How to Fix Social Media and Imagine a Better Future for VR

It all started with a terrible mistake, an idealistic beliefin the potential of a free and open internet. Now, social media powerfullymanipulates consumer behavior using positive and negative feedback and stimuliin a process that technology visionary Jaron Lanier likens tobehaviorism—comparing individuals in thrall to their gadgets and online statusto trained dogs. Instead, he argues, consumers should be more like cats. “Thatsense of integrating modernity with independence is, I think, what every personseeks, and is harder and harder to get at. But cats have it,” Lanier told PBS NewsHour’s Paul Stolman in aninterview that aired May 17.

While dog lovers might reasonably howl at the suggestionthat dogs lack independence, the underlying assertion—that social mediamanipulates people without their knowledge or informed consent—is one thatLanier returns to frequently; it’s also the focus of his latest book, TenArguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. But, he alsosays, it’s possible to fix social media and, critically, to imagine a betterfuture for virtual reality. 

Lanier has spent much of his life thinking and writing abouthowhumans interact with technology. His curiosity led him to tinker withtechnology from early childhood; he was instrumental in creating the firstvirtual reality environments and early simulators. His criticism of socialmedia and the ways people interact with technology today comes from a place ofdeep knowledge as well as some sense of responsibility for errors that he andother technology giants made in the 1990s and early 2000s.

In his April12, 2018 TED talk, Lanier described the idealism of early digital cultureand a “lefty, socialist” conviction that the internet must be a vast publiccommons with all content freely available. Pairing that ideal with the digitalculture’s adoration of technology entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Lanier said, ledto a solution that digital learners and consumers know well: Provide contentfor free, and support it with ads.

As computer algorithms and data collection abilities improved,the customers of the social media platforms—who are advertisers, not users—beganto apply predictivealgorithms and to use the massive amounts of data they had to influenceuser behavior, turning social media platforms into what Lanier calls “behaviormodification empires.” The problem, Lanier said in his TED talk, is that, “onsocial networks, social punishment and social reward function as the punishmentand reward.” People—and companies—respond much more quickly to negativefeedback and stimuli, and it’s much easier to destroy trust than to build it.“Therefore, even well-intentioned players who think all they’re doing isadvertising toothpaste end up advancing the cause of the negative people, thenegative emotions, the cranks, the paranoids, the cynics, the nihilists,”Lanier said. “Those are the ones who get amplified by the system.”

Throughout his writings and interviews, Lanier hints at waysto correct this mistake and “fix” social media. Even more compellingly, hedescribes what has happened with social media as a cautionary tale—andexpresses hope that our experience with social media will enable us to avoidwhat could be a worse mistake—allowing something similar to happen with virtualreality.

A wake-up call?

Lanier’s concern for how social media and other technologieshave affected people and social relationships stems, in part, from a sense of personaldisappointment. “A lot of the rhetoric of Silicon Valley that has the utopianring about creating meaningful communities where everybody’s creative andpeople collaborate and all this stuff—I don’t wanna make too much of my owncontribution, but I was kind of the first author of some of that rhetoric along time ago. So it kind of stings for me to see it misused,” Lanierrecently told Noah Kulwin of New York Magazine’s Select All website.

Citing issues including “election interference and thefomenting of ethnic warfare, and the empowering of neo-Nazis, and thebullying,” Lanier said, “As bad as all of that has been, we might rememberourselves as having been fortunate that it happened when the technology wasreally just little slabs we carried around in our pockets that we could look atand that could talk to us, or little speakers we could talk to. It wasn’t yet awhole simulated reality that we could inhabit.”

Virtual reality “will be so much more intense, and that hasso much more potential for behavior modification, and fooling people, andcontrolling people. So things potentially could get a lot worse,” he said. Buthe added a note of optimism: “Hopefully they’ll get better as a result of ourexperiences during this era.”

One way to fix social media, Lanier said, is to move to amodel where users pay for content, much as television moved into subscriptionand other payment-for-access models—and triggered what media are calling theera of “peak TV.”

“Sometimes when you pay for stuff, things get better,”Lanier said in his TED talk. “We can imagine a hypothetical world of ‘peaksocial media.’ What would that be like? It would mean when you get on, you canget really useful, authoritative medical advice instead of cranks. It couldmean when you want to get factual information, there’s not a bunch of weird,paranoid conspiracy theories. We can imagine this wonderful other possibility.”

<H2>Ethics in digital development

The problems with social media, the rampant capture and useor misuse of personal data, and the potential for harmful uses of virtualreality all point to a need for ethics in the development and use oftechnology. The notions of free, “weightless” information on the internet and abelief that “some sort of dispassionate algorithmic optimization” is betterthan “old-fashioned ideas about ethics” allows people to believe that what theydo in the digital space does not affect other people, Lanier said in an interviewwith Parminder Mudhar for the 2017 Computers, Privacy, and Data Protectionconference. “What we need to try to do is remember that even if it seems asthough we’re having no impact on people—and that might be a government actor oran individual or anybody—we actually do affect each other in the world, and wehave to find a way to acknowledge that.”

Lanier also said that the notion ofconsent is “absolutely impossible” in the digital space, and, “What we need tohave is a more broad and general principle of accountability that is automatic,ever-present, and reliable.” In other words, ethics. “That’s what ethics are.Ethics are standards that one can count on, that one can rely on, that don’trequire an absolute reconsideration of everything from the most basicprinciples at every moment of every day.”

Looking to the future

Lanier remains an optimist; even while describing thedysfunctional state of social media and digital interaction—and negativeconsequences that affect many areas of society—he says that it’s possible tofix social media and avoid making the same mistakes with VR. “I believe it’spossible. I’m certain it’s possible.”

Register now for The eLearning Guild’s Realities360Conference to hear what Jaron Lanier has to say about what it means to behuman at a moment of unprecedented technological possibility. The conference isJune 26-28 in San Jose, California, and features dozens of sessions exploringthe use of augmented reality, virtual reality, and simulations in eLearning, aswell as keynotes by JaronLanier and Rika