You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
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- ISBN13: 9780307269645
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was made, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.
The current design and function of the web have become so familiar that it is simple to forget that they grew out of programming decisions made decades ago. The web’s first designers made crucial choices (such as building one’s presence anonymous) that have had enormous—and regularly unintended—consequences. What’s more, these designs quickly became “locked in,” a stable part of the web’s very structure.
Lanier discusses the technical and cultural problems that can grow out of poorly considered digital design and warns that our financial markets and sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter are elevating the “wisdom” of mobs and computer algorithms over the intelligence and judgment of individuals.
Lanier also shows:
How 1960s antigovernment paranoia influenced the design of the online world and enabled trolling and trivialization in online discourse
How file sharing is killing the artistic middle class;
How a belief in a technological “rapture” motivates some of the most influential technologists
Why a new humanistic equipment is necessary.
Controversial and fascinating, You Are Not a Gadget is a deeply felt defense of the individual from an leader uniquely qualified to comment on the way equipment interacts with our culture.Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2010: For the most part, Web 2.0–Internet technologies that encourage interactivity, customization, and participation–is hailed as an emerging Golden Age of information sharing and collaborative achievement, the might of democratized wisdom. Jaron Lanier isn’t buying it. In You Are Not a Gadget, the longtime tech guru/visionary/dreadlocked genius (and progenitor of virtual reality) argues the opposite: that unfettered–and anonymous–ability to comment results in cynical mob behavior, the shouting-down of reasoned argument, and the devaluation of individual accomplishment. Lanier traces the roots of today’s Web 2.0 philosophies and architectures (e.g. he posits that Web anonymity is the result of ’60s paranoia), persuasively documents their shortcomings, and provides alternate paths to “locked-in” paradigms. Though its fervently-stated opinions run against the bias of well loved assumptions, You Are Not a Gadget is a manifesto, not a screed; Lanier seeks a useful, respectful dialogue about how we can shape equipment to fit culture’s needs, rather than the way equipment currently shapes us.
A Q&A with Leader Jaron Lanier
Question: As one of the first visionaries in Silicon Valley, you saw the initial promise the internet held. Two decades later, how has the internet transformed our lives for the better?
Jaron Lanier: The answer is different in different parts of the world. In the industrialized world, the rise of the Web has happily demonstrated that vast numbers of people are interested in being expressive to each additional and the world at large. This is something that I and my colleagues used to boldly predict, but we were regularly shouted down, as the mainstream opinion during the age of television’s dominance was that people were mostly passive patrons who could not be expected to prompt themselves. In the developing world, the Internet, along with mobile phones, has had an even more dramatic effect, empowering vast classes of people in new ways by allowing them to coordinate with each additional. That has been a very excellent thing for the most part, though it has also enabled militants and additional terrible actors.
Question: You argue the web isn’t living up to its initial promise. How has the internet transformed our lives for the worse?
Jaron Lanier: The problem is not inherent in the Internet or the Web. Wear only started around the turn of the century with the rise of so-called “Web 2.0″ designs. These designs valued the information content of the web over individuals. It became fashionable to aggregate the expressions of people into dehumanized data. There are so many things incorrect with this that it takes a whole book to summarize them. Here’s just one problem: It screws the middle class. Only the aggregator (like Google, for instance) gets rich, while the actual producers of content get poor. This is why newspapers are dying. It might sound like it is only a problem for creative people, like musicians or writers, but eventually it will be a problem for everyone. When robots can repair roads someday, will people have jobs programming persons robots, or will the human programmers be so aggregated that they essentially work for free, like today’s recording musicians? Web 2.0 is a formula to kill the middle class and undo centuries of social progress.
Question: You say that we’ve devalued intellectual achievement. How?
Jaron Lanier: On one level, the Internet has become anti-intellectual because Web 2.0 collectivism has killed the individual voice. It is increasingly disheartening to write about any topic in depth these days, because people will only read what the first link from a search engine directs them to, and that will typically be the collective expression of the Wikipedia. Or, if the issue is contentious, people will congregate into partisan online bubbles in which their views are reinforced. I don’t reflect a collective voice can be effective for many topics, such as history–and neither can a partisan mob. Collectives have a power to distort history in a way that hurts minority viewpoints and calcifies the art of interpretation. Only the quirkiness of considered individual expression can cut through the nonsense of mob–and that is the reason intellectual activity is vital.
On another level, when a name does try to be expressive in a collective, Web 2.0 context, she must prioritize standing out from the crowd. To do anything else is to be invisible. Therefore, people become artificially caustic, satisfying, or otherwise manipulative.
Web 2.0 adherents might respond to these objections by claiming that I have confused individual expression with intellectual achievement. This is where we find our greatest point of disagreement. I am amazed by the power of the collective to enthrall people to the point of blindness. Collectivists adore a computer operating system called LINUX, for instance, but it is really only one example of a successor of a 1970s equipment called UNIX. If it weren’t produced by a collective, there would be nothing remarkable about it at all.
Meanwhile, the truly remarkable designs that couldn’t have existed 30 years ago, like the iPhone, all come out of “clogged” shops where individuals make something and polish it before it is unrestricted to the public. Collectivists confuse ideology with achievement.
Question: Why has the thought that “the content wants to be free” (and the inexorable embrace of the concept) been such a setback? What dangers do you see this leading to?
Jaron Lanier: The original turn of axiom was “Information wants to be free.” And the problem with that is that it anthropomorphizes information. Information doesn’t deserve to be free. It is an abstract tool; a useful fantasy, a nothing. It is nonexistent until and unless a person experiences it in a useful way. What we have done in the last decade is give information more rights than are agreed to people. If you prompt yourself on the internet, what you say will be hackneyed, mashed up, anonymized, analyzed, and turned into bricks in a name else’s fortress to support an publicity scheme. But, the information, the abstraction, that represents you is protected within that fortress and is absolutely sacrosanct, the new holy of holies. You never see it and are not allowed to touch it. This is exactly the incorrect set of values.
The thought that information is alive in its own right is a metaphysical aver made by people who hope to become immortal by being uploaded into a computer someday. It is part of what should be understood as a new religion. That might sound like an extreme aver, but go visit any computer science lab and you’ll find books about “the Singularity,” which is the supposed future event when the blessed uploading is to take place. A weird cult in the world of equipment has done hurt to culture at large.
Question: In You Are Not a Gadget, you argue that thought that the collective is smarter than the individual is incorrect. Why is this?
Jaron Lanier: There are some cases where a group of people can do a better job of solving certain kinds of problems than individuals. One example is setting a fee in a market. Another example is an election process to choose a politician. All such examples occupy what can be called optimization, where the concerns of many individuals are reconciled. There are additional cases that occupy creativity and imagination. A crowd process generally fails in these cases. The axiom “Design by Committee” is treated as derogatory for excellent reason. That is why a collective of programmers can copy UNIX but cannot invent the iPhone.
In the book, I go into considerably more detail about the differences between the two types of problem solving. Creativity requires periodic, temporary “encapsulation” as opposed to the kind of constant global openness suggested by the slogan “information wants to be free.” Biological cells have walls, academics use temporary secrecy before they publish, and real authors with real voices might want to polish a text before releasing it. In all these cases, encapsulation is what allows for the possibility of hard and feedback that enables a quest for excellence. To be constantly diffused in a global mush is to embrace mundanity.
(Photo © Jonathan Sprague)
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The book forces one to look at information and the equipment around it in a very philosophical way that applies to our current lives. It’s more than an literary exercise in sounding smart…it is smart, perhaps profound in many areas. It’s nice to hear the scam of derivatives mentioned early in the book, but depressing to hear the sad Al Gore agenda of Global Warming paraded around as if it ever had any scientific fact behind it. To mention Global Warming is to prove that pop culture influences this leader above actual research and fact, so take many of the bigoted views as just that, unresearched perhaps intelligent interpretations of reality from a Bone idle Boy perspective. Still worth a read.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
While in a lot of cases Jaron drinks the same cool aid as the cybernetic totalists he skewers, this book is a excellent shot in the arm to the prevailing ethos of Silicon Valley. He makes the assumption that just because IP has supported an artist community it should permanently do so. Sometimes people have to adapt.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This book provoked many personal conflicts for me. For instance there is a bit of the “mashed” about it which is fine. I am open to the “mashed” approach as it too sparks many unforeseen associations. Mr. Lanier has certainly had many experiences in computing and the sciences that I read about for the first time in this book and for this alone I am immensely grateful. I do not even have a position on synthetic biology! If you are interested in such issues as the role of a cultural elite in guiding society there is much to consider here. I kept thinking about the French Revolution and the trend of “The Revolution” to consume its own children. One point is that younger people today seem nearly incredibly flattened in terms of the depth of their expression and I have been wondering about how this might have happened. Thank You Jaron Lanier.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
This book is very philosophical and makes you question all the systems that are embedded in our culture. It makes you question future and past and if we are doing enough in the present.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
He used a lot of huge words.
Honestly though, while I get the point of this book and it was a half way decent read, it felt more like it was written for industry insiders.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5