From the Vault: Social Media is a B.U.M.M.E.R.

food for thought as we continue through. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Work. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back to a subject that may be familiar to you if you've been listening to the show for a bit. It's the next battle in the war against

the Machines. That's right, you know, as we've already got us in the show, and I think it's obvious to most of our listeners the wonders of interconnectedness that the web have have have given us have also unleashed some less than satisfying realities. You know, we we worry about smartphone addiction and the degree to which the these devices and the many apps they have on them have been

engineered to gain our attention. And then there's been growing attention given to the role social media has in in you know, playing into you know, corporate and state manipulation and endangering democracy, our personal freedom, and our happiness. We've we've recorded a few different notable episodes on these topics. Right, So, I know you and Christian a while back did an episode.

Now this was years ago now, so that the research has come a long way since then, I think, but you did an episode on what the measurable psychological effects of social media were, Uh, and there's still I think this is still a developing field. Like I notice a lot of conflicting findings when I read upon this, Like is social media making us more lonely, more depressed? Whatever? It seems like the answer to that question is it's complicated, right, And and I think we'll discuss a little bit this

later on too. That you know, it also depends on how you're using social media, what your role is, or

using social media is part of your job, etcetera. Yeah, Uh, then we also you and I. Robert did a couple of episodes within the past couple of years called the Great Eyeball Wars that were primarily about the attention economy, about the fact that our our devices, and specifically especially like social media platforms on those devices, but other platforms also are because they make their money by getting you to use them and pay attention through you know, advertiser dollars.

Like you are the product on these platforms. You're not the customer. Uh, and your attention is what is being sold to the advertisers. They're addicting us, and they're addicting us on purpose pretty much right. Like one of the I think the handiest metaphors is that a social media app on your smartphone turns your smartphone into a tiny machine. Yes, but it's but while a Vegas slot machine is is

programmed to steal all of your money. Uh, this slot machine, this tiny slot machine, is programmed to steal all of your time, your time and your attention. Yeah, it wants you using it as much as possible. And the numbers on this are kind of freaky, Like when when you actually measure how much time people spend on their smartphones, especially looking at apps like Facebook or you know, other social media apps, they don't usually like what they find

out when those numbers come in, right. And certainly we do have tools on a lot of our smartphones now to track our screen time and to keep tabs on and even set up little barriers to excessive use. But as far as I know, like most of that stuff is still very voluntary. And then we're not doing this the default settings on a phone. Um or certainly when you get a new phone, you didn't tend to bring over your your sort of legacy settings from the former phone.

So um, you know, I think there's a there's a huge argument to be made that that these companies are not really you know, going in head first in the

battle to reduce your screen time, right. Uh. And then also we did a more recent episode called The Doppelganger Network where we talked about the jumping off point for that was an article that we read by Robert Zapolski, the neuro endo chronologist I think at Stanford and he uh then he made a comparison between the effects of social media use and and digital media more generally, and uh, the psychological conditions like cap craw delusion that caused this

rift between recognition and familiarity in the brain. So it creates a kind of a kind of strange, alienated world where where normally you'd pair these experiences of cognitive recognition, you know, knowing that you recognize something you see, and the feeling of familiarity with it, but that is kind of torn asunder by the dynamics of social media. Yeah, and and so, I I don't think you know, the idea, this argument that, oh, so the social media is potentially dangerous,

that it's that it has you know, ill effects. This is probably not new. I think everyone's heard somebody argue it to some extent, and we've even seen people make fun of the argument, like, for instance, one image that it frequently makes the round is uh is an old, old timey photograph of like a subway car or a train full of individuals, everybody reading a newspaper, everybody's face hidden in a newspaper, and then using this to make fun of the argument that you know, everybody's just plugged

into their phones and they're not connecting with each other, as if to say, well, this was exactly the same thing, but it's not. I think it's it's definitely worth driving home that the type of uh, psychological involvement that's going on with the social media platform on a mobile device is entirely different than what you would find by just sticking your head into a book or a newspaper. A book or a newspaper is not a real time feedback

to advice. Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that that that that kind of like poking fun at this argument does reveal is that you can take the argument too far and be kind of totalizing about it, because it's important to recognize that the reason people use these services are because they do provide something that people want. You know, people through social media are able to keep up with friendships that might have fallen by the wayside otherwise,

you know, maybe long distance friendships. Uh. You know, these these these platforms and these devices do enable all kinds of things in people's lives that are valuable and good righting.

And you can certainly go overboard and kind of a luddyite response to it and say, well, the internet is bad or technology is bad, uh, And I feel like everybody's gonna have varying opinions, Like to one extreme, you may be convinced that social media is uh, you know, you know, it's leaning more and more towards the self

digestion of human civilization. Or you may see nothing wrong with social media, though you may say, look, Robert and Joe, I know I use my Instagram, I use my Facebook, I keep with up with a few friends, uh, you know, a few celebrities or a few bands or what have you. I get the news through it, and that's it. And it doesn't, you know, you know, greatly improve or harm

my psychic experience of reality. Yeah, and if and if that's what you believe, our goal is not to convince you that, no, you don't understand it's actually ruining your life. I mean, you may very well have a perfectly healthy, limited relationship with social media, and you may be one of the people who's getting more out of it than it's getting out of you. But for a lot of people, I think we do want to make the case that that is not what's going on. Right I would say

that most of us. Even if you you can say, you know, honestly that you have a healthy relationship with social media, you can probably not say the same for everyone in your circle. There there there's probably somebody or several people that the display signs of unhealthy usage. So in this episode, you know, we're gonna we're gonna look

at some arguments against social media. Specifically, we're going to be discussing UH an author by the name of Jarren Lanier and his two thousand eighteen book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts right Now. It's a great title. It gets right to the point it does, and and it is a fabulous little book that Joe and I both both read for this episode. It's um it's short, It's something on the order of what hundred and forty

six pages long. It's extremely accessible, Like he did not make this a you know, a high high level computer science intellectual argument. It is written so that I think

pretty much anybody could understand it. It's very accessible, it's very ground level, and I think it makes a pretty compelling case that at least well he his argument is that social media in the business model that exists today is doing more harm than good, and our best way of fighting that harm is to have everybody get off of these platforms, because this will force the company is involved to actually implement changes, right and and so his

His argument is not one against technology, and it's not even necessarily against one one against um, a certain form of social media. It's against a particular business model that powers social media. And that business model, I think is what he ends up calling the bummer business model. It's a business model that is paid for by behavioral modification. Yes, bummer be you in any R, which Linear says stands for behaviors of users modified and made into an empire

for rent. It's clever having an acronym because sticks with you and uh and yeah, it's clever and it's a little bit funny. And and that can be said for the entire book, despite being a fairly serious topic with some potentially serious ramifications for humanity at large and for into the dual um you know, self worth, it is a humorous read at times, and it is it is fun to read, So I can't recommend it highly enough. There's a book you can read on the train and

the plane, on a toilet. Uh, you know it just it makes for a great but important casual read. Yeah, and we we've talked about maybe getting him on the podcast sometime soon, and that would be great to have a conversation with him, But today we just wanted to talk about maybe a couple of the arguments that he brings up in the book and and our thoughts about them. Yeah, we're not gonna attempt to regurgitate the entire book because

the book uh is already already speaks for itself. So we'll start though, by just talking about Jarren Lanier himself. You might be familiar with him already, perhaps you're not. Perhaps you've just read his name and thought it was pronounced Jared Lantier, which is how I've been pronouncing in my mind. That's how I've said it on the show a lot. But anyway, he is a scientist, a musician,

and a writer. He is a major figure in the realm of virtual reality, having founded the VR company VPL Research in the nineteen eighties, and while he didn't coin the term virtual reality, this is generally attributed to French playwright Anton and R. Toad In, he did popularize it. He helped create the first commercial VR products and introduced avatars, multiperson virtual world experiences, and prototypes of major VR applications such as surgical simulation. He was involved in the creation

of the Nintendo Power Glove. Yeah, now you're playing with power which you know, which I have to say, the power glove. I never had one as a kid, but I saw people with them, I knew people who had them, and it it was this this instrument of wonder. I don't think it was all that practical as a gaming device, but I think it inspired a lot of people. And I also love seeing, especially nineteen nineties science fiction where they have reused a power glove as part of like

a cybernetic you know, outfit for somebody. Anyway, he was also involved in the with the creation of the headset, apparently for the film The lawnmower Man. So you're really bringing out the hits here. Yeah, And I think this is probably not the stuff that usually gets highlighted about his career, but it's this, you know, some of the stuff that I think some of our listeners might be familiar with. Exactly. I should point out that he's not credited on lawnmower Man, but he does get a thanks

on the far Superior Sci Fi Work Minority Report. Okay, uh he But more to the point, though he's an author of several books, such as The two thousand six Information is an Alienated Experience you are not a gadget of Manifesto from two thousand ten, who owns the Future from and Dawn of the New Everything from seventeen. I tend to think of him kind of as a technology philosopher, and I really like a lot of his approach because it's got a healthy skepticism about over hyping technology and

what it can do. And at the same time, he's not anti technology. He's clearly somebody who loves digital technology, loves computers. You know, he's worked with them his whole career, and so he doesn't end up saying, through your smartphone in the fire, flush it down the toilet, smash it

with a hammer. It's not an anti technology message. He actually has a very specifically tailored message trying to identify exactly what it is about the social media platforms specifically as they exist today that's causing problems for us and for our society and how could they be changed. Yeah, ultimately he is he's an optimist. Like he's he's presenting an optimistic view of the future, like certainly highlighting problems, but discussing how we can address them, which I love.

I I feel like I've spent too much of my life, um, you know, looking at more pessimistic views of reality and dystopian views of reality, and I've gotten to the point where those just don't serve me anymore. So I far prefer reading an author like uh, like Jerry Lynn here. So the booking question, I have to talk about the cover of it, because the cover is is very simple, you know, just a black and red text on a white background and a silhouette of a cat walking off

the cover of the book. And the cat is a central metaphor in the book, right because, as he points out, you know, as much as we love dogs, I love dogs, you do, you do love dogs, and I love dogs too, just as I don't own one. But as much as we love dogs, we domesticated the dog. The cat arguably domesticated itself. Uh you know, it interacts in our lives more on its terms. You you were at great pains to attempt to train the cat, as anyone who's ever certainly you know, tried to to you know, shoot a

film about cats can attest to um. So, Lanier argues that social media is essentially turning us into well trained dogs, but we should really strive to be cats able to dictate our involvement in the relationship at hand, to scratch the hand that feeds us, if we so wish, to sleep wherever we choose, refuse food, walk on all the furniture. Ultimately, we should we should want to be cats. We don't

want to be social media's dog. Yeah. And also, I mean, while he's advising people to quit social media, he's making an argument and he's not it's not a totalizing argument. I mean he realizes that different people are in different circumstances, uh, that it's it's not a choice that will work for everybody, right, Like, he's very clear on the on the fact that quitting social media is a privilege and not everybody is able

to do it. A lot of people, uh you know, own a business or or or part of their job entails them using social media. I know some people like that, and they're just they're trapped in they're trapped in it, like you just can't walk away from it, or you might be shackled to it. More socially, like, well, if I stop using uh, you know, Facebook, how am I gonna connect connect with my friends who all live in

another city. And I just moved to a place where I don't know anybody, Um, you know, they're all these arguments to be made, and so he's not. He's not, you know, drawing this firm line in the sand and saying, you know, the winners over here, users over there, or

anything of the of the sword. And he's certainly not arguing that, you know, we should we should all go and make a big dramatic to do about quitting social media either because I think I think we all see that occasionally on our feet to oh, that's the most embarrassing thing when you see somebody post a lot about how they're quitting, and then they quit for a week

and then they're back. Yeah. Yeah. And in fact, I actually I shared I shared something about this book on my private social media feed, and immediately like somebody was like calling me out for having posted about quitting social media on social media. But of course I think what's wrong with that? I mean, where are we going to talk about leaving social media but social media to a

certain extent um. And and also well, I mean this episode where we're discussing his arguments again, you know, we're not necessarily saying everybody's got to get off social media. But I do think these are some interesting arguments, very worth considering. Um, we're discussing these on an episode that will be promoted on social media because that is part

of the distribution business model of this podcast exactly. It's like, this is how, you know, one way that we reach listeners, and if we don't do this, it won't reach as many listeners. So I don't know, how do you how do you balance That's like, are you actually doing better if you say, well, let's not post the episode on social media so fewer people will hear it. Yeah, thus is the world? Thus have we made it? But at any rate, Linear also ultimately says like, hey, I'm not

even saying quit social media forever. Um, you know, because ultimately he's hope, he's hopeful that social media can be corrected, that we can come back to a version of social media media that is not harmful to us in so many ways. And then also he's saying, like, you know,

quit for a while and come back. That's the only way you'll you'll have any kind of like insight on what it's doing to you, Like this will help give you the uh, you know, the vantage point by which to to understand the interaction between your life and these bummer systems. All right, well, maybe we should take a quick break and then when we come back we can discuss a couple of the arguments from the book and

our thoughts about them. Than all right, we're back. So again, the book that we're discussing is uh Journalinears ten arguments for deleting your Social media accounts. Right now, you're probably wondering what are those ten arguments. We're not going to regurgitate all ten arguments here. If you want to know what they are, you should pick up a copy of it because without even opening the book, all ten are listed on the back right, which is which is prob

was handy. You know, you can just you can instantly see what you're in for. We're gonna be talking about i think basically four of the arguments, and uh In discussing them a bit here for you, yeah, someone more depth than others. Now, one thing that we should talk about upfront, because it's sort of a foundational argument that feeds into all the others, is this point that, in Lanear's words, due to social media, you are partially losing

your free will. Uh So, one of his core arguments on which many of the others rest is that social media is at heart a mass program of behavior modification for rent. That is how these companies make money. So if your Facebook, the way that you make money is that people pay you to have some kind of influence on users of Facebook, and that influence could be a very traditional, normal style of advertising, the kind of thing that you know that happens everywhere, and most people aren't

bothered by, right, because it's clear what's happening. You're just seeing an ad for a product that somebody thinks you might want, and you know, there's the ad and you might go by it. That's you know, we're not generally very bothered by that. Right. Always reminds me of the moment in Futurama where a fry encounters in the future and advertisement in his dream. That's a little creepier. We find it intrusive. And he says, you know, we didn't

have that in my time. We just had advertisements, you know, all over the place and in the sky and on the billboard. I mean, certainly we do even without social media. We live in an age of you just ubiquitous advertising. Yeah, and you know that is this is one thing that he does sort of attack is the problem that the web arose on an advertising pay for model. Uh. You know, back in the early days of the web, there was this idea that everything needed to be free to access.

You couldn't charge people to get stuff on the web. But then how do you pay for producing that stuff. Somebody's got to make it, you know that they've got to get paid somehow. So what happens, Well, you'd pay for it by showing advertising along with the thing, and the advertisers would pay for what you're seeing. Right And of course, again coming back to podcasting, we're not blind to the fact that that's essentially what you have with this podcast. This podcast is provided to you for free,

but you have to put up with advertisements. Right now, I don't really mind that from an advertiser, from a from a podcast point of view, because when I listen to podcasts and when I make a podcast, I generally think the advertising that's happening there is fairly straightforward. It's pretty clear what's going on. Somebody's pitching you a product. I mean, likewise, on television, of course, television start off with the same model and he discusses this. You know,

it's like, here's the signal. Here's some programming, but here are also some advertisements. But generally speaking, without getting into some of the you know, the trickier forms of television advertising and product integration and so forth, you're you're still dealing with the situation where it's like I'm watching a show. Okay, now I'm watching an ad. Now I'm watching the show again. Right.

But even when even with other things, you know, like uh, sponsored content and stuff like that, I mean, I think there's there's a big difference between what's clear and what's sneaky. I think generally people tend to be okay with advertising when it's clear what's going on. When you know, they're told who's paying for what they're seeing, and it's clear what the person who's paying for what they're seeing wants

them to do. Usually it's like buy my product or become a member of my service or something like that. That that that's the kind of thing that I usually

feel fine about that. Most people tend to feel fine abou out what's going on with social media, According to Tullneier's argument is that there is a much sneakier, more subtle, and perhaps more sinister thing happening which is that our behavior is being modified in ways that are not clear, that are not that are not obvious to us, ways that we're not aware of, and we oftentimes, in fact, most of the time, don't know who's doing it right.

And I think we all have those moments using a product like Facebook where something an advertisement will pop up or predict or perhaps a post even made by a friend will pop up, and you'll stop for a second and wonder, why was that served to me? Why am I seeing this? Yeah? What is what have I done? What sort of interactions on my part or you know, demographic information on my part has led to this being put in my face? But there's a good chance that

it is. It's either serving the like the supply model of Facebook, which is trying to keep you engaged on the platform for as long as possible, so that that's one thing that they just want to keep you on there so they can modify your behavior more, gather more

data about you, show you more ads. Uh, So that's one thing they might be just showing you it to you because their vast collection of data shows that when you see stuff like this, you use Facebook for a longer period of time, or you log back on more often later in the day. So that might be one thing, but the other thing might be that you're seeing that thing because somebody has targeted you for some kind of effect.

They want to generate some kind of effect. And this could be like become my customer kind of effect, or it could be something else. It could be in effect like we want to make people stay home instead of go out and vote today. Now at this point, I

do want to drive home as well. That one thing that Lanier is very clear on is that he is making no argument that there is like a broom at Facebook or Twitter or wherever where like evil operations go on, that there's like a sinister cabal uh in any of these organizations that are sitting down and saying what can we do to destroy the human soul or anything like that. Right,

there's not a m wahahaha committee, right there is. Instead, there is well, well, I mean, there are decisions being made by people about what types of incentives will be algorithmically optimized and so so that is something where it's not like the humans who operate in these companies don't bear responsibility. They do, but they're not they're they're generally

not trying to ruin the human race. They're they're not trying to say, what's the worst thing we can do to our users, right, that would that would just be a simplification of something that is a lot more complicated, and it's taking place not on the scale of even of an individual or individuals, but taking place in the

scale of a corporation. What Linear argues is that bad business incentives which prioritize behavior modification are leading to the creation of algorithms that sort of automatically commit these these behavior your modification schemes, and so behavior modification can be linked to traditions and the behaviorist school of psychology, which flourished in the twentieth century. We've talked on other episodes of the show about like b F. Skinner and behaviorism.

Behaviorism sometimes gets demonized, and they're definitely really good reasons to be historically critical of the behaviorist trend in the history of psychology, but it also wasn't entirely wrong. Like behaviorism, I think could be credited with trying to make psychology a more objective science. But it also you know, a common criticism is that it sort of treats the human

brain like a black box. You know, conditioning goes in, behavior comes out, and whatever happens inside just isn't really important. But one thing that it did show is that if you treat the human brain like this kind of like mystery machine where you just kind of like put conditioning in and keep calibrating until you get the output behavior you want, you can actually change behavior in an extremely effective way like that, like you know, be behavioral conditioning

can be very powerful. And Laniers Linears argument is that modern social media is sort of almost a perfect vehicle for refining behavioral conditioning because it can collect extremely minute data about you, and lots of it because of course it has you know, this connection like it it records everything you do and all the stuff you do on

social media. There's actually a lot of things you do on social media that they can learn a lot about, from your brain states to where you are through location tagging, to what you spend money on you know, your linked accounts, to the words you use reflecting your moods. Like they can, they know a lot about you and about how what they show you affects what you do. Right, you know, I would be loath perhaps to say that they know

us better than we know ourselves. But there, but I feel like they often, these platforms often know us better than we are perhaps prepared to admit to ourselves. Yeah, well, they know things about you that are different from the way you think about yourselves. They know about you from a behavioral conditioning standpoint, where they can track in a really minute way what conditioning goes in and what behavior comes out. We tend not to think of ourselves that way.

We tend to think of ourselves from the inside out. We think about our own mind states. You know, we tell a narrative about our behaviors in which everything is rationalized to make sense. So it's often we feel kind of demeaned when it's suggested that we are vulnerable to behavioral conditioning. It's like, no, no, no, I'm not. You know. It's like how people think advertising doesn't work on them, you know, like, no, I'm not more likely to buy a product because I saw a commercial for it, but

you know you probably are. I mean, we just tend to think we're more mentally independent of the effects of stimuli that we actually are, or we will will criticize and say it doesn't affect us on one platform and then on another will celebrate it without naming any names. One might use a particularly popular music streaming service and you might go, wow, I really love the algorithm on

this thing. It really knows what I'm into it. Yes, me, it keeps giving me musical suggestions that are they're totally on point. Yeah, and you need you have to stop sometimes like, well, I guess that's a good thing, but is it really Yeah. So social media platforms they can gather all this data about you, but also they have extreme psychological power over you. I mean, especially the big one to think about his Facebook just like it's this

almost perfect machine for maximizing potential and behavior modification. It can make you feel and think what it wants with astonishing effectiveness just by showing you certain things that it has figured out that when it shows these things two people like you, you tend to react by behaving a certain way. And then of course it can just keep calibrating those those efforts more finally, and finally, finally with extremely high quality feedback based on the way it tracks

your behavior and all the ways we mentioned earlier. So this this is basic argument, and you can see that companies like Facebook are interested in in always getting tighter and tighter control of the data and feedback about you in these sorts of ways. I was just reading a story the other day, uh, in the m I T. Tech Review about Facebook being involved in funding research on a wearable headband that could supposedly read your thoughts. Now.

I don't think we should get overly alarmed about like this one particular news story, because this kind of technology is probably very crude at this point. You know, it doesn't tell you a lot today. We're not going to go from like zero to black mirror in a year on this particular front, right, But I do think the fact that Facebook is funding this kind of research should tell us something. They want to get deeper, They want

to go further. They want to get closer and closer to your brain to know exactly how you're reacting to things in real time all the time. They want they want sort of like infinitely precise and finally calibrated data about you. And why would they want that. It's because it gives them better control over what you do, and that control can be rented out to sponsors and again,

and those sponsors could be fairly straightforward. They could be somebody trying to get you to buy their brand of shoes, or it could be a government trying to control what you do on a certain day, or or control how you feel about a political movement. Absolutely, and and that certainly they did. The involvement of of of other states or operatives acting on the part of on the behalf of other states has has certainly been in the news a great deal recently. Well, yeah, it's very strange that

like that. I don't know if people would have predicted ten years ago. Maybe they did, and I wasn't aware of it that social media would start to become a major um statecraft and national security concern. Yeah. I mean, well I think we were all probably you know, in the in the same boat. You know, for the most part when social media started up, it just seemed like a thing that was a fun way to connect with a few other people that you knew and maybe meet

some new people. It's cool. Yeah, And it was you know, for the most part, you know, it was just you and friends and potential new friends on there. And your parents weren't on it yet. Major politicians were not on it yet. Um, major governments were seemingly not involved yet. Well, I mean, it's the I don't want to be overly. I don't want to demonize it too much, but I

mean it's kind of the addiction model, right. It's like, you know, your first your first dose of this drug is free, maybe your first free, uh, several doses you get hooked. And then what Linear talks about a big issue going on with these companies is that there is this problem of network effects, right. Network effects are the thing that happens in digital media businesses where people tend

to get locked into a service. And once people are locked into a service, it's very hard for there to be an effective competitor and get people to move over there. People are already on Facebook. If you tried to start a better Facebook today, and people have tried to start like nonprofit facebooks, nobody goes over there, right new. I've joined those before and it lasts like an afternoon. Yeah,

you're you're already. People are on Facebook because that's where their friends are and that's where all that's where everything is happening. It's network effects that keep people locked in once they're already there, and once everybody's there, you can kind of like lock the doors and then start doing whatever you want inside, and you can check out any time you like, right, but you can never leave you alright,

So we're skipping and skipping around a bit. But another argument, basically the fifth argument that Linear makes, is that social media is making what you say meaningless, and the core argument here comes down to context. Now, entering into this argument, I personally thought about the rather simple example that I'm sure many of you are thinking of right now, and an ambiguous text message or email has taken out of context because there are limitations to what we can typically

convey in these you know, limited generally short form communication formats. Uh. You know, an emoji can only do so much to provide context to what you're saying. You ever, notice how if you listen to a friend of yours talk about something, it sounds normal and fine, But if you listen to a snippet of a stranger's conversation, they sound like a complete moron and it's like embarrassing or or at best, like a cryptic alien where you're just like, what what what?

What was that? I'll never know? But you know what I mean? And it's not like strangers happen to be like, there's something wrong with people you don't know as opposed to people you do know is that when you know somebody, you have context based in their personality and your relationship with them. What they're saying makes sense to you because you know them and you know how they generally think

about things and all that. If you were if you didn't know this person, you just happen to over or hear them, is you know, you walk by on the sidewalk and they were saying the same thing that would normally say that would sound normal to you as part of a conversation. You might think like, wow, what that What a freak? I know, people probably think the same

thing about me all the time. Oh, I'm sure people think that about I mean I think about this all the time, Like I'll be out somewhere having a conversation about Highlander to the Quickening, and I'm like, what do I sound like? What kind of what kind of idiot do I sound like? To somebody who doesn't know me?

I mean, I probably maybe I sound that bad to people who do know me, but no, alright, So but anyway, coming back to linear here, he's getting some of this applies to his case, but basically he's saying that you know, with context or the lack of context. You know, it comes down to the lack of individual control over context on social media, and he points to two extreme examples of this online to sort of hu, you know, better

illustrate what's happening elsewhere. So, like the two extreme cases would be when, um, when you have legit ads popping up on say, terrorist recruitment videos on YouTube, which was which was a problem at least early on, is that you would have a legitimate advertiser and ultimately an illegitimate content or an illegitimate user, and those will be matched together in the context it would would be you know,

accidental and terrible. Platforms are juxtaposing content without understanding what that content is, and it very often doesn't reflect well on any of the content, or certainly on some of it. Right. And then the other example he brought up, we're when you have images of say women and girls whose whose images are are sexualized or incorporated into violent media without their consent. Again, that's like a that's that's horrible, and

it is an extreme example. But he argues that these extreme cases are possible because social media in general robs us of control over context. When we express ourselves online. We have no idea how that expression will be presented

specifically to anybody else. How often is there some public controversy about like a tweet where you know, somebody is like somebody's like, hey, I found a tweet by ex celebrity, you know, where they said something that looks really bad, and then that person defends themselves by saying, but you

took it out of context. What you really feel about this, of course, is going to very highly case by case because maybe the context changes the meaning of it, and maybe it doesn't, right, But when it's just presented as a snippet, that individual doesn't have control of the context. Maybe you have control of the context, but but they don't. It's similar when and we certainly see this, uh in our political cycles as well. You know, something that a candidate said or wrote ten years ago is you know,

twenty years ago, what have you? Uh? Is taken out as a snippet and presented often without completely either without context or without like complete context or to what they were talking about. Uh. And you know, and in some cases, I mean, anytime you're quoting somebody, you are you are literally taking them out of context. But like, uh, there are ways that being taken out of context can be pernicious, and then they're I mean, they're totally normal ways to

do it too. But then again, is when when something is taken out of context, is there's kind of implied by that statement that context is usually in place. And it's like saying, who who left this toy on the kitchen floor, Let's put it back where it goes. You don't want to live in a reality where the toys are always on the kitchen floor, in which context is always out of place. And and so that's ultimately what

he's getting out of social media. I'm gonna going to read just a quote from his writings here, quote, we have given up our connection to context. Social media mashes up meaning whatever you say will be contextualized and given meaning by the way algorithms and crowds of fake people who are actually out rhythms match it up with what other people say. And he continues, speaking through social media

isn't really speaking at all. Context is applied to what you say after you say it for someone else's purposes and profit. So essentially we have surrendered context to the bummer platform. He's saying, rendering communication quote petty, shallow and predictable, and as such, only the extreme voices, the worst of us, the loudest, the you know, the most acidic voices in our culture are going to be the ones that rise up.

Oh yeah, I mean this is a whole other point he makes that I guess we're not going into in depth, but I mean he argues that these platforms necessarily promote the worst voices because the worst voices tend to drive engagement, right, and the platforms want to drive engagement. What gets people using the platforms more keeps people glued to Twitter, glued to Facebook. It's like whatever, gin's up the most net

gative emotion, right, and one click word on engagement. One thing that he hammers home a number of times in the book is that when you hear the word engagement used in a social media context, what we're talking about is manipulation. So try to think about that next time. If you're attending a meeting or reading an article, uh sort of like especially a pro social media argument, uh you know about social about engagement, Just uh switch it out for the word manipulation and see how the taste

fits you. But called engagement caught manipulation, whatever you like, it ends up creating this environment where everybody has to play that game in order to be heard, And of course that means it changes the way that say, legitimate journalistic uh um publications have to play the game. You know, you have to lean into even you know, more ridiculous headlines for instance, click bad headlines in order to get that precious and engagement, and that can have an eroding

effect on the institutions of journalism and themselves. Oh absolutely, I mean well that also goes with the just like it is the most uh, the most toxic or most uh whatever voices gin up the most negative emotion tend to be promoted on these platforms because they drive engagement.

The same could be true of topics. So like you might not say that, well, my voice is toxic, but like whatever topics get people the most like upset and worried and aggravated and angry and all that, those topics are going to be favored by algorithms that are trying

to increase engagement. So they know, you know, I think a lot of times, um publishers of online media know that there are certain topics that get people really upset, and those will be the highest performing articles on our videos on social media those days, like think of chemicals as engagement, Like which chemicals are most engaging when you get them on your skin? You know, I instantly think of the ones that are going to sting right, uh And suddenly I can't think of anything but those stingy

places on my skin. Um. So you know again, one of the things that he comes back around to too is that you know what in this context situation is that what you were saying is only valuable or relevant insofar as it serves the platform. And again, you were not the customer on this platform. You are the product. The customers are those uh, those corporations or even state to players that have the money to pay into the bummer system. Yeah. Now I was glad to see that

he thinks podcasts have not been ruined yet. Yes, yes, so there there's a whole section in this uh this argument where he goes under discussed podcasts and uh and he makes in an argument that podcasts are a rare area of our media that are not bummer yet. But he does dream up and describe an absolute nightmare scenario for the future of podcasts that I hope never comes to pass. And while I was reading it. I was

literally breaking out in sweats. Yeah, because think about what we do on the show, you know, stuff to blow your mind. Is full of our personalities and our context, and we have the time and we have the space to present topics and ideas, to present our takes and topics and ideas, and a chance to share our personalities with the listener in a continuous episodic manner. And as a result, you, the listener, you kind of know us.

You you know, when when we get something wrong, you have the context to understand what's going on generally, you know, and what we do on this show is not easily reduced to sound bites. That's true. And this has been a problem before, right, Yeah, you should trust us on this because every now and then, not currently, but it's did with a fair amount of regularity, someone will come

to us and say, we need some sound bites. Yeah, give us fifteen second clips of your show to show what the show is really about, to show what the show. That should be the clip. But no, it's like it's impossible to do. When you try to pull out fifteen seconds of our show, nothing sounds right, I mean, nothing really make sense on its own. That's that short, Yeah, we're not. We're not a Zinger factory here. We're not calculating celebrities or want to be celebrities, and we're not

actively trying to play the SoundBite game. We're not trying to play the bummer game with this show. But to clarify all this and really explain what he's talking about, uh, Lanear devises a way to quote ruined podcasting. Uh. And then he adds, nobody do this. Okay, so somebody's gonna do it. I mean, I yeah, I can second see

it happen. Basically, he describes a sort of podcast aggregator app that serves up snippets from podcasts with ads, of course, and the resulting situation would be that podcasts would then be incentivized to produce the sort of content that lends itself to this format, so fiery, you know, extreme attention grabbing sound bites the kind. Okay, So imagine clips of podcasts that are that are prioritized the same way that like tweets or Facebook posts or YouTube videos are prioritized

by the content recommendation algorithms. So just basically like pulling out the most egregious and like negative emotion conjuring moments of things. Yeah, and the horrible outside of context. Yeah, and the horrible thing is that I can well imagine the marketing on social aggregator. You know, it would be something like, don't have time for all the podcasts in

your life? Well, now you don't have to let telepod pick out the best parts of the shows and topics you love and serve it up to you in an easy to consume dose of wonder that fits into your busy schedule. And I and it sounds kind of convincing, you know, it's like, yeah, I'm busy. I don't have time for a whole bunch of hour long podcasts. There's so many of them. Why not let the algorithm slice out just the choice cuts from all my favorite shows

and give them to me. Friends out there in podcast land. If this happens, boycott I. Do not do this. Do not unless you're already this type of show that is, you know, leaning, because there are shows out there that doling themselves well to uh to this sort of thing, not necessarily by design, but just by sort of the suit that the type of topics are already covering, or

the individuals involved, the personalities involved. You know, and then it's not saying that you know that their villains because of it. But I think there are a lot of great shows and you know, hopefully ours is on that list where yeah, you you you can't cut out these little segments and expect the host organism to survive or to be able to communicate what it's trying to communicate.

It's going to be called pod butcher. And if pod Butcher came to pass, you know, I can tell you that we would not be able to produce the sort of show we produced now that you presumably like if we had to satisfy such an algorithm, and what you like would have even less to do with it, because you would have handed your likes and choices over to Bummer, just as we, uh you know, would have handed over

context itself. And the interesting thing is Linear is not the only person, or the first really to to recognize the death of context in social media. I was looking back at an article from twelve and Forbes from Susan Tardonico, and she wrote, quote, every relevant metrics shows that we are interacting at breakneck speed with frequency through social media, but are we really communicating with our communication context stripped away?

We are now attempting to forge relationships and make decisions based on phrases, abbreviations, snippets, emoticons, which may or may not be accurate representations of the truth. And we can we can actually go back even even further on this notion as well. Um on the show. In the past,

I've discussed the work of futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler. Uh. They wrote an important nineteen seventy book titled Future Shock, which was also made into a uninformative but also kind of more entertaining than informative orson Wells narrated TV show. That's also that's wonderful in its own right. But the book, uh was pretty great, and they discussed the apparent and possible disruptions of the human experience and human society due

to rapid advances and technology. And I would like everybody to consider this quote from Future Shock nineteen seventy again. Quote. Rational behavior in particular depends upon a ceaseless flow of data from the environment. It depends upon the power of the individual to predict, with at least fair success, the outcome of his own actions. To do this, he must be able to predict how the environment will respond to

his acts. Sanity itself thus hinges on man's ability to predict his immediate personal future on the basis of information fed him by the environment and me personally. I would extrapolate this to the digital environment that we've grown increasingly dependent upon. You know, it's like every day, like multiple times a day, over and over again, we're plugging into the digital environment and checking out of our physical environment as being a main determiner of our behavior of year.

But it's not an environment that's chiefly mechanically dominated by things like you know, everyday Newtonian physics that we can predict pretty well. It's more like the main environments that we're participating in are like the giant, you know, super complex slot machine where you you pull the lever and you know, you can pull the lever in a few different kinds of ways and you don't know exactly what's going to come back out at you. So this is

this is the digital context, the digital environment. I want every want to keep that in mind. Is I continue reading this quote from the Tofflers here quote, when the individual is plunged into a fast and irregularly changing situation or a novelty loaded context. However, his predictive of accuracy plummets. He can no longer make the reasonably correct assessments on

which rational behavior is dependent. To compensate for this, to bring his accuracy up to the normal level again, he must scoop up and process far more information than before, and he must do this it extremely high rates of speed. In short, the more rapidly change and novel the environment, the more information the individual needs to process in order to make effective rational decisions. And of course there are

limits to our speed. So anyway that the tofflers, I think, really strike a chord with our current situation in this passage, at least from my standpoint. I mean, sanity itself hinges on our ability to predict our immediate personal future on the basis of information fed to us by the digital environment. And here we are attempting to communicate, act and absorb knowledge in a social media environment that makes it impossible to control the information fed to us, absorb it all properly,

and control the context of our own voices. Yeah, all true, I think, I mean it's it's kind of scary. I mean, to think about the fact that I'm quite sure that nobody. There is nobody at Facebook who fully understands all the decisions made by the you know, the content recommendation algorithm

that creates the Facebook feed, right, I mean there. I mean, maybe they could go maybe they have some way of going through if they could look at an individual one and say, Okay, here are probably some reasons why you were shown this, why you were shown that. But they can't, like, they can't predict it all. You know, you can't generate one of these feeds just uh, you know, with your

own brain. Yeah, I mean, and we're we're ultimately, we're just continuing to understand what and to what extent, you know, the harm is. I was looking around, um at some various uh you know, posts and sort of industry thoughts about about how social media has been linked to struggles

with depression and anxiety. Uh. And there are actually some serious discussions going on within the journalism field where journalists often feel the need to maintain a social media presence or are mandated to and are forced to deal with the resulting actually, I mean actual trauma and PTSD. Oh man, if you're a journalist, especially working in some kinds of fields, you are going to be inundated day in and day out with with hateful messaging from people who don't like

whatever you're you're saying or doing in your career. People telling you to go kill yourself, people telling you that you're a fraud, and you know, and heaven and Heaven forbid your your gender, your gender identity, your your your race,

um or what have you. Uh, you know, happens to to you know, put you in the lines of sights of you know, particular troll groups on social media totally and and I know that there is a kind of common reaction, I think, especially from people who don't deal with this problem themselves, to say, like, you know, it's just people, it's just trolling. Just get over it. You know, it's just trolling. Like you're probably just failing to imagine what it is like to to actually face this kind

of like hate and abuse all the time. You know, we're we're highly social creature. I mean, even if you don't actually fear violence against yourself, which you might have good reason to, depending on you know, who you are and who these people are and what they say. But I mean, if anything, should be clear that the digital world in the physical world are are not separated by an impassable chasm, you know, I mean we online Israel life is reel life, and we see violence stemming from

digital activities. Yeah. But even if you're not in that category, dealing with an onslaught of just hate and abuse all the time, is it does life ruining? Yeah? And and

generally we're not trained to deal with it. So a lot of the discussions going on in journalism are are you know, should we be training people to to cope with the flood of negative commentary and effectively sort out what should be ignored, what requires attention, and what constitutes an actual threat that should be you know, reported to

authorities and to reiterate. Of course, it's not just journalists that deal with this kind of issue, but like journalism is one field where a lot of times people have to be on these platforms, whether they want to be or not, and also by the nature of their work

just naturally just attract a lot of negative attention. Right if if, if someone wants to learn more about this, I should point out that Kyle Bessie wrote a great post just last month at journalism dot co dot uk titled how social media impacts mental health and journalists and of course in thinking about all this, you know, comes back to the fact that like this is the reality we've built for ourselves, you know. I mean it's it's through this complex interface of you know, of corporate interests

and algorithms and and so forth. But still like this is the world we've made for ourselves. We've created, we've created, you know, through our use of technology, these new pitfalls and these new perils to social engagement. All right, we need to take another break, but after this we will be back with more of our discussion. Alright, we're back. So one of Jarren Lanier's arguments from this book ten arguments to what is it? How exactly does it go

for deleting your social media accounts? Right now? Yeah, there it is. Um. One of them is that quote social media hates your soul? Now, Robert, what are we to make of this? So this is this is argument ten. So this is the like, the final, all encompassing argument. So in a sense, it's almost a little bit unfair for me to skip to it because it it hinges upon all the arguments that he's made. But it's not going to spoil the book, it's not. But to give

you a test of it. I'm just gonna read the second paragraph from the first page of this argument quote to review. Your understanding of others has been disrupted because you don't know what they've experienced in their feeds, while the reverse is also true. The empathy others might offer you is challenged because you can't know the context in which you'll be understood. You're probably becoming more of an but you're also probably sadder. Another pair of Bummer disruptions

that are mirror images. Your ability to know the world to know truth has been degraded, while the world's ability to know you has been corrupted. Politics has become unreal and terrifying, while economics has become unreal and unsustainable, two sides of the same coin. That's pretty bleak, and it's hard to imagine just from that paragraph that he is ultimately presenting an optimistic message. Though he is. He is, yeah,

but you know he's he's saying though that. Look, Bummer's behavioral modification is taking place not only at an individual scale, but at a societal scale. In this it's reach is more like a religion, and it's and it concerns not only the way you live your life online but what it means to be a person at all, which again may sound a bit extreme and a bet out there,

but I think he really makes a strong case for this. Uh. First of all, coming back to free will, which we talked about earlier, free will is central to most religions. You're you're hard pressed to find a spiritual model in which humans are mere automatons. But under Bummer, he argues, free will isn't destroyed, but it is assaulted. It's degraded.

You have less of it, and certain parties wind up with more alongside, you know, their wealth and power that they've already accumulated or are accumulating as they take a more and more of your free will, you know. And this, actually, I think does does go along with I don't know. So we've talked before about the coherence of the idea of free will on the show, and I'm sure we're gonna get a lot of kind of like a materialist push back on the idea of free will, saying, hey,

wait a minute, free will is an incoherent concept. I think you could make that argument based on some definitions of free will, but in this sense the sense that he uses it, I think free will is an important thing to consider and is a real concept. Basically, it free will means um the feeling that you have control over your own behavior by understanding the influences on yourself

and thinking about them consciously. And you know, you can never understand all of the influences on yourself, but there are definitely ways in which you can be in a system where you you feel like you understand most of the inputs that are coming in on you and you can process them consciously and your decision making. For is a system like like a kind of behavioral modification system

where you in fact don't know you're being influenced. You don't know who's influencing you, and this is all opaque. You're just suddenly producing behaviors that feel alien and you don't know why you're doing them. Yes. Now, another religion based argumently makes uh in this chapter is that Bummer ultimately wants you to believe it is the Internet and it is the main part of your devices. Uh. But

but it but it ultimately is separated. You know. He says you can have the Internet without social media, and he makes a strong argument for that. You know, that's ultimately I think his point is that you know, you you could have a great Internet just by sort of switching everything from the behavior modification pay for a model to like a subscription model where you know, like you could have something like Facebook, but instead of modifying your behavior to pay for it, you just you just pay

to get access. Right and uh and uh, Lanier argues that, you know, in the same way the Protestants rejected papal indulgence, is you know, you can you can reject the social media but keep the Internet. You can reject the version of your faith that is uh that is, you know, tiresome or offensive or dangerous, and keep the parts that work for you. I mean, I've said that before regarding

just a religion in general. You know, whatever religion you adhere to, uh, I can almost guarantee you there is some version of it, uh that is that is ultimately more accepting and uh, you know, and more liberal in its outlook. Uh you know, whether it's in your immediate area or you have to you know, go out to find it. As another issue, Uh. He also makes the

argument that bummer activates pack the pack setting of her mind. Uh, and in doing so, it quote resurrects old conflicts that had been associated with religion in order to engage people as intensely as possible. So basically, social media riles us up and causes the kind of like pack mentality and tribalism that normally you would have to look to a

religion to do. Yeah what he This is part of an earlier argument in the book, but basically it's part of an argument he makes about how, uh, social media is making us meaner and and worse by by triggering types of thought patterns that are more associated with obsession with hierarchies and and in group out group thinking and that kind of thing. Yeah, and domination mentality, yeah, dominated culture.

And then he he also points out that Bummer ultimately asked you to have faith not in in God or God's or a godess, but in the almighty algorithms that decide what slice of news, political commentary, fake news, parody, conspiracy theory, or just outright hate you see in your feed, and that it's you know, entirely anti ENLiGHT enlightenment in that regard, and that it makes learning subservient to human

power hierarchies. Well, yeah, I mean by allowing these algorithms to control what you see all day you are in practice, whether you know you think about this or not, in practice, you're giving your consent to somebody to shape who you become as a person. And uh, and that that's a lot of power, that's a lot of faith to put in some business. He goes on from here to discuss

another destructive force in human discourse, memes. Um. So this is that this is one of these areas where when I talk about memes, I feel like often just come off like an old person, an old, grumpy person who doesn't understand how the kids talk, you know, complaining about memes. But no, I I am with you there. Even when I see a meme that's funny, and I see him all the time, you know, I'm not. I'm not above memes.

It's like, yeah, some are really funny and I like them, but there's a part of me that always sort of rebels. And I think it has to do with what we were talking about about context earlier. You know, I worry about meme culture degrading the context of original images and text in a way that that just constantly batters down our defenses and batters down our desire to understand things.

And in their original meaning. Yeah, he He writes that memes may at first, you know, when we first engage with them, they might seem to amplify what we're feeling or trying to say. And you know, for instance, somebody posts a bit of h it's news or thought, and you back it up with like, what do you see

in so many Facebook responses? Or I guess on other social media platforms as well, you see like gifts and memes that seem to be sort of an amen brother kind of an argument or or or some other interaction with the content. But but but ultimately, like this, this feeling of amplification is an illusion. You're only reinforcing the notion that virality is truth. Whatever is the most viral is rewarded, and that's a key part of Bummer's design. But just because it's viral does not mean it is

the truth. And uh, which seems like an overstatement of the obvious when I say it like that, But but again, don't think about you know, think about the way we interact with it and the way we use memes. I mean, if you go to any fact checking website, just pick your favorite, I mean, and pull it a fact or whatever and you like, scroll down and you scroll down to see you know, like truth ratings by source, what's

always the number one source of total fabrications. You might think of immediately your least favorite politician, But no, it's not a person. It's viral image, right, Viral image is always the number one source of false facts that are spreading around the internet. Why is that, Well, because viral image is an extremely powerful method for spreading falsehoods. It spreads way easier than somebody going on TV and saying them.

And here goes on from here to you know, also point out that in many of the these bummer companies and in some of the key individuals associated with them, you know, they're also they also put a lot of emphasis on grander ideas of organizing all information, of providing communities with purpose of creating AI. And ultimately, he says, you know, this is a this is a danger to

to personhood. You know that there's a spiritual danger uh, to us in our sense of personhood when we start, you know, putting too much emphasis on these these non human models of of thinking and humanity. Uh. You know which, again, this is getting into kind of heavy, headier territory than most of the book. But I think it's it's an interesting case. You know what is how how are these powerful corporations thinking about what it is to be human?

And then how is that changing the definition at least like the sort of the spiritual definition and the self defining principle of personhood. So again, like this this argument in the book, I it does have I think there is a possibility that you hear this or even you read it and you start, you know, asking yourself, well, is that that really the case? Are we're really thinking about social media like it's a religion? Is it still? Is it? Is it actually uh serving a purpose us

that is akin to religion? And I think I think he makes a strong case. I think that I think it's one of those things where you kind of like you wake up one day and you realize, oh, I have joined the church social media and I've actually I've been attending services for years and I didn't quite realize it.

You know, you know, you tend to think of of a religion as you know, as this as a as a church or a temple, as these images of God's and you don't think of the roles that they play in a culture and how even as you know, for the most part, and you know in many cultures there

is a movement away from these organized religions. You know, there's this there's this possibility that we are we are rebuilding something that operates in much the same way, or maybe in just some of the same worst ways, Yeah, without without some of the same, without providing some of

the best. Because I've you know, as I've discussed in the show before, you know, I think they're I think religion and spirituality, uh that they both have tremendous benefits uh to individuals and as certainly to uh uh to societies and uh you know, you can get that sense of community with a religious organization. You know, they can do a great deal of harm if they are you know, if they have toxic beliefs wound up into their their fabric,

or they they promote uh toxic personality dynamics. Sometimes yes, certainly, but but yeah, we we would. What we don't want to do is certainly to put all the of that aside and then rebuild. Yeah, like like you say, a new digital religion that is based on most of the worst qualities of what came before. Yeah, I mean, I I find most of this book a pretty compelling message. But I do want to emphasize again that it's like um it emphasizes a lot of what's negative about the

current model of social media. But even with these like bummer companies, he doesn't demonize. He's not saying, and we're not saying that like all the people who work at these companies are bad people. We're not even saying that like necessarily all the things done by these companies are all their products are bad. I mean, like you know,

Facebook and Google and all these companies have. They provide real technologies and real products that do you know, great things for people's lives, that make all kinds of things easier. They provide enormous wealth and convenience and stuff like that. So it's not that like everything these companies do is bad. I mean that that's not true by any stretch of

the imagination. It's just that there are certain elements about the business model of especially the social media platforms, and specifically it's the element that its behavior modification for rent that really do need to be reformed. And that's where his recommendation comes in. He says, if you want to

give these companies financial incentive to reform delete your accounts. Right, Yeah, the bummer illness is there in social media, and the only way to get rid of it, to rid the host of that that infection, is to step away from it.

To have to create this financial incentive for those for these corporations to change and and ultimately, yeah, he has this positive view, this optimistic view that it can change that if we were to do this, if we're all to do this, not all at once, but perhaps this gradual awakening, uh to the reality, you know, we could reach the point where social media can exist in a form that is not not demeaning of our personhood, that is not modifying our behavior to the benefit of you know,

you know, unknown corporations or by state or non state players. Yes. There. So there are a ton of other arguments he gets into in the book that we did not have time to address today. Of course, you know, we're not going

to address everything in the book. If we can get Jared Lannier to come on the show sometime, I'd be interested in talking about some of the other ones, uh, especially, but also I am interested in hearing from listeners who who disagree maybe who or you know agree or disagree because one thing I recognize is that I think I have an emotional predispos position to bias in favor of these arguments. Uh, simply because I I feel like in my life I have witnessed a lot of negativity growing

out of social media. I personally, emotionally don't like platforms like Facebook and Twitter and and so you know, I I've got a predisposition that makes this scene, this all seemed good to me. So I'd be interested in hearing, you know, the arguments presented to the contrary that that would go against my biases that say, no, maybe it's

not as bad as he's representing. Right. And likewise, if anyone out there has quit social media, if you have deleted your social media accounts, I'd be interested to hear your take on how that went. You know why, you know, why did you do it? Uh? Did did you accomplish what you hope to accomplish by stepping away? Uh? You know, all this is a fair game for discussion. So again, the title of the book is Ten Arguments for Deleting

Your Social Media Accounts right Now by Jared Lanier. That's l A in I E. R. It's as of this recording, it's currently available in hard back and it's coming out in paperback very soon. Yeah. If it's not out by the time this episode publishes, it will be coming out soon. Yeah. So again, highly recommend this read and would love to hear from listeners who read it as well. In the meantime, If you want to follow what we do, head on

over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. And if you want to support the show, rate and review us wherever you have the power to do so and make sure you have subscribed huge thanks to our excellent audio producer, Maya Cole. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on today's episode to suggest a topic for the future to follow up on any of the prompts we just issued, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeart

Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. The twin fourth Foot, Proper Foo