Delete your Social Network Accounts Right Now

 

Before downloading Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now  in my kindle, I saw the documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix and though I was profoundly impressed by all the negative repercussions of social media in our lives, I couldn’t get rid of them and during my vacation time I ended up using Facebook an average of two hours a day. The author of this book and star of the previously mentioned documentary, Jaron Lanier himself, is quite a character: sixty years old, heavy-set and with a head full of dreadlocks and a soft mellifluous voice that would be identified as the way gomelos talk if he were Bogotano.

His writing style is also quite particular: straightforward and a bit too superficial for my liking. However, Lanier comes up with a list of ten different reasons why we should delete what he calls our BUMMER accounts right now. By the way, this acronym was created by Lanier for social media platforms that chase to create the kind of condition described by the acronym (Behaviors of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent”). According to Lanier the main objective of his book is to teach us how to be a cat, how to remain autonomous in a world where you are under constant surveillance and constantly prodded by algorithms that try to manipulate you in order to make you consume more and believe whatever the advertisers ( who are their real customers) want you to believe.

The first reason why you should delete your BUMMER accounts is because you are losing your free will. Social media is a highly experimented behavior modifier and you might be losing your freedom to make choices without noticing.

The second argument is that quitting social media is the most finely targeted way to resist the insanity of our times. He takes some time to remind us here that people often get weird and nasty online, and that this bizarre phenomenon surprised everyone in the earliest days of networking, and it has had a profound effect on our world.

In his third argument, Lanier says that he realized he was behaving like an asshole and he no longer wanted to be that kind of person, so he decided to quit social media, and he suggests us to do the same. He takes some time to remind us that since social media took off, assholes are having more of a say in the world.

Argument number four affirms that social media is undermining truth. We no longer know what is true and what is false on BUMMER, and this is proving to be counterproductive for the proper functioning of our society.

 Argument five prays that social media is making what you say meaningless. What Lanier tries to explain here, is that BUMMER replaces the context of your words with their context and changes the kind of content you produce as well as subverts the independence of content creators such as writers.

Argument six affirms that social media is destroying your capacity for empathy.

Argument seven prays that social media is making you unhappy. In order to make you consume more, BUMMERS have to make you feel dissatisfied, sad. I guess that is the reason why people seem to have such exciting adventurous lives on their social media profiles.

In argument eight, Lanier affirms that social media does not want you to have economic dignity. BUMMER economy is a propeller of the gig economy or what the president of Colombia Iván Duque calls “the orange economy”. All these wealthy companies live on an economic model that is only beneficial for themselves and that undermines the work of many professionals who no longer have the stability they used to have as professionals in their field. The model is unsustainable and by deleting our accounts, we might force BUMMERS to change their business model.

In argument nine, Lanier says that social media is making politics impossible, taking over different political causes and subverting the message and transforming it so much that is no longer digestible for our brains.

Finally, for the tenth argument, Lanier elaborates on the spiritual consequences of using social media. The title of this chapter is actually “Social Media Hates your Soul”. Here Lanier elaborates on the spiritual war against the very own existence of humanity and our role in the world, which is often ridiculed and undermined by BUMMERS and their ridiculous claim on the prevalence of AI in the future.

Though, I did not agree with all the arguments elaborated by Jarone Lanier, for a a couple of years now, I have had the impression that there is something rather immoral and frankly wrong about social media. Unfortunately, I have not been able to delete my social media accounts yet, but at least I  have uninstalled the Facebook application from my smartphone.

 

 

The Quiet American review

 

THE QUIET AMERICAN BY GRAHAM GREENE

 

This book is a short novel of 180 pages with an engaging story that will make you reflect upon your own life as well as the lives of the people who were subjected to Colonialism.

The novel goes straight to one of the most important events in the whole book, the death of our quiet American, a serious boyish entrepreneur, and diplomat called Pyle. Thomas Fowler, a middle-aged reporter, is interrogated on suspicion of having played a part in the violent death of his supposed friend. We quickly learn that he had a reason for having acted against the Quiet American, as he ended up losing his beloved Phuong for the younger wealthier fellow.

Then, in a series of flashbacks, we come to understand the intricate relationship between the two men, and their disagreement on the view they had of the Indo-China war. The dangers of Colonialism and the interventionism from the US are feared by Fowler, whereas Pyle sees everything in a very straightforward business-like way, thinking that democracy can be restored by supporting  general Thé,  considered by Fowler a troublemaker who will make the natives suffer and will set up an autocracy.

Though at one point in the story Pyle saved the life of Fowler, we end up realizing that he is involved in a plot to raise a third force and that he is heavily involved in a series of shocking explosions that severed the lives of dozens of people. Fowler is shocked by the civilian casualties which are considered necessary casualties in the quest for restoring democracy by Pyle, and he decides to act against him through a group of Vietnamese that wants to regain control over their country.  

By the end of the novel, we come to know that everything has gone better for Fowler since The Quiet American’s death: he is free to marry Phuong, has been given one more year to stay in Saigon, and everything is going smoothly because nobody seems to keep questioning his involvement in Pyle’s assassination.

The Quiet American is a fantastic story that allows us to think of a historical moment while telling us an engaging story of a defeated middle-aged man who finds a moment of triumph in the convoluted world he takes part in.