- Lanier, Jaron.
You Are Not a Gadget.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.
ISBN 978-0-307-26964-5.
-
In
The Fatal Conceit (March 2005)
Friedrich A. Hayek observed that almost any noun in the English
language is devalued by preceding it with “social”.
In this book, virtual reality pioneer, musician, and visionary
Jaron Lanier argues that the digital revolution, which began
in the 1970s with the advent of the personal computer and
became a new foundation for human communication and interaction
with widespread access to the Internet and the Web in the 1990s,
took a disastrous wrong turn in the early years of the 21st
century with the advent of the so-called “Web 2.0”
technologies and
“social networking”—hey, Hayek could've told
you!
Like many technologists, the author was optimistic that
with the efflorescence of the ubiquitous Internet in the
1990s combined with readily-affordable computer power which
permitted photorealistic graphics and high fidelity sound
synthesis, a new burst of bottom-up creativity would be
unleashed; creative individuals would be empowered to
realise not just new art, but new forms of art,
along with new ways to collaborate and distribute their
work to a global audience. This
Army of Davids (March 2006)
world, however, seems to have been derailed or at least
delayed, and instead we've come to inhabit an Internet and
network culture which is darker and less innovative. Lanier
argues that the phenomenon of technological “lock in”
makes this particularly ominous, since regrettable design
decisions whose drawbacks were not even perceived when they
were made, tend to become entrenched and almost impossible
to remedy once they are widely adopted. (For example, just
look at the difficulties in migrating
the Internet to
IPv6.) With
application layer protocols, fundamentally changing them becomes
almost impossible once a multitude of independently maintained
applications rely upon them to intercommunicate.
Consider
MIDI,
which the author uses as an example of lock-in. Originally designed
to allow music synthesisers and keyboards to interoperate, it embodies
a keyboardist's view of the concept of a note, which is quite different
from that, say, of a violinist or trombone player. Even with
facilities such as pitch bend, there are musical articulations
played on physical instruments which cannot be represented in MIDI
sequences. But since MIDI has become locked in as the
lingua franca of electronic
music production, in effect the musical vocabulary has been
limited to those concepts which can be represented in MIDI,
resulting in a digital world which is impoverished in potential
compared to the analogue instruments it aimed to replace.
With the advent of “social networking”, we appear
to be locking in a representation of human beings as database
entries with fields chosen from a limited menu of choices,
and hence, as with MIDI, flattening down the unbounded diversity
and potential of human individuals to categories which, not
coincidentally, resemble the demographic bins used by marketers
to target groups of customers. Further, the Internet, through
its embrace of anonymity and throwaway identities and
consequent devaluing of reputation, encourages mob behaviour
and “drive by”
attacks on individuals which make many venues open to
the public more like a
slum
than an affinity group of like-minded people. Lanier argues that
many of the pathologies we observe in behaviour on the Internet
are neither inherent nor inevitable, but rather the consequences
of bad user interface design. But with applications built on
social networking platforms proliferating as rapidly as me-too
venture capital hoses money in their direction, we may be stuck
with these regrettable decisions and their pernicious
consequences for a long time to come.
Next, the focus turns to the cult of free and open source
software, “cloud computing”, “crowd
sourcing”, and the assumption that a “hive
mind” assembled from a multitude of individuals
collaborating by means of the Internet can create novel
and valuable work and even assume some of the attributes of
personhood. Now, this may seem absurd, but there are many
people in the Silicon Valley culture to whom these are
articles of faith, and since these people are engaged
in designing the tools many of us will end up using, it's
worth looking at the assumptions which inform their designs.
Compared to what seemed the unbounded potential of the
personal computer and Internet revolutions in their
early days, what the open model of development has achieved
to date seems depressingly modest: re-implementations
of an operating system, text editor, and programming
language all rooted in the 1970s, and creation of a new
encyclopedia which is structured in the same manner as
paper encyclopedias dating from a century ago—oh wow.
Where are the immersive massively multi-user
virtual
reality worlds,
or the innovative
presentation of science
and mathematics in an interactive exploratory learning
environment, or new ways to build computer tools without
writing code, or any one of the hundreds of breakthroughs
we assumed would come along when individual creativity
was unleashed by their hardware prerequisites becoming
available to a mass market at an affordable price?
Not only have the achievements of the free and open movement
been, shall we say, modest, the other side of the “information
wants to be free” creed has devastated traditional content
providers such as the music publishing, newspaper, and
magazine businesses. Now among many people there's no love lost
for the legacy players in these sectors, and a sentiment
of “good riddance” is common, if not outright
gloating over their demise. But what hasn't happened, at least
so far, is the expected replacement of these physical delivery
channels with electronic equivalents which generate sufficient
revenue to allow artists, journalists, and other primary
content creators to make a living as they did before. Now,
certainly, these occupations are a meritocracy where only a
few manage to support themselves, no less become wealthy, while
far more never make it. But with the mass Internet now approaching
its twentieth birthday, wouldn't you expect at least
a few people to have figured out how to make it work for
them and prospered as creators in this new environment? If so,
where are they?
For that matter, what new musical styles, forms of
artistic expression, or literary genres have emerged in the age of
the Internet? Has the lack of a viable business model for
such creations led to a situation the author describes as,
“It's as if culture froze just before it became digitally
open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers
picking over a garbage dump.” One need only visit
YouTube to see what he's talking about. Don't read the
comments there—that path leads to despair, which is a
low state.
Lanier's interests are eclectic, and a great many matters are
discussed here including artificial intelligence, machine
language translation, the financial crisis,
zombies,
neoteny
in humans and human cultures, and
cephalopod
envy. Much of
this is fascinating, and some is irritating, such as the
discussion of the recent financial meltdown where it becomes
clear the author simply doesn't know what he's talking about
and misdiagnoses the causes of the catastrophe, which are
explained so clearly in Thomas Sowell's
The Housing Boom and Bust
(March 2010).
I believe this is the
octopus video
cited in chapter 14. The author was dubious, upon viewing this, that
it wasn't a computer graphics trick. I have not, as he has, dived
the briny deep to meet cephalopods on their own turf, and I remain
sceptical that the video represents what it purports to. This is one
of the problems of the digital media age: when anything you can
imagine can be persuasively computer synthesised, how can you trust
any reportage of a remarkable phenomenon to be genuine if you haven't
observed it for yourself?
Occasional aggravations aside, this is a thoughtful exploration
of the state of the technologies which are redefining how
people work, play, create, and communicate. Readers
frustrated by the limitations and lack of imagination
which characterises present-day software and network
resources will discover, in reading this book, that
tremendously empowering phrase, “it doesn't have
to be that way”, and perhaps demand better of those
bringing products to the market or perhaps embark upon building
better tools themselves.
June 2010 