You Have to Invent Yourself: An Interview with Jaron Lanier
Jaron Lanier wants you to take a break from social media. Not forever—but for a significant period of time. He suggests six months. He understands that this will be hard. And he gets that it could be professionally difficult and personally isolating. But he thinks it will be worth the sacrifice, because it will help make the internet better. It might also make you feel better—more free, happier, calmer.
If you’re intrigued by this challenge, I encourage you to pick up his book-length essay: Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Now. You won’t be scolded or labeled a screen addict; instead, you’ll be asked to take a closer look at the business models behind Facebook, Twitter, and Google, which Lanier labels BUMMER, an acronym for “Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into Empires for Rent.” In a recent TED Talk, Lanier explained it this way: “We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it’s financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them.”
Lanier is a Silicon Valley insider, best known for pioneering virtual reality but also for his books, especially You Are Not A Gadget (2010) and Who Owns the Future? (2013). Both argue (in part) for a more thoughtful, economically fair version of the Internet. Ten Arguments is shorter than his previous books, and it’s more urgent, with frequent references to current events. In his acknowledgments, Lanier explains that he wrote it because his 2017 book, Dawn of the New Everything, a memoir about his work with virtual reality, was so overshadowed by the news that he ended up speaking to interviewers about how “social media was playing a role in making the world newly dark and crazy.”
I spoke to Lanier by phone a couple of weeks ago. The interview has been lightly
