Take the congressional hearings that were held in July with Mark Zuckerberg and other big tech leaders. “What struck me,” Lanier later told me, “was how alone the four CEOs were—no friends or allies anywhere in politics or society. They've creeped everyone out with their opaque form of influence. Even Big Tobacco had friends.”
One of the most depressing theories Lanier proposes in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now concerns the efficacy of social-media-based activism. In the book, he suggests that the very same media used to organize and connect people with a shared viewpoint—this powerful resource for activists looking to foment change—can end up emboldening their opponents. The way it works, according to Lanier, is that the algorithm takes a positive social movement, such as Black Lives Matter, and shows it to a bunch of people who are inclined to be enraged by it, introduces them to one another, and then continues to rile them up for profit, until they're even more fearsome and effective than the movement to which they were reacting.
“Facebook might have won already, which would mean the end of democracy in this century,” Lanier said. “It's possible that we can't quite get out of this system of paranoia and tribalism for profit—it's just too powerful and it'll tear everything apart, leaving us with a world of oligarchs and autocrats who aren't able to deal with real problems like pandemics and climate change and whatnot and that we fall apart, you know, we lose it. That is a real possibility for this century. I'm not saying I think it's what'll happen, but I wouldn't count it out. There's evidence every single day that it's what's happening.”
Every day Google and Facebook and other tech companies become more powerful and sophisticated by analyzing you and your choices—what you click on, how long you pause to watch an ad or a YouTube video—and the stories you write and the songs you record, and they charge advertisers money to access this information, and grow their own companies with it, but they don't pay you for your contribution. They don't even really acknowledge that you are contributing, as if artificial intelligence came from nowhere, instead of from data derived from you and me.
Lanier's been lecturing on one topic or another for decades, and his arguments have gradually become less abstract and more pointed as time has gone on and certain platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, and YouTube, have annexed more and more of our lives. His thoughts on this subject have been influential enough that they may sound familiar to you by now: That anytime you are provided with a service, like Facebook, for free, you are in fact the product being sold. That social media companies are basically giant behavior-modification systems that use algorithms to relentlessly increase “engagement,” largely by evoking bad feelings in the people who use them. That these companies in turn sell the ability to modify your behavior to “advertisers,” who sometimes come in the old form of people who want to persuade you to buy soap but who now just as often come in the form of malevolent actors who want to use their influence over you to, say, depress voter turnout or radicalize white supremacists. That in exchange for likes and retweets and public photos of your kids, you are basically signing up to be a data serf for companies that can make money only by addicting and then manipulating you. That because of all this, and for the good of society, you should do everything in your power to quit.