Graham is author of "the Shock Doctrine of the left"
Back in 2011 at the height of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, social media could do no wrong: it was spoken of in reverential terms as the handmaiden of a coming new democracy. Today, its reputation is in tatters. From Mark Zuckerberg being dragged in front of the US Congress to answer about the Cambridge Analytica data-selling scandal and Facebook’s half-million pound fine in the UK, to Twitter failing to act against Nazis gaining popularity on their platform, there is a growing sense that the structure and dynamics of social media are a key contributor to our extremely polarised and chaotic political situation.
People are looking for solutions, and one increasingly popular suggestion is simply to cut away from social media altogether. Jaron Lanier's new book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now is one such example. Aside from moments of implausible pop psychology, on the whole it provides an astute and accessible analysis of what is wrong with social media. He playfully characterises social media as a 'BUMMER': Behaviors of Users Modified, and Made into an Empire for Rent. He argues that social media is little more than a machine of capitalist accumulation, of which we are both its product (access to our data being sold to advertisers) and unpaid workers (producing that data through our online interactions). Where he falls down however is in justifying the theme of the book: that the answer is for us to leave.
