How social media erodes happiness
In David Foster Wallace’s short story “Good Old Neon”, from 2001, the narrator cannot shake the feeling that everything he does is fraudulent. He tries meditation and therapy sessions, even speaking in tongues in a church. Unable to cope, he commits suicide. There is a faint echo of Wallace’s “fraudulence paradox” in Jaron Lanier’s latest polemic Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. “I don’t want to be an asshole. Or a fake-nice person”, says Lanier, “I want to be authentically nice.” Lanier balances his career as a public intellectual and fierce internet critic with the credentials of a Silicon Valley guru: he worked for Atari, became a virtual reality pioneer in the 1980s, and is now employed by Microsoft Research. He notes the irony of other insiders queuing up to offer their own “mournful confessions” about the industry, citing the comments of Facebook’s first president Sean Parker: “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains”.