Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget has been on my reading list for nearly two years, and if nothing else comes of this damn book I’m trying to write, it’ll be satisfying to say that I’ve made my way through any number of important works that for one reason or another, I failed to read up till now.
I met Jaron in the Wired days (that’d be 20 years ago) but I don’t know him well – as with Sherry Turkle and many others, I encountered him through my role as an editor, then followed his career with interest as he veered from fame as a virtual reality pioneer into his current role as chief critic of all things “Web 2.0.” Given my role in that “movement” – I co-founded the Web 2 conferences with Tim O’Reilly in 2004 – it’d be safe to assume that I disagree with most of what Lanier has to say.
I don’t. Not entirely, anyway. In fact, I came away, as I did with Turkle’s work, feeling a strange kinship with Lanier. But more on that in a moment.
In essence, You Are Not A Gadget is a series of arguments, some concise, others a bit shapeless, centering on one theme: Individual human beings are special, and always will be, and digital technology is not a replacement for our humanity. In particular, Lanier is deeply skeptical of any kind of machine-based mechanism that might be seen as replacing or diminishing our specialness, which over the past decade, Lanier sees happening everywhere.
Lanier is most eloquent when he describes, late in the book, what he believes humans to be: the result of a very long, very complicated interaction with reality (sure, irony alert given Lanier’s VR fame, but it makes sense when you read the book):
I believe humans are the result of billions of years of implicit, evolutionary study in the school of hard knocks. The cybernetic structure of a person has been refined by a very large, very long, and very deep encounter with physical reality.
Lanier worries we’re losing that sense of reality. From crowdsourcing and Wikipedia to the Singularity movement, he argues that we’re starting to embrace a technological philosophy that can only lead to loss. Early in the book, he writes:
“…certain specific, popular internet designs of the moment…tend to pull us into life patterns that gradually degrade the ways in which each of us exists as an individual. These unfortunate designs are more oriented toward treating people as relays in a global brain….(this) leads to all sorts of maladies….”
Lanier goes on to specific examples, including the online tracking associated with advertising, the concentration of power in the hands of the “lords of the clouds” such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and even Goldman Sachs, the loss of analog musical notation, the rise of locked in, fragile, and impossibly complicated software programs; and ultimately, the demise of the middle class. It’s a potentially powerful argument, and one I wish Lanier had made more completely. Instead, after reading his book, I feel forewarned, but not quite forearmed.
Lanier singles out many of our shared colleagues – the leaders of the Web 2.0 movement – as hopelessly misguided, labeling them “cynernetic totalists” who believe technology will solve all problems, including that of understanding humanity and consciousness. He worries about the fragmentation of our online identity, and warns that Web 2 services – from blogs to Facebook – lead us to leave little pieces of ourselves everywhere, feeding a larger collective, but resulting in no true value to the individual.
If you read my recent piece On Thneeds and the “Death of Display”, this might sound familiar, but I’m not sure I’d be willing to go as far as Lanier does in claiming all this behavior of ours will end up impoverishing our culture forever. I tend to be an optimist, Lanier, less so. He rues the fact that the web never implemented Ted Nelson’s vision of true hypertext – where the creator is remunerated via linked micro-transactions, for example. I think there were good reasons this system didn’t initially win, but there’s no reason to think it never will.
Lanier, an accomplished musician – though admittedly not a very popular one – is convinced that popular culture has been destroyed by the Internet. He writes:
Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
As an avid music fan, I’m not convinced. But Lanier goes further:
Spirituality is committing suicide. Consciousness is attempting to will itself out of existence…the deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of bits.
Wow! That’s some powerful stuff. But after reading the book, I wasn’t convinced about that, either, though Lanier raises many interesting questions along the way. One of them boils down to the concept of smell – the one sense that we can’t represent digitally. In a section titled “What Makes Something Real Is That It Is Impossible to Represent It To Completion,” Lanier writes:
It’s easy to forget that the very idea of a digital expression involves a trade-off with metaphysical overtones. A physical oil painting cannot convey an image created in another medium; it is impossible to make an oil painting look just like an ink drawing, for instance, or vice versa. But a digital image of sufficient resolution can capture any kind of perceivable image—or at least that’s how you’ll think of it if you believe in bits too much. Of course, it isn’t really so. A digital image of an oil painting is forever a representation, not a real thing. A real painting is a bottomless mystery, like any other real thing. An oil painting changes with time; cracks appear on its face. It has texture, odor, and a sense of presence and history.
This really resonates with me. In particular, the part about the odor. Turns out, odor is a pretty interesting subject. Our sense of smell is inherently physical – actual physical molecules of matter are required to enter our bodies and “mate” with receptors in our nervous system in order for us to experience an odor:
Olfaction, like language, is built up from entries in a catalog, not from infinitely morphable patterns. …the world’s smells can’t be broken down into just a few numbers on a gradient; there is no “smell pixel.”
Lanier suspects – and I find the theory compelling – that olfaction is deeply embedded in what it means to be human. Certainly such a link presents a compelling thought experiment as we transition to a profoundly digital world. I am very interested in what it means for our culture that we are truly “becoming digital,” that we are casting shadows of data in nearly everything we do, and that we are struggling to understand, instrument, and respond socially to this shift. I’m also fascinated by the organizations attempting to leverage that data, from the Internet Big Five to the startups and behind the scenes players (Palantir, IBM, governments, financial institutions, etc) who are profiting from and exploiting this fact.
But I don’t believe we’re in early lockdown mode, destined to digital serfdom. I still very much believe in the human spirit, and am convinced that if any company, government, or leader pushes too hard, we will “sniff them out,” and they will be routed around. Lanier is less complacent: he is warning that if we fail to wake up, we’re in for a very tough few decades, if not worse.
Lanier and I share any number of convictions, regardless. His prescriptions for how to insure we don’t become “gadgets” might well have been the inspiration for my post Put Your Taproot Into the Independent Web, for example (he implores us to create, deeply, and not be lured into expressing ourselves solely in the templates of social networking sites). And he reminds readers that he loves the Internet, and pines, a bit, for the way it used to be, before Web 2 and Facebook (and one must assume, Apple), rebuilt it into forms he now decries.
I pine a bit myself, but remain (perhaps foolishly) optimistic that the best of what we’ve created together will endure, even as we journey onward to discover new ways of valuing what it means to be a person. And I feel lucky to know that I can reach out to Jaron – and I have – to continue this conversation, and report the results of our dialog on this site, and in my own book.
Next up: A review (and dialog with the author) of Larry Lessig’s Code And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.
Other works I’ve reviewed:
Wikileaks And the Age of Transparency by Micah Sifry (review)
Republic Lost by Larry Lessig (review)
Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson (my review)
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil (my review)
The Corporation (film – my review).
What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly (my review)
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
The Future of the Internet–And How to Stop It
The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
Jaron is quite the character and I’ve interviewed him a couple of times for Microsoft Advertising and my upcoming book http://www.PioneersofDigital.com For me, “You Are Not a Gadget”, was a nice wake up call or gentle prod to say perhaps “digital” is becoming more driven by money and numbers and we’re losing a sense of individuality and creativity in pursuit of the wisdom of the crowd. There’s a bit in the Steve Jobs biography I remember where he says something like we’ve all become “one world”. What Jaron is challenging is our desire to be part of one and the same. I heard that at the 4As conference in conference with Sir Martin Sorrell, Jaron commented they looked like different species! We might not be in “lockdown” mode, but I love having people like Jaron around to challenge us and keep us true. I could listen to him for hours.
Good points, Mel. Thanks.
John I have to comment on a few of your points. As an
optimist as well, I am seeing the opposite of what Lanier says. Or rather, I
see the current situation as a transition. What is happening is we have
discovered a way to connect all of the disconnected people in the world through
several mediums. Our human desire to connect is what has made this possible. It
is no accident that the people who created Facebook and My Space were young
people. They saw the need and heard the complaints all their childhood. They
answered to the call. Right now, there is huge research going on both the brain
and in communications – it seems pretty clear what the objective is.
Sometimes we have to revisit or regress a bit to shift our
paths in the right direction. The stagnation or bleakness in spirituality is
actually just a move away from religion into personal reorganization.
Spirituality is free, and intrinsic in our humanity and all healthy human
relationships. How that is defined is both individual and collective. Without
spirituality we are doomed as humans, yet each of us harbors it, ready to be
awakened at any moment. We all know we are not omnipotent; we know we are not
the only thing that matters; we learn to work in that framework when we wake
up. Some are awake sooner than others.
I have to agree with the points of Tiffany and Leonard Shlain
with regard to what visual media, its new format and communication are coming
to mean with regard to the use of our brains. We exercising both sides of the
lobes and may learn what our brains are truly capable of. This is clearly developing
a new language and a new understanding of possibilities.
Still it is an argument where both sides are right.
Awareness is key but it is not a futile effort. Optimistic that work is being
done and we have the opportunity to move beyond this current junk-food fetish
of facebook and other similar mediums. It seems clear that this medium is
becoming less interesting and less engaging.
Thanks Zoe for the thoughtful comments. “Fast food fetish” – one for the ages.
“I pine a bit myself, but remain (perhaps foolishly) optimistic that the best of what we’ve **created together** will endure, even as we journey onward to discover new ways of **valuing what it means to be a person**.”
This optimism is most precious inspiration needed by many to crawl out of the digital information static silos we have built around us, each from his own diverse path, contributing to one group or brand or project or standard, etc. If we raise the value of what the definition of a human/person should be – to self-reflect, then what ever that it is will be — that we create together, consciously, in that search, we’ll discover an optimistic and balanced future for all. Human civilization has a (perhaps only one!) chance to take to actualize its collective potential — accelerated via the internet, and lets really hope it takes it ! 🙂