When Jaron Lanier’s book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now popped up on my Amazon feed, I had to have it. I’ve written extensively about the dangers and problems of social media, and I no longer look at Twitter or Facebook for a host of reasons. I have my site post to them, but I don’t look at the feed. In short, I had already formed my own arguments for deleting my social media accounts, so I figured it would be interesting to read what a Silicon Valley insider thought. And it always helps to backfill one’s already-assumed point of view with arguments in favor of it. Most of us do that anyway.
As it was, Lanier’s book was, for the most part, a disappointment.
The writing style is folksy and conversational, which works fine for the subject matter. And I hadn’t considered some of the arguments Lanier put forth. However, there’s a strong political slant to the book that not only undercuts Lanier’s own arguments, but calls into question his analytical faculties in a way that makes the content questionable.
Lanier is obviously a progressive out of the Silicon Valley mold, which doesn’t disqualify him from writing any sort of book, but he refuses to accept responsibility for the progressive political slant of the social media companies he rails against. He claims, despite all evidence to the contrary, “Social media is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward.” The political right has always been the recipient of the vast majority of account deletions, shadowbanning, and social media deplatforming. The people who run these social media companies not only foster far-left political environments in their respective workplaces, they enforce their bizarre version of ethics on their users through Terms of Service that change wherever the political winds blow. When tweeting “Learn to code” to a left-wing journalist is a bannable offense, but calling a conservative person a Nazi is not, that’s a political issue. That’s bias.
The problem with the book is that Lanier can’t afford to admit that the left is culpable for turning social media into a disgusting sewer, because it would require him to turn the force of his analysis on himself, his cohorts, and the culture he helped shape, and who wants to dive into all that ugliness without a hazmat suit? The right shares some of the blame for the hostile social media culture we’ve developed, but when all the bannings and deplatformings go one way and not the other, it’s obvious that the people in charge enforce the rules selectively, to the detriment of social media in general.
When Lanier calls Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who famously claimed that the world would end in twelve years, an “optimistic young politician,” it’s a questionable claim, no matter how you feel about AOC’s politics. When he spends paragraphs boosting Black Lives Matter and attacking Trump for tweeting, it suggests that he has an axe to grind that goes way past the advice of deleting one’s social media accounts. What’s good for Lanier isn’t, perhaps, what’s good for you, particularly if you don’t share his fringe worldview.
In addition, the redundancy of some of the arguments he makes suggests that the number ten was selected for its aesthetic qualities, not because he had ten solid reasons. There’s quite a bit of argument overlap.
Reading Ten Arguments was very much like trying to eat lunch in a nice restaurant, but the waiter is overly attentive and suffers from horrible body odor. If Lanier’s progressive politics, born of unthinking Silicon Valley progressivism, don’t bother you, then you’ll appreciate the book more than I did.
Ultimately, all you need is one argument for deleting your social media accounts, and you probably know what it is already. Do you need a book to tell you what’s good for you?
My award-winning* Kindle Single 
The clumsy, shrill feminist message running throughout the film is undercut by the plot. A female urologist’s husband tells her that he wants a divorce because he finds her vagina hideous to look at. He even uses the term “beef curtains.” (I don’t know if that’s an exact translation; all I can do is read the subtitles.) Later that day, the understandably unsettled doctor with the unappealing genitals insists that a male patient provide a semen sample by masturbating in front of her. After she gets fired for this piece of questionable professional behavior, she becomes a pioneer in vaginal plastic surgery, and even has her own female parts prettified. Today’s woke feminism would, no doubt, have her shouting her pride in her, ah, “beef curtains” instead of having them adjusted according to sexist male standards of attractiveness.
With Woke Progressivism corroding every American cultural institution, there’s only one place to find the best of the new literary counterculture, and that’s here: the Appalling Stories series.
Howe: My South was never intended to be an accurate depiction of life below the Mason-Dixon line. It’s a pop culture South. A Brit’s interpretation of junk ‘Murricana. I’ve never visited the South – wouldn’t want to visit MY South – in fact, I’ve visited the States for all of a weekend, when I met Stephen King in NYC after winning his On Writing contest. When it comes to location, I’m less interested in specifics, than I am in mood and atmosphere, and the American South has that in spades. To me, the South has a mythic quality that suits my hyperreal style. I can write the most outlandish shit, set it in the South, and it becomes borderline plausible. I recently read a ‘weird news’ headline about a meth-head who fought fifteen cops while masturbating. (Presumably he was resisting arrest one-handed.) Now I just read the headline, so I don’t have all the details – but tell me that doesn’t sound like a Southern crime? And that I shouldn’t write about it? And that you wouldn’t read it? I also love the rhythm of the Southern accent, and the Southerner’s colorful turn of phrase. For some reason – too many movies, I guess – this cracker raconteur is the loudest of the voices I hear when I’m writing. It’s getting to the point where I’m losing my British accent.
