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You Are Not a Gadget

Jaron Lanier

3.56 · Rating details · 5,811 ratings · 671 reviews

Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.

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Hardcover, 221 pages

Published January 12th 2010 by Alfred A. Knopf

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Jun 30, 2011 Will Byrnes rated it really liked it

Shelves: brain-candy, nonfiction, economics

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 pull us into life patterns tha

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Oct 25, 2011 Mykle rated it did not like it

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' 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 12, 2010 Patrick Brown rated it liked it

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 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. ...more

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May 14, 2010 Gordon rated it liked it

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 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 diameter, 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 / Blackberry 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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May 16, 2011 Szplug rated it liked it · 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 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. ...more

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Mar 08, 2010 Trish rated it it was amazing

Shelves: art, computerology, nonfiction, something-completely-new, science

Lanier is something different altogether; he is an original. It took longer than I expected to read this book, but I loved learning that there was someone who was thinking about our human connection by electronic device. Computer expression is a result of, and limited by, human biology. Therefore, it is entirely appropriate to consider them together.

Lanier discusses the possibilities inherent in technology, as well as the concepts of the Singularity, the hive mind, and the “wisdom of crowds.” H Lanier is something different altogether; he is an original. It took longer than I expected to read this book, but I loved learning that there was someone who was thinking about our human connection by electronic device. Computer expression is a result of, and limited by, human biology. Therefore, it is entirely appropriate to consider them together.

Lanier discusses the possibilities inherent in technology, as well as the concepts of the Singularity, the hive mind, and the “wisdom of crowds.” He discusses the constraints of technology as we know it today. He explains that as a humanist, he is worried about a subculture of technologists he calls “cybernetic totalists” or “digital Maoists.” This terminology comes with a whole set of cultural connotations but Lanier takes care to say he is talking conceptually, and not specifically, about members of the group: “the members of the tribe are my lifelong friends, my mentors, my students, my colleagues, my fellow travelers. Many…may disagree with me…[but] the groupthink problem I am worried about isn’t so much in the minds of the technologists themselves, but in the minds of the users of the tools the cybernetic totalists are promoting.” Which is where we come in.

Lanier put his finger on a couple of things that had been in the back of my head but, not knowing everything about the world, I couldn’t possibly assert the truth or validity of these notions. For the same reason, I am not sure he can, either, but we have noticed the same things.

For instance, this paragraph deep in his discussion, after the bit about the Singularity and hive minds:

”Take a look at one of the big cultural blogs like Boing Boing, or the endless stream of mashups that appear on YouTube. 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. This is embarrassing.” (p. 131)

It is almost as though we are constantly surprised by the technology we use, but not by what it can convey. In a sidebar he concludes “You need locality to have focus, evolution, or any other creative process.” (p. 141) This, and many other basic truths punctuate this book and perhaps because it is presented in an organic manner, it is more difficult to summarize quickly and succinctly. It is an important book to read, however, whether or not we agree with him. Agreement is not the point here. The point is he has valid observations and he amuses and enlightens us with what he has been able to glean from his experience. His concerns are not insignificant, and I am pleased he bothered to engage us with this book at all.

There is an impassioned and important section in this book about fostering and feeding the creative mind by finding new ways to monetize the value of creativity. This seems a critical point, and not the completely-obvious statement it appears at first blush. It has everything to do with where we go from here.

I love what he says about humans…that we have been highly evolved through millennia of hard knocks but that neoteny is what separates us from cephalopods, those fellow giants of evolution. By this he means that humans can actually pass on what we have learned and step on the shoulders of those who have come before, while cephalopods rely on instinct. Following this thought, though, comes a fear. Neoteny in humans is lasting longer—does anyone disagree with this?—and often true, original, out-of-the-box creativity comes in that interstice between childhood and adulthood. Is that target area shrinking, or is it just my imagination? Can we blame it on economics or anything so banal?

Lanier explodes my brain just a little when he talks about the synecdoche of smell—how a smell needs additional input from other senses to compute. Lanier starts with technology and ends with biology, which if you think about it, is exactly as it should be.
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Feb 17, 2010 Elijah Meeks rated it liked it

As a disclaimer, Jaron Lanier was roommates with Richard Stallman, with whom I had a bit of an argument regarding epistemology while I was attending a conference at Harvard Law School a few years back. I was young and freshly baccalaureated with a degree in philosophy, and I realized that Richard Stallman, while by all accounts an excellent coder, was a miserable philosopher. Unfortunately, his former roommate isn't much better, either as a philosopher, a sociologist or a musicologist. You Are N As a disclaimer, Jaron Lanier was roommates with Richard Stallman, with whom I had a bit of an argument regarding epistemology while I was attending a conference at Harvard Law School a few years back. I was young and freshly baccalaureated with a degree in philosophy, and I realized that Richard Stallman, while by all accounts an excellent coder, was a miserable philosopher. Unfortunately, his former roommate isn't much better, either as a philosopher, a sociologist or a musicologist. You Are Not a Gadget, while good grist for the mill of anyone concerned with "augmented reality" is simply too shallow on every front. It's a shame, because Lanier is calling for more rigor and engagement with the world (rather than being a gadget that fits into the gadget-sized holes of Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads or any other Web 2.0 machine) and he lets us down with his inability to move beyond his own intuitive rejection of the Social Web.

Not that the book is awful, it's got some very striking moments. The best is when Lanier, a wild-eyed technological optimist from way back (Back when "virtual reality" sounded nigh awesome), bemoans the flagship products of our radical egalitarian open source community: a UNIX clone and an encyclopedia (The former is a youthful 40 years old compared to the latter, which dates back a brisk 500 years according to Wikipedia). He rightly attacks the normative nature of files and code, but oversteps with his constant rejection of MIDI, which sounds fresh until you realize that musicologists have been developing new musical codes for years, as evidenced by the 1996 Beyond MIDI: The Handbook of Musical Codes, which in its introduction does a better job of criticizing MIDI while drawing out constructive lessons than Lanier manages.

But this isn't an old hippie who hates the future, and the predictable denouncements of Lanier (by SlashDot folks that, also predictably, didn't read his book) actually support his intuition. It's unfortunate that he didn't move beyond that intuition. So many biologists, physicists and computer scientists think that the study of knowledge and society were the easy subjects back in school, and figured that coding in C was much more difficult than understanding exceptionless moral norms. But just as they would mock poorly written code, I'm forced to pan their poorly explored humanist inquiries. ...more

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May 29, 2012 Spencer rated it it was amazing

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 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. ...more

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Nov 21, 2010 Cow rated it it was amazing

I had decided to give this four stars, but then I read the other Goodreads reviews.

Everyone I could see was giving it five or one, based on whether or not they agreed. My personal favourite review was one where the reviewer hadn't read the book at all, but had read a New York Times review of the book and reviewed the book based on that alone. I don't know if the author would find that hilarious or horrifying, as it both validates his entire thesis and goes against everything the book hopes to in ...more

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Jun 17, 2011 Phil rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Reading this book was like sitting next to your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving and listening to his rant full of unsubstatiated, uninformed opinions stated like they were the words of God himself.

To be fair, the author does warn the reader that the negativity will eventually end and that the end of the book has some positive messages, but I never got to the positive part. The concepts of the internet making us dumber as a people were all very well written opinions. Unfortunately, the data backing ...more

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Jan 17, 2010 Foppe rated it did not like it

Shelves: abandoned

From reading the NYTimes review of the book, there seem to be major problems with this book, that mark it out to be a book containing pompous drivel.
Allow me to offer an unread critique of one of the main suggestions that are "argued for" in the book. From a NYT review:

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 impenetrab

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Jul 26, 2011 Emily rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2011

In this book, a rather strange man who plays a "Laotian mouth organ" and admires cephalopods tries to convince us to promote humanism in computing. I started this book in a skeptical frame of mind, since the argument could be pompous, point-missing, or Luddite, but it's none of those things. The author throws a lot of ideas out, and some of them are half-baked, and a few I disagree with, but overall there's a lot to think about here. His main argument--that computers give us amazing powers to be ...more

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Dec 28, 2011 Aaron rated it it was ok · 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 19, 2010 Andy rated it it was ok

Its a shame, Lanier has some interesting theories and plenty of experience to back them up but he kept losing me with his metaphors.

Here's two thoughts that do warrant consideration:
1. I'm not Facebook's customer, the advertiser is. I'm just another product on Facebooks shelf giving their business added value.
2. Young people (including people that "think" they're young) announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the em ...more

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Feb 02, 2011 Jen from Quebec :0) rated it it was ok

Shelves: foreign-authors, non-fiction, could-not-finish-ugh

This book had a LOT of great ideas, but read like a textbook that had been translated from a different language. Terrible writing style for what I thought I was buying....---Jen from Quebec :0)

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Dec 28, 2017 Kara Babcock rated it it was ok

Shelves: culture, own, non-fiction, not-my-cup-of-tea, 2017-read

My first reaction upon starting this book was trepidation regarding how long I had put it off. Published in 2010 (and therefore probably finished in late 2008 or early 2009), You Are Not a Gadget is nearly 10 years old. That’s an eternity in the world of technology. I’ve had this sitting in my to-read pile for years, just haven’t gotten around to it! I was curious to see how well Jaron Lanier’s self-titled manifesto would hold up, considering that 9 years is an eternity in the tech world.

The ans ...more

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Apr 24, 2011 Shawn rated it liked it

Shelves: nf-r-science-culture-dno

This is a rather difficult book to review since it falls outside my usual purview. A good friend suggested I check it out and so I got a copy from the library and buzzed through it instead of adding it to the endless "To Be Read" list.

As others have noted/griped about, it's not a drawn-out, reasoned argument so much as it is the author putting down his basic thoughts on the topics of computers, the internet, technology and how general and specific forms of same, and our interactions with them, a This is a rather difficult book to review since it falls outside my usual purview. A good friend suggested I check it out and so I got a copy from the library and buzzed through it instead of adding it to the endless "To Be Read" list.

As others have noted/griped about, it's not a drawn-out, reasoned argument so much as it is the author putting down his basic thoughts on the topics of computers, the internet, technology and how general and specific forms of same, and our interactions with them, are changing us as a culture, a civilization, a society and a species. The complaint that it could have been just as well represented by a number of magazine article (or, ironically, blog posts) misses the point, I think. He calls it a manifesto, for gosh sakes, you should expect some latitude. And while "New Media" mavens have no interest in geezer tech like books, the presentation format will likely bring the author more readers, not less. Because those that eschew books are almost certainly likely to reject the basic concepts presented here in an out of hand, reactionary way (but, they *can't* be reactionaries, because they're hip, bleeding edge - remember that silly bit of posturing - visionaries who have freed us all from the flesh, right!?!)

Those of the Web 2.0/Neo-Futurist/Transhumanist/"come the Singularity" tribes and their ilk will likely consider this book a Luddite tract. But that, by definition, is impossible as Lanier's background in early and current current computer tech gives him the knowledge and position to know whereof he speaks. As to the arguments of the book, I think it should be checked out for yourself and I don't really know if I could re-articulate them well (I will be loading up salient quotes - ah, the irony) suffice to say they are generally not alarmist so much as guardedly cautious regarding technology, how it changes us, and the increasing speed with which that is happening. In no way alarmist, these are informed statements, thoughts and suppositions, not thoroughly interrogated and footnoted arguments, so those who need to dismiss them can do so with relative ease and get back to the problem of how they're going to make all content free and smash the commerce machine while still making a buck off the process. The rest of us can ponder and weigh.

In particular, I was most struck with the concept of how the limiting stricture of computer frameworks and their presentations actually cause us to "adjust down" our expectations of humanity and our own flexibility, instead of demanding more out of the technology (reduced - an example would be the phenomena of "friendship" as now defined by quantitative stats racked up on FACEBOOK). Also interesting was getting yet another perspective on the endlessly worrying modern trend of our growing cultural sociopathology and how the internet places us in the position of distanced outsider for which everything, including human pain and misery, is a sensation to be consumed, exploited or even deliberately generated for our amusement. This is a problem that may very well kill us, our race, our species. And the book gave me a lot to think about regarding the free content on the web movement, paralleling my own realization that the atomization of the classic, physical object publishing model (in which, clumsily, profit and thus continued existence guaranteed some level of quality, even if it was hemmed in by "lowest common denominator" tastes) has now given us a a supposedly "free" market in which no one can make a profit to survive on and, in a critical sense, there is no "bottom" which strains out the bad writing and muck, and so we are awash with a back-flow of effluvial crap through which no one can take the time to wade (and exactly at the moment when distinct critical perspective is most frowned upon because everyone has their own opinion and all are equally valid - and thus equally worthless - on the democratized web).

On the negative side, while I understand how the thinking strand gets there, and agreed with a lot of that strand, I do think Lanier perhaps takes his diatribe against the leveling effects of digitization on music and creativity a little too far when he condemns, en masse, electronic music as uncreative, cold and sterile - in this final form, these are arguments I've heard a million times before and the last 20 or so years have proved them essentially short-sighted. But the paths along the way to that rather hollow end statement are also interesting.

In the end, the question is not whether you agree with Lanier's book, either in whole or in part, or disagree with it, but whether - if even the smallest aspect of it is true - anything can be done about these effects. And I don't think they can, honestly.

I will add at this point that Lanier does a good job of remaining mostly apolitical throughout the entirety of the book and what follows are my own cranky, (and thus easily dismissible) views. The only likely way such a juggernaut of brilliant technological thinking, savvy corporate investment and facile (and at times downright anti-human, exploitational and sociopathic) philosophy and worldview can be derailed is by a large scale, real-world event. The looming Worldwide Depression accidentally engineered by the market-worshiping Neo-Cons and their reckless, greedy banking masters (and ushered in by the limp-willed, spineless Neo-Libs - all of whom will be rewarded in the ruins, I'm sure) could do it - but that's cold comfort and there's always the equal chance that such an event will just be the trigger stage for the often-feared sociological shift to a technocracy in which the "idiot, bestial many" slave away for (and enjoy the reductive fruits of) the tiny, tech-savvy upper-middle class and their non-tech savvy but phenomenally rich masters....

in 2040, will pony-tailed, nice-guy but whiny and politically uncommitted ("I'm a progressive!") data-tech, with all his comic book statues and video games, realize he's actually a complete tool of evil as he has to take a pistol to protect himself from hordes of starving children ("it's okay, they deserve it" the corporate news reassures him) when he goes out and eats at his exclusive geek-chic, Pokemon & Fetish-themed restaurant? Time will tell...

...but we can't say we weren't warned (more cold comfort).... ...more

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Feb 10, 2012 David rated it it was amazing

Shelves: technology, audiobook, computers, philosophy

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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May 03, 2010 Jason rated it really liked it

The core ideas of this book are great, but they're explained in such a scattershot fashion that it's tough to recommend the book to people not heavily interested in technology's effect on culture. Buried here is a great criticism of the design philosophies of the current generation of web entrepreneurs and the wide leeway users have given them. Lanier's criticism, on the surface, can seem like an indictment of techno-utopianism in general, but in my opinion he is only focusing on techno-utopian ...more

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Jun 12, 2010 Surfing Moose rated it really liked it

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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Aug 15, 2010 Christy Stewart rated it liked it

Shelves: history, reference, philosophy, politics, reviewed, nonfiction, science

There are a few problems with this book...

1. The author mentions himself too often, it comes off as self-indulgent. This is a topic that would be better analyzed by statistics than personal opinion.

2. A ton of books are being printed all the time on what being human IS, and this book tries to tackle what being human is NOT while never attempting to define his parameters of humanity.

3. It's full of bull shit about how technology has changed society. Nothing has changed. Not since one dude said to ...more

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May 17, 2016 Jim Nail rated it really liked it

I read this twice but I still don't feel youngsmart enough to review it, especially after reading the reviews, some of them not so postive, written by the youngsmart people. I am 68 years old. When I was a kid I had to call the operator (a real person with a headset on) to talk to my best friend 8 miles away. I can remember the invention of color television. Now I am using the internet, texting on a cell phone, dependent on Wikipedia for instant information. I have read numerous books on the sub ...more

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Jul 27, 2010 Donna rated it liked it

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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Jan 12, 2011 Nick rated it really liked it

I am not a tech guy. I consider myself technologically savvy but not sophisticated: I understand software but not hardware; I’ve created a website but don’t know html; etc. I picked up this book because it was amongst the “Best New Non-Fiction” at a local bookstore.

The funny thing is that I feel as if I was the perfect audience for the book since most of the information presented felt very fresh and new to me while perhaps much of what he writes might already be known to the self-described “tech I am not a tech guy. I consider myself technologically savvy but not sophisticated: I understand software but not hardware; I’ve created a website but don’t know html; etc. I picked up this book because it was amongst the “Best New Non-Fiction” at a local bookstore.

The funny thing is that I feel as if I was the perfect audience for the book since most of the information presented felt very fresh and new to me while perhaps much of what he writes might already be known to the self-described “technologist.” However, it’s hard to say whether other people like myself, i.e. the general reading public, will read it, especially with its ugly jacket design and silly title*. I hope they do. The book deals with the direction in which computing technology is developing and the moral, cultural, and financial consequences that might be in store for us; it proved to be quite a thought-provoking and, dare I say it, important read.

First off, Lanier opened my eyes to the origins of some general computing ideas, ideas that we generally take for granted. For instance, Lanier was programming when the whole concept of a “file” was developed. Jesus! Now it seems to make sense that the digital world should mimic the real world of documents and folders. Yet Lanier reminds us that this wasn’t always a foregone conclusion, that there might have been a scenario in which everything was one giant file. How much would our lives be different if this was the case, if files were not portable, and, consequently (and more importantly) not so easily reproducible?

Thus Lanier helps to address issues at an almost “atomic” level, reminding us that every aspect of the web and computers was designed. He’s not saying that we can just go back and fix things—in fact, he says the opposite, that once a program gets accepted and “locked-in” with additional programming put around it, it’s very difficult to start from scratch. However, just thinking about the original, potential possibilities allows the imagination to roam much more freely and truly question the status quo. It reminded me of when I learned about the Gnostic gospels, that there had been many, many different types of Christianities butting heads before Roman Catholicism extinguished the rest with the help of the Roman army. When I learned this information in college, there was very little in American culture that pointed to these other possibilities. The writers of the Gnostic gospels aren’t around these days to protest the way Christianity has developed. Lanier, on the other hand, is alive and well and openly objects to the way things are going on the web, remarking that just because a certain method is accepted and codified, doesn’t mean it’s the best one.

Lanier’s broad-mindedness as an original creator has many antecedents in history— thinkers and creative artists working with a new medium seem to always dream in much more radical ways than the generations that follow, who, barred from the delights of novelty, work more on perfecting what is already there than on experimenting with it. Lanier was one of the original creators of virtual reality (and he also explains later what happened to that) and hence was around close to the very beginning of computer programming as we know it. He’s been around to witness many forks in the road and knows what directions things could have gone in. This gives his objections a weight that an ordinary citizen might not have.

To sum up his objections specifically, Lanier discusses how there is a growing acceptance of the “hive mind” mentality, that whatever the internet produces, due to the combined efforts of the crowd, it is good and that the effort to control it isn’t worth the trouble. There is another name for this phenomenon: the “free” market. And just like the so-called “free” market allows for a few corporations to devour small businesses all in a purported desire to help customers, so do the internet behemoths reap the many financial rewards of the system while many individuals, seemingly benefiting from free music files and free movies, are quietly being undermined as culture and the instruments of free speech lose their power.

Lanier offers some mediocre solutions for these problems but even if they were brilliant, they still probably wouldn’t work from his suggesting them—for regulations to work, there has to be a government in place to enforce them. Considering the internet used to be thought of as an untamed environment, the Wild West wasn’t exactly the Fair West. The advantages of wilderness were balanced by its dangers. And yet now we live in a time where the web is almost a boring place yet the dangers of total economic destruction of so many media industries looms very large.

People may laugh off Lanier’s almost dire warnings about the dehumanizing aspects of Facebook and Wikipedia but the truth is that a change in perspective is not a sudden thing. Like climate change, you will never be able to feel the changes day to day. And when the glaciers all melt and every day is either a hurricane or a drought, and when a very few monopolies control all the wealth on the internet, by then it’ll be a little too late to change things. Okay, so I’m being a bit dire myself now. But sometimes even just a little loss of individual creativity, freedom, joy can be enough to change the future for the worse.

Of course, the book is not without problems. Lanier, unfortunately, is not always the best spokesman for his ideas. He is what some people might call a “weirdo” and sometimes it almost gets in the way of his credibility. For instance, after bashing the web 2.0 for a while he tries to make amends and says “Hey, I don’t hate the web, really. I love the web! Me and all the oud players [read: obscure musical instrument] get together on the oud forum and talk oud!” Considering, this is practically his sole example of why he likes the web, this is a good way to alienate most of the population and does not really promote his cause of getting that same population to wake up and fix things before it’s too late.

Also, there’s a particularly disagreeable chapter in which he basically says that generation X, Y, & Z have accomplished almost nothing musically. While he makes the fair claim that it is very difficult to distinguish music made in the late 90s to music made in the late 00s because of the current reliance on rehashing previous musical forms, he ignores some very significant facts. Most of the 20th century’s musical revolution came from two sources: the shifting from the European traditional focus on melody and harmony to the African & Asian traditional focus on rhythm; and the electrification of music. While the mixing of these two ideas led to a massive variety of different musical forms, eventually, equilibrium will be (and perhaps already has been) reached and there will be a decrease in the novelty of the musical ideas, especially since recording allows us never to lose previous musical traditions. Consequently, I believe it is the timing of the current generation of young musicians in history rather than any inherent lack of talent or forward-thinking on their part for any perceived musical repetitiveness. That and the splintering of the music industry and popular music itself into so many camps means that there are fewer and fewer mass musical movements to define generations.

There are some unexpectedly happy and wonderful digressions in the book, as well; there’s a terrific chapter near the end of the book which hints at a link between language and smell. Considering how grim most of his predictions seem, though, here’s hoping that this book will at least get some people thinking about the future of technology—and perhaps find a way to get us back on the right path.
...more

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Jun 13, 2010 Jill rated it liked it

Shelves: did-not-finish

I have the feeling that I'm not going to finish this. When I first started to read it, I felt it should have been required reading for iSchool (or, as seemed more likely, underground reading for iSchool) -- the digital Maoism and techno-wishful thinking Lanier describes certainly corresponded to my experience in several classes (I KNEW I was right about the weirdly free-market language and the hints of libertarianism). Lanier's points about dehumanization are on target. But the book is starting I have the feeling that I'm not going to finish this. When I first started to read it, I felt it should have been required reading for iSchool (or, as seemed more likely, underground reading for iSchool) -- the digital Maoism and techno-wishful thinking Lanier describes certainly corresponded to my experience in several classes (I KNEW I was right about the weirdly free-market language and the hints of libertarianism). Lanier's points about dehumanization are on target. But the book is starting to fall apart on me -- as critical as Lanier is of current web culture, he doesn't seem able to step outside of it, and some of his suggestions (um, the "songle"?) just don't ring any bells for me. I have to admit that I'd rather read a book that would make some of the same points but also encourage some engagement with the real, non-Interwebs world. The trouble is, framing the discussion in terms of internet vs. non-internet gets you labeled as a fuddy-duddy Luddite (ooh, that's catchy), and also sort of implies that there's a binarism -- you're either fully integrated or you're not, when in reality I'd guess that people engage with the internet in a broader range of ways than we seem able to acknowledge (though I think there's some legitimacy to the idea that computers lock us into binarism even more than we understand). Earlier this evening I saw a tweet from a religion professor who noted that the biggest need for digital humanists was for them to create a web-based community that involved discussion of other things besides the web. Good point. I'd like to see that too. Information science/studies seems to involve a whole lot of conversation about information science/studies, and not so much about content beyond that.

That said, I heartily applaud anyone who points out that information requires human use and interpretation and argues against the anthropomorphizing of information -- even better that it's coming from someone within the information world. If a plain old humanist said that, he/she'd just be dismissed as one of those stupid, backwards humanists who probably writes on paper (ba ha ha ha ha! pen and paper! ha ha ha!)

That said, I'm going to go write in a notebook. ...more

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Jun 29, 2013 Jesse Toldness rated it it was ok

tl;dr: Damn Hippies. Damn Old Computer Hippies

Longer Version: This is not a book. This is what it says on the title. A Manifesto. A stream of consciousness outpouring, unfiltered and unedited and unbound, from the author's mind. This isn't any one single thing because the old Computer Hippy couldn't stay on any one topic long enough to really flesh anything out. Major concepts get brushed over with a mention, while long, tedious personal fixations get pages and pages of skippable twaddle. Lanier ...more

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May 14, 2011 Mark Rayner rated it liked it

I would like to give this work a higher rating, but I'm afraid it's a bit too hard to read. That said, I think anyone who is interested in our future as a species should spend some time with Lanier and this manifesto, because he raises some pertinent questions about what technology does to us as human beings; specifically, he is interested in how the design of technology affects us as human beings.

I agree with much of his criticism. I'm worried that humans are now having to adapt ourselves to ou ...more

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Jan 20, 2012 Ben added it

This book is about disappointment. Jaron Lanier is a “programmer, musician, and father of virtual reality technology,” and he’s bummed about how computer programming and the Internet have turned out so far. I don’t understand a lot of the technology and virtual-reality jargon he speaks, but I do get disappointment. I mean, F-book is really lame, isn’t it? I’ve joked that if I was on F-book, I would set the following auto-response to every message posted on my wall: “I don’t care.” Of course, alm ...more

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Sep 20, 2017 Ben Bush added it

Shelves: read-in-2017

In style and structure, this made me think of Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. People who are into this might dig Astra Taylor's The People's Platform or her great essay "Serfing the Net" ...more

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Mar 17, 2010 Zach rated it it was ok

The first half of this book does resemble a manifesto of sorts. Lanier keeps interrupting himself to say that he's not a Luddite, probably because his fierce critique of what he calls "cybernetic totalism" really makes him sound like one at times. Cybernetic totalism is what he calls the dominant culture of the internet, including such ideas as simple anonymity, open culture, cloud computing, trolling, mash-ups, and the singularity. He fears a future in which machines and bits are more important The first half of this book does resemble a manifesto of sorts. Lanier keeps interrupting himself to say that he's not a Luddite, probably because his fierce critique of what he calls "cybernetic totalism" really makes him sound like one at times. Cybernetic totalism is what he calls the dominant culture of the internet, including such ideas as simple anonymity, open culture, cloud computing, trolling, mash-ups, and the singularity. He fears a future in which machines and bits are more important than individuals, and gives a lot of justification for why he thinks we're heading there. He proposes that the internet and related technologies be remade with humanism and spirituality at the forefront of their designs. His ideas for how to do this are almost laughably half-baked (he thinks people will buy things called "songles" that re-introduce scarcity into recorded music), although I don't necessarily disagree that it's a good direction to take.

Some of his analysis is chillingly spot-on, such as his critique of Wikipedia, the primary punching bag of the manifesto. By letting the will of the crowd drown out individual voices of expertise, he argues, Wikipedia elevates an article itself above the people who created it, effectively erasing the importance of individuals. Similarly, new media forms such as blogs are celebrated not for individual acts of creation, but for the aggregation of such acts; the blog itself gets more credit than the people whose work it links.

He also points out that the internet, far from being the culturally radical frontier we sometimes imagine it to be, is actually rather conservative, since the mob favors the familiar and recognizable above the truly avant garde:

It is astonishing how much of the chatter online is driven by fan responses to expression that was originally created within the sphere of old media and that is now being destroyed by the net. Comments about TV shows, major movies, commercial music releases, and video games must be responsible for almost as much bit traffic as porn. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but since the web is killing the old media, we face a situation in which culture is effectively eating its own seed stock.

He mourns what he perceives to be a lack of originality in online discourse, considering retro fetishism and remix culture to be sure signs of the intertubes' cultural decline. He could have a point.

Unfortunately, there's also a lot of incredibly poor philosophy mixed in with is social critique. For example, he tries quite unsuccessfully to argue that consciousness can never be understood through physical means because... well, because it's just too mysterious, and because he says so! He retells an old thought experiment: if you were able to simulate a neuron precisely, then you replaced each of the neurons in your brain one by one with a wireless device controlled by such a simulation, such that it perfectly mimicked your existing brain functions, would the computer(s) controlling the simulation then be conscious? I say yes, obviously. He never even bothers to justify why he feels the answer is no, considering it self-obvious I guess. Similarly he tries to argue that consciousness must be a metaphysical mystery because otherwise (get ready for this) time is negated. You see, it must be our consciousness that travels through time, which is why we cannot experience the future or the past, only the present.

If you are certain the experience of time is an illusion, all you have left is time itself. Something has to be situated—in a kind of metatime or something—in order for the illusion of the present moment to take place at all. You force yourself to say that time itself travels through reality. This is an absurd, circular thought.

Well why can't it, Jaron? He says this with a straight face right after he gets done talking about how our limited consciousness cannot comprehend certain metaphysical mysteries.

I had trouble with a lot of the writing, especially early on. I would often have to read a pair of sentences multiple times, trying to understand why they were right next to each other, let alone in the same paragraph. The entire last third of the book seems completely unrelated to the earlier chapters, abandoning the social critique and presenting his own vision of the technologies of the future, along with his musings on how the brain works and so on. I'm sorry, Jaron, but you can't spend chapters 1-7 calling the Singularity a cult for technologists (he compares it to the rapture) and then chapters 8-10 gushing about how fully sensual virtual reality will change our lives.

I picked this book up because I had read one of the excerpts and found it compelling. Sadly, those infrequent excerpts are all that are worth reading in this mess. ...more

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About Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier

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Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.
In the sciences:

Jaron Lanier scientific interests include biomimetic information architectures, user interfaces, heterogeneous scientific simulations, advanced information systems for medicine, and computational approaches to the fundamentals of physics. He collaborates with a wide range of scientists in fields related to t Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.
In the sciences:

Jaron Lanier scientific interests include biomimetic information architectures, user interfaces, heterogeneous scientific simulations, advanced information systems for medicine, and computational approaches to the fundamentals of physics. He collaborates with a wide range of scientists in fields related to these interests.

Lanier's name is also often associated with Virtual Reality research. He either coined or popularized the term 'Virtual Reality' and in the early 1980s founded VPL Research, the first company to sell VR products. In the late 1980s he led the team that developed the first implementations of multi-person virtual worlds using head mounted displays, for both local and wide area networks, as well as the first "avatars", or representations of users within such systems. While at VPL, he and his colleagues developed the first implementations of virtual reality applications in surgical simulation, vehicle interior prototyping, virtual sets for television production, and assorted other areas. He led the team that developed the first widely used software platform architecture for immersive virtual reality applications. Sun Microsystems acquired VPL's seminal portfolio of patents related to Virtual Reality and networked 3D graphics in 1999.

From 1997 to 2001, Lanier was the Chief Scientist of Advanced Network and Services, which contained the Engineering Office of Internet2, and served as the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet2. The Initiative demonstrated the first prototypes of tele-immersion in 2000 after a three-year development period. From 2001 to 2004 he was Visiting Scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc., where he developed solutions to core problems in telepresence and tele-immersion. He was Scholar at Large for Microsoft from 2006 to 2009, and Partner Architect at Microsoft Research from 2009 forward.

Lanier has received honorary doctorates from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Franklin and Marshall College, was the recipient of CMU's Watson award in 2001, was a finalist for the first Edge of Computation Award in 2005, and received a Lifetime Career Award from the IEEE in 2009 for contributions to Virtual Reality.

Punditry:

Lanier is a well-known author and speaker. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010. His book "You Are Not a Gadget" was released in 2010 and was named one of the 10 best books of the year by Michiko Kakutani in the NY Times. He writes and speaks on numerous topics, including high-technology business, the social impact of technological practices, the philosophy of consciousness and information, Internet politics, and the future of humanism. His lecture client list has included most of the well-known high technology firms as well as many others in the energy, automotive, and financial services industries. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Discover (where he has been a columnist), The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Harpers Magazine, The Sciences, Wired Magazine (where he was a founding contributing editor), and Scientific American. He has edited special "future" issues of SPIN and Civilization magazines. He is one of the 100 remarkable people of the Global Business Network. In 2005 Lanier was selected as one of the top one hundred public intellectuals in the world by readers of Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines.

Music:

As a musician, Lanier has been active in the world of new "classical" music since the late seventies. He is a pianist and a specialist in unusual musical instruments, especially the wind and string instruments of Asia. He maintains one of the largest and most varied collections of actively played rare instruments in the world.

Lanier's "Symphony for Amelia," premiered in Octo ...more

Books by Jaron Lanier

Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality

Internet Liberation: Alive or Dead? (Cato Unbound)

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Quotes from You Are Not a Gadget

“A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.” — 105 likes

“But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?

People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous.

The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality.” — 31 likes

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You Are Not a Gadget

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Books by Jaron Lanier

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