The True Toxicity of Social Media Revealed – Sam Vaknin

Short version: Why you should delete your social media accounts with Jaron Lanier

Summary:
– The most popular instagram accounts have no content. Teenage girls who eat bananas have 16 million followers!

– Signalling leads to performance anxiety or enhances anxiety. There is no situation where it reduces anxiety. If your last post had 2000 like and your last post had 1000 like then you failed. This creates enormous anxiety.

– 41% of freshmen on socmed (social media) reported extreme anxiety vs. 18% in 1985. Socmed is the only thing that changed.

– Socmed can be studied as an epidemic. Self limitation in epidemiology is where all viruses spread widely and then stop. Black death, AIDS all stop. Viruses stop because they want to propagate. If the viruses killed everyone then at some point they would die too. If socmed is like viruses then we are not coming to a stage of self-limiting. The world will then be divided into 2 groups… users and non-users.

– Socmed has a massive impact on psychology. So there will be a massive difference in psychology.

– Just how the fashion industry was created by homosexual men who had a liking to boys. So the idea female figure was boy like. Till now this is the ideal figure and women make the mistake of following this. Thin, anorexic, boy-like. Men like fuller figured women.

– Now socmed was created by the same kind of men. Only these men were schizoid, socially inept, nerds, asexual or low sexual activity, white. So they created a tool that was designed to cater to schizoid, socially inept, asexual, white males. Then it took off and started catering to population groups which were out of sync with the nature and character of the technology. So it’s was created by and for a specific psychological profile and it’s being used and misused by other psychological profiles which creates dissonance.

– Exposure to screen-time encourages depression, anxiety, suicide. Anxiety among teens increased 20% since 2007. 17% of these teens are with life threatening anxiety. Screen-time decreases happiness, life satisfaction and self-esteem. (All studies have been done).

– 63% of all instagram users are unhappy. It’s not known if unhappy people gravitate to instagram or IG makes them unhappy. Stats from other socmed suggests that IG makes them unhappy.

– Anxiety and depression increased 70% from the young. Teen suicide went up 31%. Leading cause of death among teens up to 24 is suicide.

– Socmed is a conditioning tool. It uses relative positioning and the first one of that is envy. Purveyors and amplifiers of envy. It’s quantified with likes, retweets etc. Then it leverages and weaponises the envy and aggression. Jealousy vs. envy. Jealousy is when you want to be like someone which motivates with positive actions. Pathologically envy is when you regard someone as a source of frustration and that you can be like them so you want to destroy them or make them like you. E.g. forcing people to eat like you. (Paras firing shots at vegans). All socmed encourage aggression via their algorithms. Peer aggression, bullying, gang stalking, mobbing, black humour, brutal honesty. The platforms are designed to condition and encourage repeat compulsive use. And only envy, aggression, hatred and such emotions encourage repeated use.

– All psychological studies show that love doesn’t encourage repeat usage, repeat action, does not foster addiction. So the platforms are designed with pathology in mind. Some of the original designers have come out and confessed this.

– Twitter limited characters. Aggressive speech acts are much shorter than non-aggressive. Think of road-rage vs. love letters. They are fostering aggression. Recommends – Former Facebook President Admits It’s ‘Exploiting A Vulnerability In Human Psychology’

– Your mind begins to change with this toxicity. You start defending the toxicity that you have been sharing. One way to defend is to withdraw from it. Socmed has encouraged more asocial behaviour ever. Aggressive people will find socmed an ideal turf so it’s a self-perpetuating feedback look. It attracts and connects these people known as network effect. Why didn’t socmed choose hierarchy, forums or curated conversations instead of networks.

– Network effects is an epidemic. You spread socmed the way you spread ebola. Self-propagating, self-replicating, brain altering, conditioning and addictive… NETWORKS! So then you have shared psychosis. Things like teenage death cults, school shooters. Network effects can be leveraged for good like wikipedia. It started out as a network and it became toxic in a start. It used to be Newpedia and it was curated. Sam Vaknin was one of the first 100 to create it. It was like a social network but that created slander, hate-speech, all the bad things. But then later Sam sued Jimmy and Jimmy retreated and wikipedia started getting curated. People lost interest then because people want aggression.

– Paras note: If you want to know how powerful hate, anger, negativity are I highly recommend The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into The Forces of History by Howard Bloom. The link includes a summary of the book.

– All the social media platforms know this and still riding the wave.

– The first time in history 2 billion people can be pathologised. Millions will not only stay stuck but they were get so much worse that they can check out of reality and get into virtual reality.

– People have gone crazy because of this. They’ve developed all the symptoms of an addict. Time heals everything but you get stuck in a downward spiral if you’re hidden from reality and only stuck in a toxic environment where you are rewarded for more toxic behaviour.

– The good news is that 20% of the people are checking out of socmed, not using smart phones, so many signs of revolt. So not all 2 billion will be pathologised. Maybe only 1 billion.

– Socmed addicts are like zombies from the movies. You can’t relate with them. People LIVE in these kind of multiplayer games. They try to pretend they are in reality but they live in the computer. Teens prefer to interact with other teens exclusively via socmed. Face to face interaction with them dropped 70% in the last 10 years. Dating dropped by 63%. Sexual encounters dropped by 50%. They’ve moved exclusively through socmed. Documented evidence of them interacting with each other while sitting next to each other and not talking to each other. No wonder the big effect on sex.

– Less than 1/3 consider having a family. More than a third under 24 are homosexuals. Homosexuality reflects a basic disconnect. Historical figures were within a certain range. So the figures tripling with less than 6 years. (Paras note: Even though they think it’s because of socmed, I think it has to do with over population, collective consciousness, feminisation of men through chemicals and plastics, etc.) It’s much more comfortable with your own gender if you’re not face to face. Socmed enhances like-minded people, only things that agrees with you. So like these bubbles, there is a gender bubble, sports bubble, etc. Homosexuality is autoerotic in a way. You’re making love to your own gender. Socmed does this by closing people in their own groups.

– Identicalness is the tendency to propagate with people who are very much like this. The epitome of this is the selfie. 60% of media is selfies. 10 years after socmed selfie got into the Oxford dictionary in 2015. 6 out of every 10 posts is a selfie so these mutants are interacting with themselves those many times.

– The main sexual activity with men 15 to 45 is masturbation. 51% of all internet users consume porn at least once a day to masturbate. The male side is 90%. (Paras note: Please check this article out if you feel there is a porn problem around you – The Great Porn Experiment and Porn Addiction) So we are investing in our own selves physically, socially, psychologically, emotionally (cathexis). We start by being invested in ourselves then we invest in others or objects. Socmed reverses this process.

– Splitting happens in socmed. Like dislike me. It’s psychologically regressive. In effect socmed is as bad as tobacco or drugs. So if a drug did the same it would be banned by now.

– The most frighting thing is to be ostracised. They would prefer to die than to leave the community. You would rather starve, no have shelter, basic needs, etc as long as you’re not hated or shunned. So socmed forces you to deny your nature and to conform to some kind of ideal to get likes. It’s aggressive, regressive and narcissistic. This is creating dissonance because part of you knows you’re doing something wrong. Your level of anxiety shoots up after posting a selfie. So after doing this a thousand times you become depressed. Teens answered that it makes them feel bad being on socmed. Only 3% said it makes them feel good. They are there because of conditioning. Socmed is conditioning not addictive. Addiction is goal oriented and you have a product at the end, it provides meaning. Conditioning is automated. Push, result, push, result. It’s simple. Socmed is anti-complex.

– People who were born before socmed started like dinosaurs use it as they use telegraphs etc. Socmed era during adolescence would use it for social positioning, connecting, highly specific purposes, dating, information exchange so they are still pretty safe. Digital natives are doomed because they’re born with tablets in their hand. Gratification is instantaneous. Hormones released fast and conditioning is immediate. It shapes their brains and reflects their mentality. Attention span is truncated. Aggression is used for all sorts especially peer control. Families have disintegrated. 40-50 year olds experienced extended family, 20-30 experience the nuclear family, 15-25 experience no family with single mothers (40%) and divorced families (70%).

– Lack of other social dimensions make it difficult to compare discussions. Lack of family and other social units there is no control. They’re used to suicide and death cults, violent porn, self-mutilating online, etc. Simulated people who are in the matrix already. They are born and living inside a simulation already. So to them reality is unreal and virtual reality is real. Starving children in Yemen are pixels and bites.

– Facebook hates intimacy. It’s a social activity. You’re only intimate with one person and who they are connected to. Intimacy is a mini-social network.

– Manufacturing mantras: Planned obsolescence and indispensable. Socmed tries to make itself indispensable and takes intimacy. Social media expires so much faster than other products. You need to keep tweeting. The only manufacturer that has made you their employee. You do everything for it!

– Because it hates intimacy the partner you found online will help you get of socmed by 60% so it finds way to get you both back on. The woman doesn’t want her partner to look at other women when there is so much hotness out there. Love, relationship, community, etc are all threats to socmed. Most interactions on socmed are painful in a way. That is micro-intimacy so real intimacy will feel much more but this is why it is not online or in public. So you’re not really communicating fully online. Socmed has basically exponentially multiplied all the negative communications. So you’re conditioned not to have real intimacy to get your rewards. We are emotionally dying.

– Solutions: Limit usage to 2 hours a day. There are ways to condition yourself out of it. Socmed has to be ambiguous and non-intimate. You need to remember that and know that what you see in the virtual world will not be the same in real life when you get real intimacy. Start getting intimate with people in real life. To divorce from socmed either shut them down or have two personalities, online and real. Start finding things to do things in the real world. (Paras note: I highly suggest getting to know more about Permaculture)

Bonus: How Social Media Is Like a Drug, Tech on Young Brains and The Damage of Devices (Digital Dementia)