I have been reading the book ‘The Great Wave’1 by Michiko Kakutani which was given to me by a mate who thought I would enjoy it. Kakutani is an American Pulitzer Prize winning literary critic and writer2. The book is subtitled ‘The era of radical disruption and the rise of the outsider’1.
While the first 60 or so pages have been interesting, there have been a few sections on that road which piqued my interest. One of these was a paragraph (on p. 45) quoting Jaron Lanier3, who was a “pioneer in the development of virtual reality and a member of Silicon Valley’s founding generation”1.
In 2018, Lanier published a book entitled “Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now”4. In this, he wrote “What might once have been called advertising must now be understood as continuous behaviour modification on a titanic scale.” He argues that social media “is biased, not to the Left or the Right, but downward,” and that the ease of using negative emotions online “for the purposes of addiction and manipulation” has resulted in a digital ecosystem in which “information warfare units sway elections, hate groups recruit, and nihilists get amazing bang for the buck when they try to bring society down1.
This struck a chord with me as it made me realise what had happened to me with Facebook (or Farcebook as I now call it). As I related three months ago, I was banned from Farcebook permanently after being accused (falsely) of something I don’t know how to do. However, I expect the real reason I was banned was because I posted a few articles about the malevolence of Zionism and the genocide in Gaza5. These included several I had written myself6-10.
When I was still able to use Farcebook, I’d check it out a couple of times a day, and spend perhaps 20 minutes or so each time, scrolling through the stuff and posting links to items I have written here, and the odd one or two from elsewhere. After I was banned, I emailed colleagues and friends to tell them I’d been banned, so that they were aware that if they needed to contact me, they’d have to do it by email.
After my indignance at being falsely accused of something had passed, I found that I did not miss Farcebook in the least. This indicates to me that Lanier may have been correct; that it is an addiction into which I had been manipulated. As a much younger person once said to me: “Facebook feels like the internet’s retirement home”; while another said: “It’s where memes go to retire and arguments go to breed”. The younger generation are wiser in some ways than we give them credit for.
Sources
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145625413-the-great-wave
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michiko_Kakutani
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier
- https://www.dymocks.com.au/ten-arguments-for-deleting-your-social-media-accounts-right-now-by-jaron-lanier-9781529112405#tab-label-description
- https://blotreport.com/2025/07/31/pillocks-or-zionists/
- https://blotreport.com/2023/12/20/symbiotic-atrocities/
- https://blotreport.com/2024/01/23/how-could-they/
- https://blotreport.com/2025/01/12/defending-yourself/
- https://blotreport.com/2025/07/05/get-out-of-gaol-free/
- https://blotreport.com/2025/07/16/bogus-report/
