17 Quotes by Lanier

Using symbols instead of real rewards has become an essential trick in the behavior modification toolbox.

Negative emotions such as fear and anger well up more easily and dwell in us longer than positive ones. It takes longer to build trust than to lose trust. Fight-or-flight responses occur in seconds, while it can take hours to relax.

We need to foster joy, intellectual challenge, individuality, curiosity, and other qualities that don’t fit into a tidy chart.But there’s something about the rigidity of digital technology, the on-and-off nature of the bit, that attracts the behaviorist way of thinking. Reward and punishment are like one and zero.

The term “engagement” is part of the familiar, sanitized language that hides how stupid a machine we have built. We must start using terms like “addiction” and “behavior modification.

So the problem isn’t behavior modification in itself. The problem is relentless, robotic, ultimately meaningless behavior modification in the service of unseen manipulators and uncaring algorithms.

BUMMER platforms have proudly reported on how they’ve experimented with making people sad, changing voter turnout, and reinforcing brand loyalty. Indeed, these are some of the best-known examples of research that were revealed in the formative days of BUMMER.

Prohibitions generally don’t work. When the United States attempted to outlaw alcohol in the early twentieth century, the result was a rise of organized crime.Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle486-487). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.

Remember, with old-fashioned advertising, you could measure whether a product did better after an ad was run, but now companies are measuring whether individuals changed their behaviors, and the feeds for each person are constantly tweaked to get individual behavior to change.