52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
16. You are not a gadget: a manifesto.
Jaron Lanier is, the dust jacket informs us, “the father of virtual reality technology,” and as such may be held partly responsible for the culture of technological escape we seem to be embracing in the 21st century, when our online personas are growing almost as rich and demanding as our real selves. Which makes it a surprise that Lanier, a committed humanist, argues vehemently against many of the accepted tropes of the Web 2.0 movement in You are not a gadget (subtitled: “A Manifesto”, NY: Knopf, 2010). A disjointed and sometimes digressive manifesto, You are not a gadget boils down to one deeply held warning / conviction: the individual is more valuable than the crowd or the cloud.
Lanier begins by reminding us that technologies hide ideologies, and that in adopting a particular technology we often unknowingly also adopt its worldview. Web 2.0 technologies have been designed with features — anonymity, favoring crowds and open culture — that devalue individual humans. The belief in a Singularity (the point when the software, or the Internet in general, becomes sentient — characteristic of a way of thought Lanier calls “cybernetic totalism”) drives designs that push us to view software as being personably intelligent in the same way that people are intelligent. But software, Lanier argues, is actually more and more conservative the more complex it becomes. Couple this with the tendency for bad designs to get “locked in” as software gets older and more complex, and we face the very real risk of cementing in anti-humanist models of interacting with the Internet that could be deeply harmful over the long run.
“Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups may seem trivial and harmless, but as a whole, this widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication has demeaned interpersonal interaction… The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.” (p. 4, 17)
Lanier returns again and again to the example of MIDI, which in seeking to digitally represent the fluid concept of a ‘note’ succeeded in making it so rigid that certain forms of musical expression were locked out of the future. He cites the ascendancy of clockwork tempos, which are a function of the difficulty of modulating tempo in digital environments. In a broader context, he points out that the current generation hasn’t innovated a new musical style since the early eighties (hip-hop), satisfied instead to endlessly recycle old styles. He blames the wisdom of crowds, which stifles individualism and results in a sort of scavenger culture, endlessly rehashing existing creations. The hive-mind makes no space for the sort of intellectual restriction — scarcity, essentially — that results in new forms. He also cites our extended adolescence, which cedes cultural authority to the still-viable previous generation for a much longer period.
Lanier is an all-over-the-map thinker, and I’ve neglected to address large portions of his concerns in this book, including his thoughts on the implication of digital culture in the current financial crisis, and his opposition to the digital media free-for-all. He’s nostalgic for a time when individual voice and thought provided a basis for creative communication; he laments the Wikipedification of online explanation, which often results in a flat, unmodulated tone. One issue I take with his approach here: though he is a dedicated humanist, yet his chosen field requires him to be a dualist — he believes slightly different things about the nature of the universe depending on which application he’s pursuing. Sometimes he’s comfortable with a materialist model of things; other times he wants to admit to mystery, though he won’t commit to a full expression of that view. In any case, it’s a useful concept: none of us are either/or, we’re most of us usually both/and. He favors materialism but champions mystery. But the flip side of this is that Lanier has it both ways — spiritualizing materialism is like squaring the circle. His late-in-the-game explorations into future humanistic communications seem out of sorts with the tone of the rest of his manifesto.
Still, his clarion call to back up and see the forest instead of the trees, to see the deep conservatism in what we tend to see as a progressive new sphere of interaction, is sorely needed. “People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time… We have repeatedly demonstrated our species’ bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.” (p. 32). I don’t know how to turn the tide of the crowd, but if the right people listen, maybe we can put some much-needed brakes on this headlong hurtle toward the Singularity… before individual expression becomes completely optional.
Thanks so much for your review. I didn’t know what to think of this book before (I haven’t read it yet). Now I might use it for my Science, Technology, and Social Values class.
Would you like a royalty check? (I make about $3.40 an hour presently. I’ve I give you a cut, it’ll amount to about 75 cents.)
e. March 29th. 2010. 6:38 am.