You Are Not A Gadget

by Jaron Lanier

the structure of the online economy as it has developed is hurting the middle class, and the viability of capitalism for everyone in the long term.

When I refer to the tribe, I am not writing about some distant “them.” The members of the tribe are my lifelong friends, my mentors, my students, my colleagues, and my fellow travelers. Many of my friends disagree with me. It is to their credit that I feel free to speak my mind, knowing that I will still be welcome in our world.

Every save-the-world cause has a list of suggestions for “what each of us can do”: bike to work, recycle, and so on. I can propose such a list related to the problems I’m talking about: Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.

Wikipedia, for instance, works on what I call the Oracle illusion, in which knowledge of the human authorship of a text is suppressed in order to give the text superhuman validity. Traditional holy books work in precisely the same way and present many of the same problems.

I like the term “empathy” because it has spiritual overtones. A term like “sympathy” or “allegiance” might be more precise, but I want the chosen term to be slightly mystical, to suggest that we might not be able to fully understand what goes on between us and others, that we should leave open the possibility that the relationship can’t be represented in a digital database.

Obviously the example of bacteria is extreme, but it shows that the circle is only meaningful if it is finite. If we lose the finitude, we lose our own center and identity. The fable of the Bacteria Liberation Front can serve as a parody of any number of extremist movements on the left or the right.

How do I draw my circle? I just spend time with the various species and decide if they feel like they are in my circle or not. I’ve raised chickens and somehow haven’t felt empathy toward them. They are little more than feathery servo-controlled mechanisms compared to goats, for instance, which I have also raised, and will not eat. On the other hand, a colleague of mine, virtual reality researcher Adrian Cheok, feels such empathy with chickens that he built teleimmersion suits for them so that he could telecuddle them from work.

What has saved us from Marxism is simply that new technologies have in general created new jobs—and those jobs have generally been better than the old ones. They have been ever more elevated—more cerebral, creative, cultural, or strategic—than the jobs they replaced. A descendant of a Luddite who smashed looms might be programming robotic looms today.

For many college students, sharing files is considered an act of civil disobedience. That would mean that stealing digital material puts you in the company of Gandhi and Martin Luther King!

The financial crisis brought about by the U.S. mortgage meltdown of 2008 was a case of too many people believing in the cloud too much.