect of going to therapy—a stunning drop for a four-week break. Four in five said afterward that deactivating had been good for them. Facebook quitters also spent 15 percent less time consuming the news.
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Max Fisher (The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World)
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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.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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Usually Google has had a way of coming up with the creepier statements, but Facebook has pulled ahead: A recent revision in its statement of purpose includes directives like assuring that “every single person has a sense of purpose and community.”5 A single company is going to see to it that every single person has a purpose, because it presumes that was lacking before. If that is not a new religion, I don’t know what is.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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Nuestra incapacidad para preservar un espacio en el cual inventarnos a nosotros mismos ajenos a la evaluación constante, eso es lo que me hace infeliz. ¿Cómo podemos tener autoestima cuando ha dejado de ser el tipo de estima que más importa?
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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There is no room for sentiment. Everything must go to enable you to combat this manipulative technique. Photographs. Burn all of the photographs that I appear in. Remove them from all social media, mobile phones, PCs, laptops and tablets. Yes, you may look fantastic in that picture with me (I am sure you can alter it so you are preserved and I am not). As you remove the pictures say “I delete you (say my name)” and this process of exorcising me from a visual part of your life will feel uplifting. All gifts, mementos, cards, letters and those little trinkets that we so often send one another must be removed. Burn them, shred them and dispose of them. Where possible, sell certain items and you will gain increased satisfaction from having made some money out of it too. Do
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H.G. Tudor (Escape: How to Beat the Narcissist)
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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Cats are everywhere online. They make the memiest memes and the cutest videos. Why cats more than dogs?1 Dogs didn’t come to ancient humans begging to live with us; we domesticated them.2 They’ve been bred to be obedient. They take to training and they are predictable. They work for us. That’s not to say anything against dogs.3 It’s great that they’re loyal and dependable. Cats are different. They came along and partly domesticated themselves. They are not predictable. Popular dog videos tend to show off training, while the most wildly popular cat videos are the ones that capture weird and surprising behaviors.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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AI is a fantasy, nothing but a story we tell about our code. It is also a cover for sloppy engineering. Making a supposed AI program that customizes a feed is less work than creating a great user interface that allows users to probe and improve what they see on their own terms—and that is so because AI has no objective criteria for success.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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If you want to be a real person living in the real world, the first thing you must do is get off the grid. Take the first brave step and delete your Facebook profile. After all, you surely wouldn’t want the words carved on your headstone to be: “I was registered with Facebook. I had 101 online friends (and I even knew a few of them). My current mood is: Sad.
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Michael Faust (Mad as Hell: Why Everything is Getting Crazier)
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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A neon-pink 3 flickered and instantly disappeared again into the dark. The sight of it on my own device now made me sick. I held my finger down on the menu screen; each little app logo began to vibrate. I deleted the 3. I contemplated deleting everything. Cleaning it all away. The idea had a charm, a self-cancellation, many little suicides, a way to dispatch myself without actually going anywhere.
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Olivia Sudjic (Sympathy)
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When you are a solitary wolf, you are forced to get directly in touch with the larger reality that doesn’t care about what a society thinks. You must find water and shelter, or you will perish. You have to scavenge and hunt for yourself. Your personality shifts; you must solve problems on the basis of evidence you gather on your own, instead of by paying attention to group perception. You take on the qualities of a scientist or an artist.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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The macrohistorical log is largely siloed across different corporate servers, on the premises of Twitter and Facebook and Google. The posts are typically not digitally signed or cryptographically timestamped, so much of the content is (or could be) from bots rather than humans. Inconvenient digital history can be deleted by putting sufficient pressure on centralized social media companies or academic publishers, censoring true information in the name of taking down “disinformation,” as we’ve already seen. And the advent of AI allows highly realistic fakes of the past and present to be generated.
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Balaji S. Srinivasan (The Network State: How To Start a New Country)
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Facebook Sonnet
Facebook is not just injurious to health,
It's now a full-on humanitarian crisis.
If you think it's just a harmless bad habit,
You're fanning the flames of social necrosis.
Social media ought to make people social,
Not make pavlov's dogs out of humanity.
Yet all that facebook actually does today,
Is drive society towards clinical insanity.
Social media is not necessarily bad,
So long as it doesn't feed on our stability.
Yet facebook has devised the perfect algorithm,
To learn, pump and monetize human instability.
Facebook is the definition of what AI must be not.
Algorithm without humanity is mental holocaust.
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Abhijit Naskar (Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World)
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And in December of that year –five months later –The Guardian reported they’d got it wrong. The messages had been deleted, but it was probably done automatically by the mobile network after a set time, and possibly even as a result of the police listening to the messages as part of the missing person investigation. No one gave a toss, of course. That’s always what happens after a lynch mob –those who took part walk away, whistling, and don’t bother to clean up the mess they leave behind. All people remember is they were JUST APPALLED about THAT THING the details of which they CAN’T QUITE REMEMBER.
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Susie Boniface (Bluffer's Guide to Social Media (Bluffer's Guides))
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you need to know the Life Cycle Of A Lynch Mob: 1. Someone says something bad. 2. Someone else notices. 3. The second person broadcasts the offence. 4. Each of the people who hear the news spreads it again, allowing the original offence to multiply like bacteria on a body dumped in a cesspit. The lynch mob is named Something Must Be Done, and attracts people who are more offensive than the first offender. 5. The original offence is magnified by a factor of 50 GAZILLION and the lynch mob achieves critical mass. 6. The originator of the bad thing says sorry. 7. Half of the offended people say, ‘Well, don’t do it again.’ The other half scream, ‘IT’S TOO LATE NOW!’ 8. The originator of the bad thing deletes account, falls on sword, makes charitable donation, or commits suicide. 9. Most people grumble but decide enough’s enough. 10. 84 people are still offended and will be forever.
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Susie Boniface (Bluffer's Guide to Social Media (Bluffer's Guides))
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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We’re pretending that the people who know how to translate are obsolete, when in truth they’re still needed. Isn’t it some kind of sin to tell someone that they’re obsolete when it isn’t true?
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1341-1342). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
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What we call AI should never be understood as an alternative to people, but instead as a mislabeled new channel of value between real people.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1343-1344). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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The stupidity of the BUMMER approach to human value transcends economic unsustainability; it is a breach of human dignity. That dimension will be explored in the tenth argument, on spiritual concerns.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1352-1354). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
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Musicians use BUMMER to promote themselves for free, and yet a smaller percentage of musicians are doing well enough to plan families— which is a reasonable definition of “security”— than during the era when music was sold on physical discs. 1 Recording musicians; language translators … who’s next?
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1356-1359). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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When social media companies are paid directly by users instead of by hidden third parties, then they will serve those users. It’s so simple. Someone will be able to pay to see poisonous propaganda, but they won’t be able to pay to have that poison directed at someone else. The incentive for poisoning the world will be undone.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1416-1419). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
“
The first argument proposed that BUMMER users are trapped in addictive behavior-modification apparatuses. This is the metaphor that some of the founders of BUMMER have chosen to frame their regrets, and the pieces fall in place within that framing. It is useful.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1669-1670). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
“
It’s unlikely that there will be a vast wave of people quitting social media all at once; the combination of mass addiction with network-effect lock is formidable. But as more people become aware of the problems, they— you— can speak to the hearts of the tech industry and have an impact. If you drop accounts even for a while, it helps.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1893-1895). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
“
the advertising business model. Advertising would allow search to be free, music to be free, and news to be free. (That didn’t mean that musicians or reporters got a piece of the pie, for the techies considered them replaceable.) Advertising would become the dominant business in the information era. This didn’t feel dystopian at first. The original ads on Google were cute and harmless. But as the internet, the devices, and the algorithms advanced, advertising inevitably morphed into mass behavior modification. This is how BUMMER was born. As often happens with people, we forgot that we made a choice. Now we feel helpless. But the choice remains, and we can remake it.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
One way is to directly monetize services such as search and social media. You’d pay a low monthly fee to use them, but if you contributed a lot—if your posts, videos, or whatever are popular—you could also earn some money. A large number of people, instead of the tiny number of token stars in the present system, would earn money.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
One way is to directly monetize services such as search and social media. You’d pay a low monthly fee to use them, but if you contributed a lot—if your posts, videos, or whatever are popular—you could also earn some money. A large number of people, instead of the tiny number of token stars in the present system, would earn money. (I acknowledge, of course, that there would have to be a way of making services available to those who couldn’t afford to pay even a small fee.)
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
It might sound undesirable to someday have to pay for things that are currently free, but remember, you’d also be able to make money from those things. And paying for stuff sometimes really does make the world better for everyone. Techies who advocated a free/open future used to argue that paying for movies or TV was a terrible thing, and that the culture of the future would be made of volunteerism, with the digital distribution funded by advertising, of course. This was practically a religious belief in Silicon Valley when the big BUMMER companies were founded. It was sacrilege to challenge it. But then companies like Netflix and HBO convinced people to pay a monthly fee, and the result is what is often called “peak TV.” Why couldn’t there also be an era of paid “peak social media” and “peak search”? 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. BUMMER only supports stars.
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”
Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
When social media companies are paid directly by users instead of by hidden third parties, then they will serve those users. It’s so simple. Someone will be able to pay to see poisonous propaganda, but they won’t be able to pay to have that poison directed at someone else. The incentive for poisoning the world will be undone. I won’t have an account on Facebook, Google, or Twitter until I can pay for it—and I unambiguously own and set the price for using my data, and it’s easy and normal to earn money if my data is valuable.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
Some have compared social media to the tobacco industry,5 but I will not. 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.6 Smart people simply waited to buy paint until there was a safe version on sale. Similarly, smart people should delete their accounts until nontoxic varieties are available.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
“
Prohibitions generally don’t work. When the United States attempted to outlaw alcohol in the early twentieth century, the result was a rise of organized crime.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle486-487). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
“
BUMMER pioneers like Google and Facebook have avidly chased bad actors, fakers, and unsanctioned manipulators, and the result has been the rise of technically accomplished, underground cyber mafias, sometimes working for unfriendly states.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle490-492). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
“
Well-intentioned activists demand that corporations govern behavior more and more. “Please tell us what we can say, oh rich young programmers of Silicon Valley! Discipline us!”
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle495-496). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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Addicts become anxious, strangely focused on portentous events that aren’t visible to others.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle542-543). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
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A gambler is addicted not to winning, exactly, but to the process in which losing is more likely. A junkie is addicted not just to the high, but to the vertiginous difference between the lows and the highs.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle550-551). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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There are situations that call for the switch to be set to Pack. Military units are the canonical example. Sometimes people must lose themselves to a hierarchical order because that’s the only way to survive. But a primary goal of civilization should be to make those times as rare as possible.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle661-663). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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The notion that truth has recently become dead is one of the most familiar tropes of our times.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle726). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
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Our peer groups influence us profoundly when we’re young, but that remains true throughout life. If your extended peer group contains a lot of fake people, calculated to manipulate you, you are likely to be influenced without even realizing it.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle756-757). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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From the point of view of the algorithms, you are no longer a name, but a number: the number of followers, likes, clicks, or other measures of how much you contributed to the BUMMER machine, moment to moment.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle879-881). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
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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, anymore.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle993-994). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
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Another way to see the problem is to think about public spaces. If you share a space with people who aren’t looking at their smartphones, you are all in that space together. You have a common base of experience. It can be an amazing feeling, and it’s a big reason why people go to clubs, sports events, and houses of worship.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1000-1003). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
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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.
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Lanier, Jaron
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I remember when the internet was supposed to bring about a transparent society. The reverse has happened.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1076). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
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You might spend less time with your family in proportion to the cuteness of the presentation of your family life you put out there on social media.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle1123-1124). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
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Lanier, Jaron
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It’s random that BUMMER favored the Republicans over the Democrats in U.S. politics, but it isn’t random that BUMMER favored the most irritable, authoritarian, paranoid, and tribal Republicans.14 All those qualities are equally available on the left. If a U.S. version of Hugo Chavez had come along, he could have been president. Maybe it will happen in the future. Yuck. As a lefty, I don’t think a BUMMER-style lefty leader would be any better than Trump. Debasement is debasement, whatever direction it comes from.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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It’s as if Facebook is saying, “Pay us or you don’t exist.” They’re becoming the existential mafia.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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A lot of potential Hillary voters were infused with a not-great feeling about Hillary, or about voting at all. Were you one of them? If so, please think back. Were you seeing any information customized for you before the election? Did you use Twitter or Facebook? Did you do a lot of online searches? You were had. You were tricked. Your best intentions were turned against you.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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You cannot delete this, whether, with due or undue weight. It is social media, not the Wikipedia.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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Fake people are a cultural denial-of-service attack.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)
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People are clustered into paranoia peer groups because then they can be more easily and predictably swayed.
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Jaron Lanier (Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now)