10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Account

Introduction: How to Be a Cat

Jaron Lanier opens with a question about animals. Think about the difference between a dog and a cat. A dog has been bred and trained over thousands of years to obey. Whistle, and the dog comes running. A cat is different. Cats wandered into human settlements on their own terms, decided the hunting was good, and stayed. They never fully surrendered their independence. You can live with a cat for years, and it will still do exactly what it wants. Nobody has ever successfully made a cat heel.

Lanier wants you to be a cat.

The trouble is that the technology most of us carry in our pockets is designed to turn us into dogs. Not through force, and not through anything as crude as an obvious command, but through a constant, invisible system of rewards and punishments tuned to shape what we do. The phone buzzes. We come running. Lanier is not a technophobe shouting from the sidelines. He is one of the founding figures of virtual reality, a Silicon Valley insider who built some of the early tools of the digital age and still works in the industry. That is exactly what makes his warning land harder. He is describing a machine he helped build, and telling you to walk away from it.

He finished this book in early 2018, just as the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. The manuscript was already at the printer when news spread that a political consulting firm had harvested the data of millions of Facebook users to target them with manipulative messaging. A grassroots movement sprang up under the banner of deleting Facebook. Lanier had a sharp word for the commentators who agreed the situation was outrageous but kept their own accounts open anyway. If you have the freedom to quit and you don't, he argued, you are not standing in solidarity with people who feel trapped. You are reinforcing the very system that traps them.