You are Not a Gadget

Jun 06, 2011 Chris rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Amongst other things, Lanier has opened my eyes to the fact that, in a world both more just and ideally situated for a continuation of the entrepreneurial capitalist culture that has raised the tide of global wealth like nothing before, each one of you moochers and looters would be paying me a fee for the opportunity to peruse these book reviews which appear upon your computer screens only after a tortuous, strangled combat producing rivulets of overly-descriptive and yet still somewhat nebulous...more Amongst other things, Lanier has opened my eyes to the fact that, in a world both more just and ideally situated for a continuation of the entrepreneurial capitalist culture that has raised the tide of global wealth like nothing before, each one of you moochers and looters would be paying me a fee for the opportunity to peruse these book reviews which appear upon your computer screens only after a tortuous, strangled combat producing rivulets of overly-descriptive and yet still somewhat nebulous adjectives that sprinkle my prose like so many glistening drops of corporeal depletion indistinguishable between sweat and tears: so if the lot of you had a shred of decency, the cheque would already be in the mail.

I also feel compelled to reiterate how attractive the design of this manifesto is—that stark, crisp, angry eggshell white cover, neither subdued as if under the lash of dim lighting or an oppressive shadow, nor that etiolated thinness that speaks of energy departed to other realms, with its beguiling word cloud of smudgy grey background noise serving as a framework for the trim and perky cyan that clusters in outspoken cliques; while the interior fonts, of a perfectly proportioned size, spacing, and selection, perform their orderly and measured maneuvers across pages of potato-chip texture that slightly rebuff the cradling fingers and proudly, starchily snap-to-attention when the page is admiringly turned. Hats off to Vintage for a job well done.

As for the content, for Mr. Lanier's gentle polemic against the cybernetic totalists and their open culture jihad...ah, fuck it, I just can't be arsed. I'm hot, I'm tired, I'm burned out from working too much, reading too much, and investing a considerable percentage of my currently available enthusiasm into the Canucks' quest for Lord Stanley's Cup and Roger Federer's futile butting of his head against the French Open-dominating Spaniard with his windshield wiper, extreme Western forehand and its resultant moonballs to the backhand of the silky Swiss maestro who is losing his race with Father Time—it's proving an exceedingly difficult task to formulate any manner of coherent analysis of the worthwhile thoughts of this olive-eyed, dreadlocked panda and his worries about the wiki-izing and networked flatness of the globalized world.(less)

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May 14, 2010 Gordon rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is a slim book that should have been slimmer. In fact, it should probably have been a couple of articles in Wired Magazine instead. I think the Wired readership is pretty much the core target audience for this book. The author is a long-time software engineer, musician, and philosopher of technology. I’m not sure I’ve ever read any book by a philosopher of technology, but that’s definitely what he is. The upside of that approach is that he thinks of technology within a framework of ethics a...more This is a slim book that should have been slimmer. In fact, it should probably have been a couple of articles in Wired Magazine instead. I think the Wired readership is pretty much the core target audience for this book. The author is a long-time software engineer, musician, and philosopher of technology. I’m not sure I’ve ever read any book by a philosopher of technology, but that’s definitely what he is. The upside of that approach is that he thinks of technology within a framework of ethics and esthetics. The downside is that he rants a lot, in ways that are both quirky and cranky.

The book starts with a long discussion about how early technology standards or platform designs (think Windows or UNIX) lock in a certain kind of architecture that shapes everything that is built on top of it or plugs into it, for better or worse. His favorite whipping boy is the MIDI standard used for digitizing music, which, as a professional musician, he thinks is lousy but too deeply entrenched to displace. OK, but that’s always been the case with standards. We’re kind of stuck with railroad gauges of a certain width and light bulb sockets of a certain width, unless we want to do a lot of large scale tearing down and rebuilding. This is not exactly a novel insight. Nor is it clear how you avoid this, or even if a flawed standard is really worse than the chaos of no standard at all.

Much later in the book, he makes some very interesting points about what he calls “encapsulated technology”, such as computing hardware devices or iPods or Blackberries. These he believes progress very rapidly according to Moore’s Law, precisely because they are protected behind a sort of fortress wall that makes it possible for their designers to keep advancing the state of the art, while they open up some selected aspects of their platforms for 3rd party developers – as Apple and Research in Motion have done. With open source software, by contrast, there is no such encapsulation or protection. Result: this software does NOT evolve! This is a very surprising observation, and immediately what come to mind are such seeming counter-examples as Wikipedia and LINUX. But, as he points out, these two highly successful products are based on long-established pre-existing models, which grew up in the old “encapsulated world”: Encyclopedia Britannica and UNIX. So are Wikipedia and LINUX truly new, or are they just evolutionary advances that harnessed the collective energies of countless contributors willing to work for free in exchange for some bragging rights? I think Lanier is (mostly) right on this.

The above examples lead Lanier to argue that the whole “hive mind” approach of the web and open source and “mash-up”-style creative models may be running out of juice. In fact, he thinks they’re suffering from what archeologists would call “pattern exhaustion”, where a civilization runs out of new ideas and just starts repeating the same old patterns with minor variations – think of the Maya or Imperial China in their late stages. He thinks this hive mind is really killing diversity and original thinking on the web. This is pretty provocative stuff coming from Lanier, with a lot of truth in it.

I also very much liked his discussion of the impact of anonymity on the hive mind that drives social networking on the web. Since so much of it is anonymous, users hide behind a mask and begin writing very ugly and/or mindless things. Recall that the Ku Klux Klansmen also liked to hide behind their sheets, with predictably ugly results. It’s not likely that any of this is making a contribution to our civilization. Anonymity (hiding behind a pseudonym) and privacy (keeping others from nosing around your personal information) are NOT the same thing – which is not a distinction that Lanier makes very clearly, however.

He whines a lot about the implications of creative content on the web being free, especially content such as music and journalism. (Remember, he’s a musician and a writer). Increasingly, people can’t make a living in these professions, because they can’t compete against free. This is true, but is much like complaining about the weather. In any industry where barriers to entry are low, the marketplace is global, the cost of distribution is next to zero, and the producers (musicians/journalists) are willing to do what they do for little or no money because they love what they do, then prices will inevitably move to ridiculously low levels – in most cases, FREE – for all but a small rarefied portion of that creative content e.g. the New York Times and music from brand-name musicians. I think Lanier forgets that for professions such as music, the creators have almost always been unpaid for as long as music has existed. Even Mozart nearly starved to death. There was a brief heyday for paid musicians in the 20th century, but that was an anomaly.

His lengthy discussion of “computationally enhanced corruption” was entertaining – not least for the label he used to describe it – but mostly uninformed. Yes, it’s true that global networks and powerful computers and sophisticated trading platforms have made all kinds of scams possible – things such as Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), the scam used to peddle near-worthless sub-prime mortgages to unsuspecting investors all over the world, and obscure derivatives strategies and hedging schemes. Collectively, these nearly brought down the global financial system. But very little of what Lanier proposes would have done anything to stop it.

Overall, You Are Not a Gadget was thought-provoking and sometimes infuriating, but I still maintain it would have been better delivered as a couple of magazine articles in Wired rather than a full-length book.
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Mar 07, 2010 Patrick Brown rated it 3 of 5 stars

Recommended to Patrick by: Stephanie Anderson recommended this to me via her blog.

Shelves: computers-and-the-net

Ever since I read about this book at Bookavore's excellent blog, I feared this book. How could I not -- I'm currently employed by a social media company. Surely this manifesto would make me rethink my career, my hobbies, how I spend my time. It had the potential to be a paradigm-shifting reading experience, the kind of experience I hadn't had since reading The Omnivore's Dilemma a few years back.

That it didn't realign my thinking on all things digital -- thankfully -- is not entirely Lanier's fa...more Ever since I read about this book at Bookavore's excellent blog, I feared this book. How could I not -- I'm currently employed by a social media company. Surely this manifesto would make me rethink my career, my hobbies, how I spend my time. It had the potential to be a paradigm-shifting reading experience, the kind of experience I hadn't had since reading The Omnivore's Dilemma a few years back.

That it didn't realign my thinking on all things digital -- thankfully -- is not entirely Lanier's fault. Though I found his prose to be too verbose at times ("If you read something written by someone who used the term "single" in a custom-composed, unique sentence, you will inevitably get a first whiff of the subtle experience of the author, something you would not get from a multiple-choice database."), he writes convincingly about many troubling aspects of online life.

It's difficult to argue that online culture hasn't brought out the ugliest aspects of human nature on occasion. Anonymity breeds not only snarkiness, but cruelty, ignorance, and even, on occasion, harassment and intimidation. And while I think Lanier drifts off point a bit with regards digital culture's influence on music (Seriously, who cares what someone looks like when they're listening to music), he has a point that the internet seems to have brought on retreads, remixes and retro whatevers. Who can listen to the The Strokes or Interpol or Fleet Foxes or any of a number of other indie bands and not hear the past pulsing through the speakers (and these are the best of these retro bands). And while the web has brought about an explosion of text that makes a reader like me feel some optimism, too often I see people write off (no pun intended) anything longer than a paragraph with the dreaded "tl;dr" tag (And don't get me started on the mashup culture that exists on the web. How many times have I seen someone on Tumblr say "You didn't give me credit for that Terry Richardson photo I posted earlier." Huh?).

What I think Lanier is wrong about, and the reason this book didn't destroy my faith in social media, is that so much of how I experience social media seems to affirm the best of what Lanier hopes for from the web. I frequently write blog posts that took me weeks to write (as frequently as one can write such posts while working full-time); I've attempted (and sometimes succeeded) in finding ways to use twitter, facebook and YouTube to get people to work together on a collaborative project. The "I like Coldplay, therefore that defines me on Facebook" argument that Lanier puts forward doesn't hold a lot of sway for me. I don't troll for friends by looking for similar cultural totems (though I will occasionally seek friendship with someone online based on a thoughtful blog post or Goodreads review they've written). I think services like Twitter and Tumblr have enriched my life by presenting me with a feed of useful information and entertainment (albeit, some of it inane), and while Facebook seems determined to be as juvenile as possible, it has helped me keep abreast of my friends' lives in ways I never could have before.

I should note that the book ends with a dose of optimism, including some science writing that wouldn't be out of place in a Malcolm Gladwell book. Additionally, this book went a long way towards explaining to me why some people feel a sense of glee when old media companies struggle (It all plays into their dreams for what the future holds -- a world where we're all immortal in the cloud). In the end, this was a thought-provoking book that I would recommend to anyone who thinks deeply about the internet. It may not change how you view the web, but it might make you reconsider that anonymous comment you were thinking about posting.(less)

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May 30, 2013 Aaron rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is, unfortunately, very poorly argued.

I was really interested in reading this book to get some ideas on how technology can be better applied to work for people in a more humanistic way. Unfortunately, the first three quarters of the book involve the author ranting against "web 2.0 technologists" without clearly attributing any specific arguments.

The last quarter of the book is where the author starts actually providing ideas on how technology can be applied in a more humanistic way, bu...more

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Jan 05, 2013 Will Byrnes rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, economics, brain-candy

UPDATED - 1/5/13 - at bottom

There are many ideas floating about in the mind of Jaron Lanier, the guy who popularized the term virtual reality, was with Atari in the beginning and has, for decades, been involved with VR as a teacher, consultant and architect. One of his notions, the core argument of this book, is that much of current internet interface design, so-called Web 2.0, is hazardous to users.

certain specific, popular internet designs of the moment—not the internet as a whole—tend to pu

...more

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Jun 05, 2012 Rick Wilcox rated it 2 of 5 stars

So who is Facebook's customer? You? Yes, someday when you have to pay for access to feed your habit, but you are not the big ticket. Facebook's real customer is the advertiser of the future. Vast data is being collected about people's likes and dislikes, habits and preferences, and the engine to truly mine all this data has yet to be created.

Even though the data here under-represents reality, Facebook still gets closer than any other social graph thus far.

Read the quote below from the book I am...more

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Sep 06, 2011 zerospinboson rated it 1 of 5 stars

From reading the NYTimes review of the book, there seem to be major problems with this book already, that mark it out to be a book not to be approached if one is looking for insightful comments.

Like Andrew Keen in “The Cult of the Amateur,” Mr. Lanier is most eloquent on how intellectual property is threatened by the economics of free Internet content, crowd dynamics and the popularity of aggregator sites. “An impenetrable tone deafness rules Silicon Valley when it comes to the idea of authorshi

...more From reading the NYTimes review of the book, there seem to be major problems with this book already, that mark it out to be a book not to be approached if one is looking for insightful comments.

Like Andrew Keen in “The Cult of the Amateur,” Mr. Lanier is most eloquent on how intellectual property is threatened by the economics of free Internet content, crowd dynamics and the popularity of aggregator sites. “An impenetrable tone deafness rules Silicon Valley when it comes to the idea of authorship,” he writes, recalling the Wired editor Kevin Kelly’s 2006 prediction that the mass scanning of books would one day create a universal library in which no book would be an island — in effect, one humongous text, made searchable and remixable on the Web.
Mr. Lanier, a pioneer in the development of virtual reality and a Silicon Valley veteran, is hardly a Luddite, as some of his critics have suggested. Rather he is a digital-world insider who wants to make the case for “a new digital humanism” before software engineers’ design decisions, which he says fundamentally shape users’ behavior, become “frozen into place by a process known as lock-in.” Just as decisions about the dimensions of railroad tracks determined the size and velocity of trains for decades to come, he argues, so choices made about software design now may yield “defining, unchangeable rules” for generations to come.

Most eloquent?
How shiny.
1. There is no "silicon valley" of "the internet", where decisions are made that pertain to every place on it. "Crowd dynamics" along with them choosing to go to sites that allow different kinds of behaviour (which then adapt further depending on the audience that's drawn to it) might, but again, suggesting there are general trends to be seen seems rather silly.
If I wanted to kid everyone, I could just as easily suggest that the internet, rather than "attacking the notion of authorship" is proposing we have more sex with rather larger sexual appendages.
2. "impenetrable tone deafness" sounds silly. First off, "silicon valley" is quite in favour of IP rights. Secondly, the internet is far more differentiated than that. Thirdly, the idea of "authorship" isn't quite as monolithic and unchanging as Lanier suggests it is.
3. The http protocol can carry just about anything, so I don't really understand why he thinks that design decisions will be "forced upon" the internet. As I see it, things like Wordpress, Slashdot, facebook are all quite different, and while they might borrow ideas from oneanother (forgive my choice of examples here), there is little reason to think that slashdot will one day become "incompatible" with the rest of the internet. This, again, assumes central control.

Decisions made in the formative years of computer networking, for instance, promoted online anonymity, and over the years, as millions upon millions of people began using the Web, Mr. Lanier says, anonymity has helped enable the dark side of human nature. Nasty, anonymous attacks on individuals and institutions have flourished, and what Mr. Lanier calls a “culture of sadism” has gone mainstream. In some countries anonymity and mob behavior have resulted in actual witch hunts.

4. Mr. Lanier is likely a paternalistic conservative, as only conservatives extrapolate from 2 incidents to general trends (ignoring all the happy stories about how chinese and iranian activists are now better able to communicate with the rest of the world due to the fact that they can be anonymous), and only paternalists are dumb enough to believe that there suddenly won't be "bad behaviour" any more.

If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don’t know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video.”

5. Why is this an argument? Why is this necessarily "bad"? Verifiability? Because mashups are inherently demeaning to an original author? The guy sounds a bit full of himself. I bet he doesn't like Jazz either, where musicians frequently borrow(ed) from oneanother. Or Bach, who did the exact same thing.
Anyway, he sounds rather full of himself.
The biggest problem I have with it is his positing of a "hive mind". First of all, there are minds, secondly, they're hardly as hivey as he makes it out to be, as most websites are very much hierarchical. And while decisions made on important sites may have ramifications for others, this is not the definition of "hive mentality". The scariest thing in the book is that he seems to be attacking the idea of a right to anonymity, apparently seeking to replace it with something more "controllable".
Aside from the suggestion that this is something that is made possible "by the internet" and only on the internet, it also horribly overstates the case, as the really bad things aren't nearly as prevalent as he seems to suggest ("witch-hunts" for adulterers perhaps), while the others aren't even remotely comparable to those fringe cases in badness (trolling, some slander). To suggest that these things are somehow comparable is just sick.(less)

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Apr 09, 2013 Michael Burnam-fink rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013, utopia

Jaron Lanier is very angry about computers. While this book is a necessary antidote to the usual silicon valley cyber-utopianism, Lanier is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and this manifesto is plagued by conceptual and organizational difficulties.

The first target of Lanier's wrath is the Singularity, the idea that increasingly powerful computers will lead to an intelligence explosion and the rapture of the nerds. Singulatarians are easy targets for mockery, and Lanier's attack is based...more Jaron Lanier is very angry about computers. While this book is a necessary antidote to the usual silicon valley cyber-utopianism, Lanier is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, and this manifesto is plagued by conceptual and organizational difficulties.

The first target of Lanier's wrath is the Singularity, the idea that increasingly powerful computers will lead to an intelligence explosion and the rapture of the nerds. Singulatarians are easy targets for mockery, and Lanier's attack is based around the Hard Problem of Consciousness: explaining the phenomenon of experience. This leads us into some interesting philosophical and mathematical thickets: all computers that we know of are Turing Machines, which are classed as machines which can solve a certain set of formalized mathematical questions (actually, the ones we know how to build are less than Turing Machines because they run in finite time and space). Either brains are Turing Machines, in which case experience is just math, or brains are not Turing Machines, in which case our understanding of math is due for some big changes. Lanier, however, doesn't talk about this (I know about it because I've read Godel Escher Bach several times), preferring to bash Kurzweil et al as robot cultists.

Second are online communities, which he characterizes as Digital Maoism, or blind mobs, primarily interested in trolling. Now, there is a lot of trolling online, and mobs are fickle and sometimes dangerous, and Clay Skirkey is probably a buffoon, but actual scholars doing actual scholarship (cite forthcoming, mostly my friends) have done a lot of interesting work on the social interactions that make up the web. Ethnographic studies are a lot more work than generalized bemoaning about cyber-vigilantes and the ADHD spikiness of internet interests. Of course the internet looks like a mob from on high-from a sufficient distance, nearly everything can be treated as a problem in statistical mechanics. Real social scientists, as opposed to self-proclaimed polymaths, have stopped taking "cyberspace" as an intellectually productive conversation.

Third, and most interesting, is Lanier's attack against Open Source culture. According to his argument, the computer has killed authorship, creative expression, and the middle class, leaving nothing but Cloud Lords and Microserfs. He has some interesting points about hip hop as the last novel/pre-digital artistic movement, the retro sensibilities of modern pop culture, and the triumphs of Open Source software being a clone of UNIX and an encyclopedia rather than something new.

That said, there are some big questions that Lanier doesn't engage with. First, as awful as MIDI and other standards are, (and a friend of mine did an undergrad STS thesis on MIDI), working technologies are by definition 'closed', in the social construction of technology sense of closure. You want tools that can be used; you have to assume those tools' political values as well. A little reading in the philosophy of technology, particular Bowker and Star's Sorting Things Out, would've been immensely helpful here.

Second, Lanier has a rather confused notion of what a computer is, as a box that shows me images which are made out of math. Copyright, authorship, the whole shebang of culture that Lanier cares so much about and takes as reaching its optimum right at 1970 or so, is historically and legally contingent on a bunch of technological and political factors around the reproduction of physical objects. Well, computers make math infinitely reproducible. Stewart Brand's slogan "Information wants to be free" doesn't quite get at how free information wants to be. Given a computer and some math, information is free in the same way that air can't be locked up. It's basically the problem of the 'digital original,' and the question of the value of the original versus copies. Lanier is making some kind of worthwhile point here, but its buried under so much vitriol and romanticism that it's hard to see (much like this review).

In the end, I think Lanier ironically does the exact same thing he criticizes others for doing, in that he blames all the contradictions of Late Stage Capitalism on computers. It's a technologically deterministic argument with a few new twists, but not nearly as novel or rigorous as it could be. (less)

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Jun 13, 2010 Surfing Moose rated it 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book and was already of the mindset that Jaron writes about. I do believe that sites like Facebook diminish the word "Friend" and give individuals a false sense of community. Sites like Facebook will go away eventually to be replaced by the next thing but hopefully something better and more meaningful.

I am an individual, not a member of a hive, not classifiable for marketing purposes (man does Amazon's recommendations get it wrong 95% of the time), and refuse to have my rig...more

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Mar 27, 2011 Mark rated it 3 of 5 stars

At the outset, let me say that as a software developer myself I found this a compelling read despite some stylistic and tonal flaws.

Mr Lanier's primary bone of contention is with the way in which existing modes of digital conduct are enshrined as sacrosanct practices, when in fact their origins had far more to do with programmatic expediency rather than any kind of realistic, tangible human goal. Early in the book he uses MIDI as a larger metaphor for the concept of lock-in; in that its original...more At the outset, let me say that as a software developer myself I found this a compelling read despite some stylistic and tonal flaws.

Mr Lanier's primary bone of contention is with the way in which existing modes of digital conduct are enshrined as sacrosanct practices, when in fact their origins had far more to do with programmatic expediency rather than any kind of realistic, tangible human goal. Early in the book he uses MIDI as a larger metaphor for the concept of lock-in; in that its original myopic design was centered around the instrumentation of keyboards and therefore is incapable of orchestrating instruments such as violins with considerable nuance in tone and modulation. This is used as an example of some of the larger instances of 'lock-in' and how they affect our daily lives, especially as deeply locked-in practices become more and more integrated with the social dialogue.

While it could be argued that this is the mere nature of digital development and is to be rectified over time, the cultural effects of this 'lock-in' make up the real focus of his text. Some of the more notable ideas on the chopping block are network anonymity, which Mr. Lanier contends disconnects and abstracts opinions from their authors and therefore creates a conundrum of responsibility that dehumanizes the source of the information at large. There may in fact be some truth to this, though I am more inclined to believe that it is a problem inherent in technology itself that we as humans are only beginning to discover how to work with.

I'm going to elect to ignore some of the more ethereal contentions in the book - I don't think anyone grounded in the real world, even technology professionals like myself, really believe in or aspire to becoming "immortalized in the cloud" as Lanier's digital rapture image supposes. To offer my own opinion on his assertions, a great deal of the problem inherent both in "lock-in" as well as the backdrop of how the global network has affected our lives has to do with education rather than any kind of in-borne social norm. The fact that people have been preconditioned to worship expediency has led to the direct creation of software and technologies that satisfy apathy and intellectual indifference. Like any supplier of product, programmers must yield to what the greater consuming public demands, and this leads to the kind of triviality that Lanier finds so appalling in his treatise.

While he is not clearly not a believer in the open source movement as a whole, the paragons of innovation that he elects as examples (the Blackberry, iPhone) are very unfortunate and make up some of the most disappointing elements of the book. To suggest that 'pleasant typefaces' amount to the kind of 'humanism' being advocated for does not set Mr. Lanier's standard for achievement very high. Not to mention that some of his examples play a large role in the dehumanizing of social dialogue that he finds such fault with. As a developer of web apps I can contend with a degree of certainty how much wasted effort goes into satisfying the collective ADD and egoism of addictive smartphone users. To suggest that these efforts in development are an effort to contribute to a greater 'digital humanism' is laughable at best - it is far more likely they sate levels of narcissism only possible in the first-world.

Among his most ridiculous profered examples is the game Spore. Yes Mr. Lanier, it was a fascinating idea. Yes, Mr. Lanier, Will Wright did conceive of a tremendously original idea that incorporated a level of ambition in primary experience never before achieved by software. Yes, Mr. Lanier, I too was frustrated by a deluge of purists who panned that game online merely because the draconian suits at EA inserted KGB levels of DRM. But what was the real problem with it, in all seriousness? It was a game that wasn't fun!

Mr. Lanier's book is a well-informed cautionary tale. A great deal of the discussion within it is worth the time of reading and giving serious consideration to. It is mainly his selection of his champions that serves to undermine his main thesis.(less)

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Mar 18, 2011 Dav rated it 3 of 5 stars

I intend to write a longer more thought-out review at some point, but as a quick brain dump:

Despite Lanier's failure to convince me of much of his opinions, a lot of pople should read this book. I wish it had a better editor perhaps. Lanier has a contrarian viewpoint that should be considered by all of us who build technology. We and our users can only benefit from it.

Some of the book is brilliant. Much of it is mad strawman arguments (in those cases maybe he has a point, but he didn't make it...more

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Jul 27, 2010 Donna rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: e-read

I was so blown away by the excerpt of this book in Harper's that I deleted my facebook account before I even finished it. I also enjoyed the book, though I got lost about one exit after the 'songle'. But this is to be expected. Manifestos have a good first half or however much is apportioned to stating the problem. Therein lies recognition and the endorphin bath of connected dots. Solutions are harder to express. There's maybe one* person born per generation who can show us those unseen patterns...more

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Nov 08, 2011 Eric Lin rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: current-nonfiction

While I agree with a lot of his sentiments, these are obviously the thoughts of someone deeply immersed in the tech community. Compared to his average reader, he's speaking from the perspective of someone who has always been ahead of the curve, and I think this skews a lot of his opinions to the extreme.

Still, many of his basic points about the general devaluation of the individual are more or less correct. For all that the internet has improved our lives, it is also dangerously easy to allow it...more

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Jun 16, 2013 Ken McDouall rated it 4 of 5 stars

Jarod Lanier makes up for a somewhat rambling, disjointed argumentative structure by peppering this book with startling insights and counter-intuitive statements on the nature of technological innovation. Lanier, credited as the founder of virtual reality technology, is as much a humanist as a techno-geek, and he wants us to be cautious as we enter the brave new world of digital miracles. Personhood is a crucial concept for Lanier, and he makes it clear that computers can never be people.

Lanier...more

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Apr 28, 2013 Joel rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book changed my perspective on social media. It is a response to the Tim O'reilley/wikipedia/"Information should be free" movement. The author speaks of how technologies become standards and then you get locked in, and does a pretty effective job of pointing out the problems.

He makes the point that by classifying ourselves into categories that make it easy for databases to define us for marketing purposes, we are reducing what it means to be a person. You start defining yourself by your Fac...more

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Apr 25, 2013 Abu Mahmoud rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: computers, commentary, philosophy, politics, economics, science, ethics, technology

An excellent critique of what Lenier calls "Cybernetic Totalism" or, coloquially, "Digital Maoism." He discusses the prospects for artificial intelligence, takes a critical look at "the Singularity," weighs into the debates on crowd-sourcing, machine trading on the stock market, Internet trolling, and Digital Rights Management. On the latter, he is an advocate of DRM tied to physical tokens of ownership. I disagree with him more on this than with anything else he rights in the book. He questions...more

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Apr 22, 2013 Don Tapscott rated it 3 of 5 stars

Marshall McLuhan, patron saint of Wired magazine and cameo star of Woody Allen's Oscar-winning Annie Hall, explained how communications revolutions disrupt old ways of behaviour. As such they are received with enthusiasm but also coolness, skepticism, hostility and even mockery.

This has never been truer than with the Internet. In the 1990s, writer Robert Bly ( The Sibling Society) argued that the Internet was "eating the human neo-cortex." Astronomer Clifford Stoll achieved fame in 1995 by writi...more

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Apr 21, 2013 Deborah rated it 3 of 5 stars

You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.

Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so is he. -Publius Syrus

The scarcity of money, as we know it today, is artificial, but everything about information is artificial. WIthout a degree of imposed scarcity, money would be valueless.

Flatness as it applies to human affairs, leads to blandness and meaninglessness.

Meaning is only ever meaning in context.

“You don’t know what you’re missing.”

If you want to see how valuable something i...more

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Jan 19, 2013 Alan Bradley rated it 4 of 5 stars

Brilliant observations from a very smart and talented man - a prodigy, a genius, I would dare say - about the trends and future of this increasingly computer-driven world from someone who was partly responsible for developing and promoting it (the term 'virtual reality' was coined by him). He is even-handed and cautionary about computers and the internet world, warning of its dangers as well as analyzing its meaning, its best uses, and its weaknesses. The guy's a real genuine Bohemian, all right...more

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Jan 08, 2013 Michael rated it 3 of 5 stars

Lanier's convictions when it comes to the social and economic impact of an increasingly digitized world make for a fantastic opportunity to reflect on humanity's relationship with the tiny computers we spend so much time around, often unaware, as well as the online communities with which we so knowingly take part. Lanier is rarely shy in this text about pursuing an analytical train of thought. He often goes "Too Far", seeking perhaps potential shock value and sometimes diminishing actual value b...more

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Jan 07, 2013 Wally Beddoe rated it 3 of 5 stars

The book You Are Not a Gadget was written by Silicon Valley visionary Jaron Lanier in 2010 and published in the U.S. by Alfred A Knopf. Referred to by sub-title as a manifesto, ‘Gadget’ proclaims to be a controversial book of how technology and the World Wide Web is transforming our lives. Mr. Lanier recalls events and experiences throughout his career, citing many famous or well-know individuals, in a thorough collection of information pertaining primarily to internet history and effect.

I foun...more The book You Are Not a Gadget was written by Silicon Valley visionary Jaron Lanier in 2010 and published in the U.S. by Alfred A Knopf. Referred to by sub-title as a manifesto, ‘Gadget’ proclaims to be a controversial book of how technology and the World Wide Web is transforming our lives. Mr. Lanier recalls events and experiences throughout his career, citing many famous or well-know individuals, in a thorough collection of information pertaining primarily to internet history and effect.

I found the book to be written with Lanier’s Silicon Valley colleagues in mind as his intended audience rather than the average person. Lanier takes a deep dive into the computer science world and into the psychology of the conscience, oftentimes leaving me, a reasonably-knowledgeable technical person, curiously trying to follow his message.

I did however enjoy the golden tidbits of history he provided with terms or events that I was somewhat familiar with, and some that I was not. For example, Lanier explains how the early adoption of the MIDI sound format (p.11) and the idea of a ‘file’ (p.12) are literally locked in as de facto components on the internet. Lanier also does a good job of explaining how poor software design can result in various user experiences; some with extreme consequences. For example, the early decision by software developers that end-users should have the option to appear as an anonymous person online, has had a huge impact on behavior. Consider Lanier’s explanation of the “wisdom of crowds” (p.55) “trolls” (p.60) who are anonymous people who are abusive to others online. These abusive people create “endless stress” (p.70) for many teenagers who must worry about protecting their online profiles are risk abusive treatment from others.

The author seems to suggest that online advertising (p.82) is one product that will maintain its value. In what Lanier describes as an early ‘disgust’ at the advertisements, he now suggests that the Google advertising products are “unobtrusive” and “useful”. I found this to be useful information.

A really interesting or good-to-know explanation of why the internet will never go down is Lanier’s description of ‘packet-switching” (p.123) and that only the destination of packets is know, and not the routes. To me, this was quite useful information.

As the book wraps up, Lanier shares more good-to-know opinions about how Wikipedia is the “book of the hive” (p.143), more than you want to know about “Bouba/Kiki” experiments (p.171), and his fascination with the morphing octopus or “Cephalpods” (p.188); Lanier suggests that these cephalopods are so intelligent that they should be running the show and we should be their pets. The thought of that really made me laugh.

Overall, I liked You Are Not a Gadget and I think others who have technical knowledge of the internet would enjoy Lanier’s insight. His message seems to be that there is power in the individual and in the group but that knowledge and understanding by the individual is paramount. I think Lanier is a brilliant computer scientist and a decent psychologist.
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Jun 20, 2012 D.M. Dutcher rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, weird

Erudite if incoherent book by a very smart person that rambles far too much for it's own good.

The loose idea is that the Web 2.0 is a very bad thing, but the book devolves into whatever Jason finds interesting, be it dongles to unlock music so people can make a living off of it, to how MIDI is bad because it limits music, to how cetaceans would take over the world if they only had childhood (seriously) to how GenX's blandness is bad because it gives birth to retro sensibilities. What's worse, th...more

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May 29, 2012 Spencer rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, philosophy

As anyone who knows me could tell you, I'm a pretty heavy internet user. I'm on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and reddit. I've kept a smartphone on me since freshman year of college, and I use it regularly. The internet is a rather inextricable part of my life.

Jaron Lanier is a techie too; he's been involved in technological innovation since the '70s. And he, too, loves the internet. But Lanier is also a philosopher and a humanist, and in You Are Not a Gadget, he turns a critical eye toward the gr...more As anyone who knows me could tell you, I'm a pretty heavy internet user. I'm on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and reddit. I've kept a smartphone on me since freshman year of college, and I use it regularly. The internet is a rather inextricable part of my life.

Jaron Lanier is a techie too; he's been involved in technological innovation since the '70s. And he, too, loves the internet. But Lanier is also a philosopher and a humanist, and in You Are Not a Gadget, he turns a critical eye toward the growing role of the internet in our daily lives, asking how it's affecting things like our creative expression, our views of the economy, and even our senses of self and personhood. The ways we interact with the internet, Lanier argues, are decidedly anti-human, and if we want to set a better course for technology, we ought to do that soon, before the legacy of our technology becomes monumental and stifling.

Throughout Gadget, Lanier tackles parts of internet culture that I would never have seen as issues before--like the open-source movement, for instance. Lanier maintains a civil appreciation for open-source technology and acknowledges its wide appeal, but also is unafraid to point out what so many open-source proponents, myself included, often refuse to admit: the open-source atmosphere is hardly generating innovation. Similarly, Lanier points out that for all its anticipated boons to creativity or the distribution of creative expressions (like music), the internet has hardly changed how expressions of culture are created or distributed. The internet, which has the potential to be a radically revolutionary force in how humans interact, create, and share, is more akin today to an armchair activist, dreaming big but hardly changing a thing.

I can't say I agree with everything Lanier writes. But much of his manifesto is so utterly original and unfamiliar that reading it forced me to challenge my own way of thinking. I see the internet in a new light now, and will be thinking hard about how I interact with it in the future. Whether you love Facebook or hate it, never log on or never log off, Lanier's unique perspective will give you plenty to think about.(less)

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Apr 29, 2012 John Carter McKnight rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Lanier, one of the pioneers of "virtual reality," delivers a thorough critique of the current state of internet culture, particularly the open source movement. His views counter the current orthodoxy, but unlike other critics, (a) he understands the technology at a deep level, (b) understands the social context in which it's used, and (c) only does the cranky-Boomer "everything was better when I was a kid" about 20% of the time (unlike Sherry Turkle, for one, who fails (a) through (c)).

It's def...more

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Apr 27, 2012 Cindy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

Very thought-provoking and enlightening. I have no software knowledge whatever, but I do want my grandchildren (assuming I ever get any!) to live in a world with a vibrant middle class where creativity is nurtured and rewarded, and that is the real topic of this book.

As an English teacher, I was blown away by the quality of the writing in this book. Every chapter is structured logically, so that point builds upon point until the reader reaches a world-view changing epiphany. And the style is so...more

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Feb 10, 2012 David rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: computers, philosophy, technology, audiobook

Jaron Lanier recollects that, a couple of decades ago he remarked to a friend: You know, this is probably the most interesting room in the entire world. And--he was probably right. He was a pioneer, helping to develop the first true virtual reality; in fact, he popularized the term "virtual reality".

If you like Wired magazine, then you will love this book. It is about the philosophy of the digital age. Lanier is a true visionary. He is very opinionated, but his opinions are fascinating. In the b...more

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Feb 09, 2012 Kami rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: essential-socially-aware-reading, research

Whatever your reaction to the assertions made within, this is a unique and fascinating book about computers because it's written in a flowery and rambling style more suited to a philosophical text - a style beaten out of me when I started writing academically about computers. This makes sense, as this is very much a philosophical book, and also makes it a valuable read for computer scientists who may not be used to seeing their world through this kind of filter.

My reaction is definitely mixed. T...more

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Oct 25, 2011 Mykle rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Jaron's dealer

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'...more 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.(less)

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Ryn Shane-Armstrong Mykle,

Respectfully, I totally disagree with you critique of Lanier. I think maybe you've forgotten a very key word in the title of the book: "manifest...more
Oct 26, 2011 05:48pm

Zach Glad to see someone in the "over-40 crowd" thought he was as full of hot air as I did.
Oct 27, 2011 11:12am

Sarah I agree with you Mykle. The lack of sources drove me batty. Definitely throw it to the giant squid.
Jun 02, 2012 06:18pm

Oct 15, 2011 Douglas Summers.Stay rated it 4 of 5 stars

Jaron Lanier points out dangerous trends in internet culture. A few things that stood out:

The web is neotenous, remaining young in both good and bad ways.
His discussion of remixing made me think of the Wood between Worlds, a fictional world with doorways to all the other fictional worlds. Suddenly, everyone can go explore everyone else's world. (That was my reaction not his point.) This idea is also a big part of Chronicles of Amber, Fables, and Sandman.
Wikipedia, like scripture, increases its p...more

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Aug 16, 2011 David Rickert rated it 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps Jaron Lanier is a little cranky that people never embraced virtual reality like he thought they would, but this book has a lot of interesting ideas, so many that it worth a slow, careful read. I adimt that parts of those were a little over my head as my computer background is not the greatest.

His basic premise is that while technological advancements are moving ahead at a rapid pace,
innovation has not and we have failed to control the technology in
meaningful ways. He fears the reductive...more

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