
Delete Your Account Now: A Conversation with Jaron Lanier - prostoalex
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/delete-your-account-a-conversation-with-jaron-lanier/
======
jolesf
"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" \- From another article about Jaron Lanier

~~~
osrec
Sounds like a reasonable description of pretty much every communication/social
platform since the 90s.

~~~
OedipusRex
So what's the alternative? Even if we roll our own software we still utilize
ISP lines.

~~~
znpy
You can use a self-hosted federated solution.

Examples are:

\- e-mail (effectively a federated system, before it was cool)

\- Mastodon

\- a social network instance like Diaspora

\- Matrix (matrix.org - "An open network for secure, decentralized
communication.")

\- XMPP / Jabber

\- IRC (not federated, but self-hostable)

\----

I've been on Mastodon for the last 3-4 months and it's been awesome so far.
It's basically Twitter without all the drama and toxicity. Also, while I don't
run my own instance, I've seen many people running one.

~~~
ChristianBundy
If you like Mastodon, I'd recommend checking out SSB. It's completely peer-to-
peer, you own your own data, you host the data of people you follow, and it's
one of the best communities I've ever been a part of. Plus we have other sub-
protocols like secret sharding for social password management and chess and
other fun stuff. Super neat, I can't recommend it enough.

[https://scuttlebutt.nz](https://scuttlebutt.nz)

------
decasia
The thing I keep thinking is that I want to have social software built on a
co-operative model (like a food co-op): you all pay some nominal membership
fee (could you fund servers and developers on $5/year/user?), and the software
would then be developed to fit the agreed-upon needs of the community, without
dark patterns or behavior modification projects, openly, and with some kind of
community governance (which need not be exclusive of technical leadership).

Obviously this would probably never get the global reach of a no-fee Facebook,
but I would use something like this in a second, many of my friends would too,
and I sometimes daydream about what I would need to do to get it off the
ground.

~~~
JepZ
Well, while I dream the same dream, it feels awkward asking my family and
friends to pay 5€ per year so that we can share the cost of running our XMPP-
Server. Currently, I pay all the bills and manage the server myself (so no
cost/effort for them), and they still keep using WhatsApp with most of their
contacts.

I don't know what the root of that evil is, but there are undoubtedly multiple
factors involved. First of all, most people have WhatsApp already.

Secondly, it is effortless to use. With federated systems, you always have to
choose a provider. Once you have overcome that hurdle, the privacy-sensitive
people like us do not want to share their address book with the server so
finding your people is a manual setup for everyone (another hurdle).

Last but not least, the client landscape of XMPP is still far from perfect. If
you want to use end-to-end encryption (e.g., OMEMO) there are finally some
clients which work with each other (Android: Conversations, iOS: ChatSecure,
Desktop: Gajim), but configuring all that stuff (Server + Clients), is not as
easy as pushing a button. Other features like video calls are still very
fragmented and rarely work if different clients are involved.

I think it would take ten dedicated developers about a year to fix all those
problems (if they would agree on common goals and focus on those) and even
after that, we would still have to sell the product.

~~~
athenot
This is all summed up in one word: friction.

What the big platforms have done is eliminate friction at all the critical
parts, to make it easy for users to onboard, easy to share, easy to grow
within the platform, and of course hard to leave.

I've been thinking about a low cost but not free platform too. If it ever
happens, it will have to be _AT LEAST_ as frictionless and enticing as the
existing platforms. The table stakes are very high. Since cost in of itself is
a source of friction, that means the rest of the platform needs to be even
MORE frictionless.

~~~
sizzle
I'm curious, can anyone estimate the developer hours it would take to clone
WhatsApp's UX, features and functionality? Would it be doable since it's
already developed and they solved the hard problems for syncing messages
across timezones and it may be feasible to follow their tech stack as a
blueprint/starting point?

Facebook and Instagram had no trouble stealing the concept of 'stories' from
Snapchat and Facebook also copied their augmented face masks.

Did WhatsApp use a lot of open source stuff under the covers that we could
leverage in building our own secure person to person/ group chat platform?

~~~
athenot
WhatsApp's popularity originally came from how it ran on many WAP phone
systems, not just iOS and Android but also all the feature phones. What they
did looked crazy from the outside but they effectively re-implemented SMS at a
lower cost, for nearly all phones. That was not a trivial amount of effort,
but it produced a lower financial friction than competition.

A disrupter would have to have even less friction but would be competing
against a product that already has a significant network effect and a very
generous backing by Facebook. I'm speculating that FB will eventually nudge
WhatsApp users to Messenger, or find a way to gradually merge the services to
the point where they are identical, especially w.r.t. advertisement.

In that respect, it was brilliant of FB to acquire WhatsApp: not just for the
users, but to make it hard for any newcommer to disrupt things (hard to
compete againsts free and frictionless).

------
xg15
A good moment to mention again that you cannot actually delete your Hacker
News account.

~~~
rcMgD2BwE72F
Hacker New is certainly not GDPR compliant.

I've been asking admins to delete an old account that has identifiable
information (which I posted while I was a minor) and which is embarrassing.

They did not care and the info is still public.

~~~
raydev
Were you not able to request to delete individual comments?

------
magwa101
I do feel like I'm a sysadmin for my life. I don't know how non tech people
deal with it. Some of the BUMMER platforms I dislike (unnamed) are ones I rely
on to make money, and they constantly prod you to engage with the platform to
fix their bugs. Examples are they allow phishing attacks but then force you to
reply or your "ranking" score goes down. Super irritating.

I do notice the most engaged communities are the ones that feel they are part
of improving the product. The developers are responsive and there is good
flow. Everyone feels good, except, they're basically the product managers for
a sub par product and they will not be rewarded for their time.

~~~
gambler
_> I don't know how non tech people deal with it._

They silently suffer, develop coping mechanisms and time-intensive
workarounds. Most don't even understand how things could be better. This is
part of the reason so many interfaces are horrible. This isn't even specific
to social media platforms. People adapt to crap. Sounds like this is what
Jaron is talking about.

Design thinking should be taught in schools or as Gen Ed in colleges.

When I worked on user-facing apps my silent motto was "reduce user suffering".
Of course, this isn't the kind of thing your employer usually wants to hear.

~~~
dschadd
Simply curious - where could I go to learn design thinking? Any online courses
you recommend? Free would be nice, but I'm open to paying if it's worth it.

~~~
gambler
Reading Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman is a great start.

There is a whole track on design at Coursera, but I only watched one course
from it, so can't say anything about its quality.

[https://www.coursera.org/specializations/interaction-
design](https://www.coursera.org/specializations/interaction-design)

It seems the term "design thinking" has been hijacked by consultants. What I
mean by it: being aware of how tools/artifacts drives people's
actions/behaviors and changing the former to proactively make people's lives
better. Sounds simple, but in practice today's world is obsessed with needs,
wants and features, not the actual _process of living_ with technology and
other human artifacts.

------
narrator
I saw an absolutely epic debate between Jaron and a Singulatarian. He totally
called them out on being religious in that they were just trying to make a
geek version of the Christian rapture. I agree that the guy is like RMS in
that he is an original thinker who works from first principles and that tends
to give him an understanding that is unique and worth listening to.

BTW, Speaking of RMS and Jaron, is there some requirement that you have to
have an iconic hair style to be a revered tech commentator?

~~~
TeMPOraL
Thinking singularity is geek rapture isn't really original thinking, it's just
regurgitation of a cliché. Now dead blog by Steven Kaas had a nice article,
listing reasons why this comparison is not valid.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20110718031848/http://www.acceler...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110718031848/http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=21)

I won't quote the long list of arguments, just a tangential remark:

"It’s also interesting to think about what would happen if we applied “Rapture
of the Nerds” reasoning more widely. Can we ignore nuclear warfare because
it’s the Armageddon of the Nerds? Can we ignore climate change because it’s
the Tribulation of the Nerds? Can we ignore modern medicine because it’s the
Jesus healing miracle of the Nerds? It’s been very common throughout history
for technology to give us capabilities that were once dreamt of only in
wishful religious ideologies: consider flight or artificial limbs. Why
couldn’t it happen for increased intelligence and all the many things that
would flow from it?"

~~~
aeturnum
I may be misreading this blog post, but it seems like the author believes that
calling the singularity the "geek rapture" is saying the singularity is
unlikely to happen (presumably what the author believes about the the non-geek
rapture). That is...not the critique I believe anyone is making when they call
the singularity the "geek rapture."

I believe the phrase is used to critique the singularity for the way it is
used to hand-wave away a huge set of problems. It's pointing out that, even if
you believe in the singularity, its time horizons are uncertain at best.
Bringing it up as a response to problems that exist in there here and now is
textbook "apocalyptic thinking" and should be called out.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _That is...not the critique I believe anyone is making when they call the
> singularity the "geek rapture."_

I think you read the article correctly, and that this is precisely the
critique being made. The way I seen it used is, "this quacks like religion, so
it is religion, therefore it's all bullshit".

The arguments about the nature of Singularity and possible time frames are
made from applying logical reasoning to extrapolate from observable facts. The
reasoning can, and absolutely should be criticized on the object level. But
just dismissing it because it sounds sorta, kinda similar to some religion
shouldn't be considered valid criticism. It's a thought-terminating cliché.

> _I believe the phrase is used to critique the singularity for the way it is
> used to hand-wave away a huge set of problems._

Such uses of the concept should definitely be shot down. But it's not
something I see popping up frequently among people discussing the concept
seriously.

------
nobody271
Jaron Lanier is an interesting character. He's not just a smelly hippy. He's
pretty smart but I don't buy into him being a "Silicon Valley Philosopher". No
one can predict the future.

Anyways, for a rip roaring good time I highly recommend this debate on
artificial intelligence featuring Jaron
([https://youtu.be/Qqc0t8ghvis](https://youtu.be/Qqc0t8ghvis)). On the
opppsing side is Martine Rothblatt (male turned female, inventor of satellite
radio, found a cure for the previously incurable disease her daughter had!).
The panelists are definitely capable of producing novel ideas.

I view Jaron as going by his feelings more than anything. Like I doubt he has
some statistical evidence for any of his claims. But I can't help but agree
with him on this.

~~~
dbspin
Most of what Lanier has to say isn't predictive - it's description and
prescriptive. In other words he's not guessing at some ghastly future, he's
describing the ways that social networks are manipulating behaviour right now,
and some of the affects that's having. Similarly his analysis of AI is about
reframing whats actually going on as digital sharecropping, rather than laying
out a future course of developing.

Also - should hardly need pointing out, but philosophy has never had a project
to 'predict the future'. That's futurology, which I agree is largely hooey.

~~~
nobody271
I know philosophy isn't about predicting the future but Silicon Valley has a
strong focus on the future. I'm saying I don't think it's possible to be a
"Silicon Valley Philosopher" because the industry changes so fast that you
can't speculate on either thr present (as it will soon change) or the future
(which we can't predict).

I do like the cut of his jib. Like I said he has a few novel ideas which are
always worth listening to.

------
jacquesm
Jaron Lanier is interesting in the same way the RMS is interesting. You don't
have to subscribe to all of their views to get something useful out of reading
their output. RMS is the better prophet.

~~~
nakedrobot2
Maybe he is, but he spreads his message and communicates in the absolute worst
way for anyone to actually listen to him or take him seriously. Which is
really a shame.

~~~
Applejinx
Is he? To me he comes off as the quintessential rich Silicon Valley outsider
nerd. His path has been so singular and so rewarding that he gives the
impression of someone who doesn't need to be the least bit concerned about how
he expresses himself.

From a street hobo, that gets you instantly dismissed, but there's a counter-
intuitive aspect where if you're a Jaron Lanier, it just further underscores
that you're Jaron Lanier and can do as you like. Because he is not trying to
maximize trust in any way, he comes off as plausible even when expressing
stuff that's unusual.

For instance, his reaction to 'how do you define a BUMMER platform?'. He
essentially said, "I know Russian Intelligence made special effort to control
this, this and this platforms, so define it as those!"

I'd not heard about the specific agencies he cited, but I've personally seen
all sorts of sketchiness going down in every platform he listed, and it
clicked. I stuck 'em all in a folder with each other, and they do seem to
belong together.

I can think of people who're purportedly much more trustworthy, that I would
not accept their statements on things like that without investigation. But
I've heard from Jaron before and he's always (a) speaking out about something
with NO concern for how his statements will come across, and (b) citing stuff
that he's deeply familiar with. There are times I've looked into his details
and found them interesting and all he said they were, so it only underscores
the impression of him as the Cassandra truth-teller, privy to important things
that are typically overlooked.

Maybe he consciously adopts that manner for that very purpose. In marketing
it's always best if you can brand yourself using the core truths of yourself:
then you can't get it wrong, or slip up and reveal inconsistency. He may take
pains to seem the raving prophet.

~~~
obscurantist
> _From a street hobo, that gets you instantly dismissed, but there 's a
> counter-intuitive aspect where if you're a Jaron Lanier, it just further
> underscores that you're Jaron Lanier and can do as you like. Because he is
> not trying to maximize trust in any way, he comes off as plausible even when
> expressing stuff that's unusual._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling)

~~~
Applejinx
Absolutely. That's exactly it.

------
crispyambulance
I wish there was still hope for Ted Nelson's concept of Hypertext.

Up until some time in the mid 90's people were thinking of the internet as
something intrinsically decentralized. The idea was that we, as individuals,
would participate in new forms of discourse and creation through the "media"
of hypertext _without_ intermediaries other than (perhaps) agents we would
create for ourselves on an individual basis (like your own personal "max
headroom").

Instead what we got are giant "media" companies acting as middle-men, cattle-
herders or disinterested extractive entities that are pursing goals totally
unrelated to the actual services they provide to the people who use "their
media".

Why do we need colossal-scale datacenters for social media anyway? Could there
be a totally decentralized solution consisting of just the people and their
devices? Or is that just a pipe-dream or sitcom plot like "Pied-piper" on the
Silicon Valley TV show?

~~~
spot
Nelson's concept was more centralized, and that's why it failed. Having no
implementation didn't help.

~~~
crispyambulance
It is only the media itself that is centralized in Nelson's vision. Today it
is the giant middle-men that are "centralized" and call themselves "media".

According to Jaron Lanier, Xanadu (Ted Nelson's concept) was all about "two-
way" connectivity, not in a trivial sense like client/server websites today
but deeply as in a "we're all authors" sense.

    
    
        > "A core technical difference between a Nelsonian network
        > and what we have become familiar with online is that [Nelson's]
        > network links were two-way instead of one-way. In a network
        > with two-way links, each node knows what other nodes are
        > linked to it. ... Two-way linking would preserve context. 
        > It's a small simple change in how online information should
        > be stored that couldn't have vaster implications for
        > culture and the economy." 
    

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson)

~~~
icebraining
The two-way connectivity was between documents (or actually, pieces of media,
regardless of type), not in the "we're all authors" sense (the latter was
common back then, and in fact the early web browser was also an editor and
server).

The Xanadu idea was that if a link was created from A → B, it would be visible
in B as well. They have some cute 3D renderings of XanaduSpace on their
website that makes it clearer:
[http://xanadu.com/XanaduSpace/btf.htm](http://xanadu.com/XanaduSpace/btf.htm)

Lanier further claims this would make Google redundant (since you'd "just see
where most of the links led" \- it's not clear to me how you'd do that without
processing (ie, scraping with a bot) all the documents and their links), and
also Facebook because, apparently, what we were missing is a way to see who is
linking to our content, so we can "meet people who share out interests"
(personally, this is what I see forums or Reddit being used for, whereas
Facebook was primarily about people you knew personally).

------
lazyjones
I would be interested in his opinion about slapping the user in the face with
greyed-out content and a subscription box on top when he tries to follow a
link to read this interview. Isn't this a great example for how the digital
world doesn't let us do what we intend to and doesn't deliver on its promises?

~~~
tsunamifury
Jaron supports premium payment for articles. I don’t know why so many hacker
news readers both are illogically irate about paywalls and also irate about
data collection. The irony is almost overwhelming.

~~~
malvosenior
> _I don’t know why so many hacker news readers both are illogically irate
> about paywalls and also irate about data collection. The irony is almost
> overwhelming._

Because they're not the same HN users? I don't care at all about data
collection but I abhor terrible UI such the modal ad in the original post.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Because they're not the same HN users?

This; people keep confusing conflicting vocal minorities with a minority with
shared but incoherent preferences.

------
fierarul
I guess one could write a book about anything, but wouldn't this message read
better on a flyer or short article?

Is deleting a social media account such a brave move that people have to
really ponder it, read a book, maybe talk with close family and friends before
making a decision?

The 1st Facebook account removal I saw was something sudden: this girl had a
really bad experience and the next day all her stuff was gone.

~~~
izzydata
In a sense, writing a whole book about your decision to delete some social
media accounts is just as bad as social media. The whole world doesn't need to
know about every mundane detail about your life. You can do things and not
feel inclined to tell everyone about it.

~~~
jpindar
How do you know someone doesn't use social media?

Don't worry, they'll tell you.

~~~
recursive
You're the first person I've told about it during the last 6 months.

------
fredley
> Yeah, actually, one thing that’s really interesting is that Facebook is not
> a normal company, in the sense that its valuation when it went public wasn’t
> based on how much money it made, which is what would normally happen with a
> business. It actually somehow talked the SEC into creating this other
> category, where it would be valued based simply on how much it was used,
> just on user engagement. And I think that was one of the most dreadful
> decisions in the history of financial governance, because, unfortunately, it
> set the pattern for other companies that went public later, like Twitter. So
> it’s almost like a government mandate that, instead of actually making money
> and serving customers, a company will become an addiction and behavior
> modification empire.

I didn't know this, can someone give more information on exactly how/why this
happened?

~~~
atomical
I came here to post that too. It doesn't seem to be true. How can the SEC
override a P/E ratio that is displayed on almost all financial sites?

~~~
deadbunny
It can't, he's talking out his arse.

------
adamconroy
Jaron is very good at articulating his ideas. He is preaching to the choir
with me though. I was somewhat addicted to Twitter, but snapped out of it 7
years ago, and find the idea of using one of those networks tiresome.

------
beat
Funny, the thing that struck me the most was the tag at the end where he's
talking about learning pedal steel guitar. I tried and failed - it's the most
difficult musical instrument I've ever played. It's harder than drums, which
are really really hard to play well.

Pedal steel involves doing a lot of things simultaneously. Chords are
assembled from strings and slide, but there are pedals and knee levers that
change the pitch of individual strings up or down. So you can do something
like play a DGB triad (G major chord), and press a pedal to turn it into EGC
(C major chord), while the strings are still ringing. _No other instrument can
do this_. It can be sort of faked by bending a note against another note on
guitar, but it's pitifully shallow next to pedal steel. But the pedals and
levers, plus the slide, plus right hand picking, plus a volume pedal to
control attack and sustain... wow. It's _so complex_.

------
kgwxd
Can't on HN :/

------
hypertexthero
An excellent discussion — glad to see this here.

I warmly recommend Jaron Lanier’s album of classical music, Instruments of
Change:
[https://open.spotify.com/album/2E4m0Uy7w5873OUGVowJfu](https://open.spotify.com/album/2E4m0Uy7w5873OUGVowJfu)

[http://www.jaronlanier.com/music.html](http://www.jaronlanier.com/music.html)

------
lgleason
There is a new documentary called "The Creepy Line", it's on both Amazon Prime
and Apple I-Tunes that also talks about this. Well worth watching. This is a
big issue today, and makes it far too easy for big tech to have enormous
power, and as we've seen with Google etc. it is not being used for good the
way the marketeers are trying to portray they are.

------
ilovecaching
I am of the belief that we are better off trying to connect everyone in the
world than going back to living in our community bubbles. I also think that
it's too late to change the centralized nature of WWW. That ship sailed two
decades ago. So we just need to live in the reality we have and try to
incrementally make it better.

------
hkai
Another great article which makes a more balanced argument:

[https://quillette.com/2018/04/17/social-media-case-
deactivat...](https://quillette.com/2018/04/17/social-media-case-
deactivation/)

------
simonsaidit
Amazing guy I once saw him have a talk about how to communicate with aliens
that would have no vocal or written language and later that nite he played an
instrument he had invented.

------
azangru
> Well, a pretty good test for whether a platform is BUMMER, is whether the
> Russian intelligence warfare units like the Internet Research Agency decided
> to target it and use it for manipulating people. That’s a really good
> measure. And so, if that’s the way you’re going to classify BUMMER, then the
> list is Facebook, Google including YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and, of course,
> a few other Facebook properties like Instagram. There are a few others out
> there, but those are the primary ones. Snapchat is an interesting one. I
> just spent some time with them and they’re sort of an edge case; they’re
> better, but they still have some problems.

> Another example is LinkedIn, which has some addictive techniques but doesn’t
> seem to bring out the worst in people. So, you know, I don’t think this is
> exactly a universal criticism of the whole idea of social media — in fact,
> I’m sure it isn’t. I’m sure there could be better social media. Basically,
> if Putin was there, maybe you shouldn’t go there. Maybe that’s a good rule
> of thumb. Basically, don’t sleep in the bed where anybody who works for
> Putin has been lately. I think it’s a very good rule for us all to follow.

It never ceases to surprise me how any mention of the Russian spooks in the
context of social media inevitably comes to the same conclusion: you cannot
co-exist with them. Either you fight them (which is the mainstream position)
by demanding that social networks ban them, or you leave the social network.

Weirdly, there doesn't seem to be any middle ground. I do not hear of any
messages directed at users about developing some sort of online personal
hygiene. Maybe take any ads with a grain of salt? Maybe do not trust total
strangers until you get to know their online personality (if you are
interested in their opinion at all)? Maybe limit your social circles? Maybe
exercise more self-control in online debates? There are probably numerous
other suggestions of how to be a more intelligent consumer of media content.
And then Putin won't be such a comical bogeyman of online media he has lately
become.

~~~
bsheir74
Here is why the middle ground wont work. Changing technology is a lot faster
than changing human nature. Propoganda works because it exploits how our mind
works. Sure we can learn to listen to our better angels more often--we need
better media education and critical thinking in schools for sure. But that
takes time, and it's not perfect either. In many cases, the problems are
better served with changing the plarforms or the technology.

------
brian_herman__
Can I start with my hacker news account?

------
devmunchies
I’m not totally convinced this guy has quit his social media accounts, with
his unoriginal opinions on Trump, MeToo, BLM, etc.

I haven’t been on FB, Insta, Twitter in years, or Reddit in months and I don’t
even think about those things anymore.

But I guess he could just hang around people who are still deep into social
media.

~~~
unstuckdev
>> _" I haven’t been on FB, Insta, Twitter in years, or Reddit in months and I
don’t even think about those things anymore."_

The terms used to talk about those things today might have their origins on
social media, but the issues existed before someone coined a term. You might
want to re-evaluate your associations if _no one_ talks about sexual assault
and harassment or the over-policing of black people.

~~~
devmunchies
> You might want to re-evaluate your associations if no one talks about sexual
> assault and harassment or the over-policing of black people.

Why? I’ve never been happier.

------
thelastidiot
This guy sounds like a child. I was surprised about the lack of depth in his
reasoning and explanations.

------
jhabdas
> Google will kill Facebook or vice versa.

That's where I stopped reading. How silly to think either of those two
terrible outcomes would ever come to fruition.

~~~
adamconroy
I don't know, nothing lasts forever, and one might 'die' at the hand of the
other. It could easily happen through acquisition as he says.

~~~
UsernameProxy
What if the merge? _shudder_

~~~
Jaruzel
Well... Facebook is worth ~$15bn and Google is worth ~$740bn. I'm sure Google
could scrounge up 2% of it's overall worth to buy-out Facebook... but then,
Google already know everything about you, so for them, Facebooks data is
worthless.

~~~
jvagner
Your Alphabet/Google market cap is about right, but Facebook's is 442.50B as
of today.

