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You Are Not a Gadget

Jaron Lanier

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Oct 25, 2011 Mykle rated it did not like it

Shelves: feeding-to-a-giant-squid

This book is all jism and dope smoke.

Jaron Lanier is really, really bothered by a laundry list of standard arch-conservative nemeses (Marxism! today's kids! filesharing! the breakdown of the social contract! foreigners stealing our jobs!) as well as a basket of useful-yet-imperfect modern technologies (Wikipedia! Blogs! MIDI! Linux!) He is aware of a sinister cabal of cybernetic totalists who are hard at work on a machine to xerox his brain and force him to use Facebook to meet girls. But they' This book is all jism and dope smoke.

Jaron Lanier is really, really bothered by a laundry list of standard arch-conservative nemeses (Marxism! today's kids! filesharing! the breakdown of the social contract! foreigners stealing our jobs!) as well as a basket of useful-yet-imperfect modern technologies (Wikipedia! Blogs! MIDI! Linux!) He is aware of a sinister cabal of cybernetic totalists who are hard at work on a machine to xerox his brain and force him to use Facebook to meet girls. But they'll never win, because humans are special, as PROVEN by the magical fact that Jaron Lanier cannot describe what makes humans special.

Meanwhile, the Internet is full of trolls, nobody speaks HTML anymore and Jaron can't make a living as a musician! Clearly, the Digital End Times are at hand. He wants to lay the blame on a digital culture that's too standardized and too free; on the evils of open source software and democratic communication.

Well, he had his chance to do that and he flubbed it. Jaron Lanier cannot construct a convincing argument; only about half the time can he even link two paragraphs. He contradicts himself whenever it is convenient to do so. He regularly starts a section with the assertion of a Great Digital Evil (the record industry is dying! bloggers don't spell check!), then insinuates a link to his vague overarching thesis. When he does try to convince a skeptical reader of the connection, he usually fails; more often he just mutters, "Clearly, there is a connection!" I guess he's trying to win over the reader with the depth and emotional sincerity of his ~~whining~~ plea for sanity. I feel bad for whoever buys it.

Then he spends the last quarter of the book trying to convince us that whatever random projects he's been working on lately are intimately connected with his desire to save the world from the Great Digital Evil he has not quite described. Apparently people need to be more like squids - while remaining uniquely special humans, of course. Also, financial contracts should be written in LISP. And pop songs should live in coffee mugs so they can't be downloaded. I kid you not.

Jaron & I & many other computer nerds over forty have lived through a bona fide computer revolution over the last two decades. But Jaron's memory of the facts is somewhat different than mine. He's good at spinning sad, scary yarns about the evolution of the Internet, of paradises promised and lost, but he's regularly full of shit. I won't call it lying because I'm sure it's true to him, but the real history is out there and can be looked up! This book has ten pages of index but cites NO REFERENCES. I would love to see it ruthlessly fact-checked, but apparently Allen Lane Publishing (a Penguin imprint) is too hobbled by the impending (sad, scary) obsolescence of literature to employ a fact checker. Or maybe they just figured the book wouldn't survive the process.

I still think there's something creepy out there. I still think the internet doesn't smell as rosy as it used to, and I still think Facebook is a big fat waste of time, both human and computational. I think the ways software can control its users are important to recognize and beware of. But this book is just a paranoid, incoherent neoliberal bitchfest with digital pretensions - from Jaron Lanier, of all people.

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UPDATE: Jaron collected his thoughts, found a real editor, and wrote a much better book! Read that one instead: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3... ...more

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Jan 20, 2019 Kit rated it liked it · review of another edition

Not so much a formal review, but some thoughts I want to chew on:

People are so hilariously uncomfortable with the idea of being asked to examine their habits and the culture that surrounds those habits. Lanier leads in with the idea of "lock-in": when something is designed around a particular principle as immovable, it becomes a gospel that's hard to break and almost impossible to get people to question.

I commend Lanier for having the boldness to discuss areas where social media, anonymity, and Not so much a formal review, but some thoughts I want to chew on:

People are so hilariously uncomfortable with the idea of being asked to examine their habits and the culture that surrounds those habits. Lanier leads in with the idea of "lock-in": when something is designed around a particular principle as immovable, it becomes a gospel that's hard to break and almost impossible to get people to question.

I commend Lanier for having the boldness to discuss areas where social media, anonymity, and constant connectedness is whittling us down to generalizations and groupthink, but in some scenarios, I think we might need to admit that a lot of this is just human beings using a new tool.

I worry often about how inventions and the like change our species, but am far from technophobic; in fact, I find myself looking excitedly to the time when AI advances in the ways Asimov offered and find myself hoping I live long enough to really see it. I share some disgust for the people who are so afraid of change that they refuse to try and learn something new. It turns out you can hold two opposing concerns in your head and see validity in both. Strange, huh?

Lanier is getting a lot of flack it seems, but he is simply asking us to do something we should be habituated to do for ourselves and our species and have been effectively trained out of by capitalism, polarized thinking, and the freedom that comes with not having to be responsible for what you say anonymously: critically evaluate how we use tools, the advantages and drawbacks, and maybe stop whooping and squealing like the apes at the end of 2001 every time the Apple monolith releases a new product into our eager primate palms. The echo chambers created by filter bubbles on social media limit our nuance and understanding, paying for a place in search results misrepresents validity of a source, and the illusion of connectedness put forth by social media is not quelling our loneliness and desperation for approval. So what do we do?

Lanier suggests that tech giants pay enough attention to the sociological effects of their advancements as they do the profitability of them, which, though admirable, might be a bit naive. After all, these are the people for whom libertarian and free-market ideologies tend to reign supreme. There is a power in being the fire-bringer and Prometheus of our times, and that power can get people a bit drunk on their own influence.

In what ways is anonymity essential? Lanier suggests a "positive anonymity," such as times where gathering group opinions without the influence of peer pressure for better data, reasons of candid speech without punishment, and pushing and questioning our taboos in order to make progress. At worst, it is a driveby of cruelty that allows an average person to let loose personal monsters without much guilt over the damage you could cause.

By contrast, too much support for legislative control of the internet breeds environments of censorship and thought control, as we have seen in countries like China and North Korea. The internet can liberate, start movements, and help advance societies IRL as well. The line is just blurring, whether by necessity or force. As such, it is similarly naive to believe the freedom presented to us is absolute when companies can and do sell your information right in front of us; as it goes with the internet, if you can't tell what the price is or what's for sale, it's might be you. ...more

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Feb 18, 2010 Zach added it

Feb 27, 2011 billpkrt rated it liked it

Jul 02, 2019 Leonardo Etcheto marked it as to-read

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