YOU ARE NOT A GADGET
A Manifesto
By Jaron Lanier, Allen Lane, 210pp.
Reviewed: 20 March, 2010
This is the best book I have read on the challenges posed by the growth of digital online culture, and one of the best on published culture generally since Vance Packard and Marshall McLuhan, decades ago. And it is in a printed book that you can hold in your hand, dog-ear, annotate, or throw on the floor whenever the punchy aphorisms get too much.
Jason Lanier writes with love of the possibilities of digital media to represent and extend our experience of reality. But he writes with even more passion about the capacity of humans to abuse those possibilities in ways that demean human individualism.
It’s not just the snazzy writing that grips you by the synapses. Lanier writes with the authority of one who has been at the technical forefront of the “digital revolution” for decades: as a pioneer of Virtual Reality, inventor of online avatars, developer of computer-assisted microsurgery techniques and big-selling video games, and as a long-term university teacher and industry columnist.
His central concern is that too many of his fellow engineers are so infatuated with the possibilities of the digital realm that they are blind to threats to individual personality and the social interaction of real people in a real world. Lanier sees these threats not as intentionally malign, but as inherent to the way software design, for engineering convenience, is reductive of any experience that the software purports to represent. Topically for Australia, computer analysis of standardised school testing is one of his negative examples.
At the worst, some embedded digital enthusiasts subscribe to a digital Millennialism that foretells of the Singularity – a future state in which computer intelligence has supplanted human intelligence to control all conscious life. He equates this to the Rapture beliefs that are surprisingly widespread in some religious circles of otherwise rational people.
More broadly, Lanier critiques the “Web 2.0” world of on-line interactive experiences that seem so popular at the moment. Where Web 2.0 proponents talk about individual empowerment and information freedom, Lanier sees “a torrent of petty designs”, uniformly driven by targeted advertising platforms, where personalities are crammed into templates and “friendship” means no more than having a record in a database.
“Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups” are not valuable creativity or genuine social interaction. Instead, they detain their participants in “neotony”, a state of immaturity based on play, rather than mature social contribution. Genuine personal interaction is replaced and demeaned by involvement in activities in which pretence is normal. The most successful participants in Facebook, he says, are those whose identities are faked.
Anonymity brings out the worst in us – the “inner troll”. Pseudonymous online discussions can quickly descend into abuse, and online bullying is by no means just a school-age phenomenon – scientists and philosophers can get just as down and dirty under a cloak of invisibility.
Some digital prophets write with enthusiasm about a “hive mind” that will harness the intellects of vast numbers of connected humans for positive purposes. Lanier is again skeptical. The history of crowd psychology and mob action is far from positive, particularly when divorced from individual responsibility. The attempt to corral massed humanity into a universal “circle of empathy”, beyond real human experience, leads to “empathy inflation” that vitiates genuine responsible commitment and reduces individual roles to “incompetence, trivialisation, dishonesty and narcissism.”
Lanier’s personal concerns are most evident in discussion of the rights and responsibilities of authorship. He has personal stakes here, having a significant second career as a musician. Lanier strongly resents the assumption by digital natives that, if “information wants to be free”, then anyone has the right to appropriate an author’s work and use it in any way, without reference or acknowledgment. Neither is he comfortable with Wikipedia’s mass authorship, nor with the Free and Open Source Software movement that produced Linux, though he doesn’t follow Bill Gates all the way on exclusive property rights.
He is also bothered by Google-type online library schemes that serve up a miscellany of “relevant” excerpts in response to a query, in which each minced excerpt has been classified by some remote, non-transparent algorithm, and authors’ words are divorced from their original context.
Lanier himself just wants authorship to be recognised, and for himself to have a say in how his work might be reused — what we in Australia already enjoy as “moral rights”. It’s a paradoxical stance for a dreadlocked musician, given the complex public cultural DNA of historical influences that no musician in any genre can credibly deny.
This book is recommended as a mild sedative for digital evangelists, as a tonic for digital skeptics, and as a stimulant for the vaguely bewildered who would like to know more. It’s an enjoyable and provocative read.
Richard Thwaites has worked with computers, software and digital content for thirty years, but has 0 Facebook friends.