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APPLICABLE TO ALL SOCIAL STRATA WHEN TOLD TO HOPE, ACT INFORMATION HEREIN IS TIMELESS WHEN TOLD TO ACT, ANALYZE A COLLECTION OF WRITINGS FOR CRITICAL ANALYSIS Ephrat Livni As People Loose Their Shit BUMMERo you ever scroll through your social media feeds and feel gross? If so, you’re not alone. It’s D a common response. And yet we go back, day after day, over and over and over, endlessly scrolling, like addicts hooked on a drug that we once loved but now kind of hate and cannot or will not even try to escape. Technologist and philosopher Jaron Lanier, a virtual reality pioneer and early internet evangelist who isn’t on Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, contends that you should just quit social media. Go cold turkey. In his book, USA Suddenly Realizes... Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier argues that engaging on the internet makes us feel bad because systems are designed to manipulate us by measuring our interests, anticipating our desires, modifying our behavior, and creating opportunities for advertisers. He’s developed a simple acronym to sum up the sinister purpose of tech companies that brought us the platforms we’re hooked on and their effect on us—BUMMER. It stands for Behaviors of Users Modified and Made into Empires for Rent. According to Lanier, social media platforms need us to keep coming back, so they’ve designed tools that accumulate data about us, then give us more of what moves us most to create wealth for the platforms. BUMMER platforms are more than just a bummer from Lanier’s perspective—they’re eroding health and happiness and political and social discourse, curbing our free will, and turning us into, well, “assholes.” Theoretically, Lanier believes, we could have better, healthier social media that wouldn’t have this deleterious effect on individuals and societies. However, since the business models of the platforms rely on a negative feedback loop, the result of engagement with the platforms we do use now is ever-worsening disease, an anxious, angry, and divided culture. Or, as Claire Lehmann, founding editor of Quillette magazine puts it in an Oct. 17 tweet (of course—where else might she express herself?), “Social media satiates our appetite for moral disgust and tribal conflict.” Since fear, loathing, anxiety, and outrage tend to drive more engagement, the platforms serve us more and more of this negativity. In turn, in an effort to generate as much engagement with our own posts and accounts as possible, we mimic the platform model on an individual level, creating— as Mark O’Connell puts it in a story about “the deliberate awfulness of social media” in the New Yorker—a “toxic miasma of bad vibes.” In an interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lanier explains that you can spot a BUMMER platform by examining whether Russian intelligence warfare units like the Internet Research Agency targeted it and used it to manipulate people. The list includes Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram. “There are a few others out there, but those are the primary ones,” Lanier argues. “Snapchat is… sort of an edge case; they’re better, but they still have some problems. Another example is LinkedIn, which has some addictive techniques but doesn’t seem to bring out the worst in people.” The technologist contends that we’re mesmerized by social media because it’s been designed for precisely that. “We’re being hypnotized little by little by technicians (Excerpt) we can’t see, for purposes we don’t know,” Lanier writes in his book. “We’re all lab animals now.” To disengage from the experiment is simple enough, he Alfred McCoy says. All you have to do is stop using BUMMER platforms. A Ghost From 2010 That’s the best way to undermine the systems designed to This article is an excerpt from “How America Will Collapse underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key instruments manipulate us and, he argues, the only way to force tech by 2025” written in 2010 for global dominion. At the moment then, no single companies to change the platforms’ fundamentally flawed superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the business model. ....Economic Decline: Scenario 2020 U.S. Lanier concedes, however, that it’s not easy to break After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in the addiction, in part because many of us feel we need to be distant lands, in 2020, as long expected, the U.S. dollar finally In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of engaged with social media. It can seem as if there is no other loses its special status as the world's reserve currency. transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and way to be in the world now. And he says he wants people to Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling an international financial elite could conceivably forge a succeed, not to self-sabotage by deleting their social media deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would accounts. But he points out that he manages to have a Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at successful career as a public intellectual without being on budget. Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington all. While denationalized corporations and multinational elites any platforms and can’t believe he’s the sole exception. slowly pulls U.S. forces back from hundreds of overseas bases would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban Indeed, novelist Zadie Smith avoids social media to to a continental perimeter. By now, however, it is far too late. enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural protect her writing from being influenced by the negative wastelands. feedback loop Lanier discusses. And writer Jonathan Franzen Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, is also a critic of technology generally and Facebook and China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and In "Planet of Slums," Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision Twitter in particular. He calls Twitter “unspeakably regional, provocatively challenge U.S. dominion over the of such a world from the bottom up. He argues that the billion irritating” and says it stands for everything he opposes. Like oceans, space, and cyberspace. Meanwhile, amid soaring people already packed into fetid favela-style slums worldwide Lanier, Smith and Franzen are doing just fine not being on prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in (rising to two billion by 2030) will make "the 'feral, failed these platforms. But also like him, they made their names real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and cities' of the Third World… the distinctive battlespace of the before social media was a thing and before every writer was divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. twenty-first century." As darkness settles over some future told they must promote themselves online to be read. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far- super-favela, "the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies Still, Lanier contends that it’s time for change and that right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, of repression" as "hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk we overestimate the importance of these tools, in part demanding respect for American authority and threatening enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts… because they’ve been designed to make us feel they matter. military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and “I think there might be a degree to which people are afraid to no attention as the American Century ends in silence. eloquent explosions." that if they did anything different, their life would be completely destroyed, but they may not be correct. It might A New World Order? At a midpoint on the spectrum of possible futures, a new global actually be fine,” he tells Harper Simon in the Los Angeles Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios oligopoly might emerge between 2020 and 2040, with rising Review of Books. suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more powers China, Russia, India, and Brazil collaborating with And Simon is convinced—he quit Twitter and striking decline in American global power by 2025 than receding powers like Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United Instagram before reading Lanier’s book and planned to make anything Washington now seems to be envisioning. States to enforce an ad hoc global dominion, akin to the loose his interview with the tech guru and philosopher his final alliance of European empires that ruled half of humanity circa post on Facebook. Still, he told Lanier it takes “real bravery” As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take 1900. to delete accounts. cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 If you do go boldly where Lanier and Simon have gone or more overseas military bases will simply become Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return and abandon the tech platforms everyone else seems to be on, unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still- to something reminiscent of the international system that rest assured, it might not have to be for long. Lanier says he unwilling Washington. With both the U.S. and China in a race operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo- is currently working on creating healthier social media to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two Westphalian world order, with its endless vistas of micro- Jaron Lanier Saysplatforms Delete Your Social Media Accounts For GOOD, that And He Wrote won’t A Book About It..

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