You Are Not A Gadget

by Jaron Lanier

A new generation has come of age with a reduced expectation of what a person can be, and of who each person might become.

changing the height of one’s avatar in immersive virtual reality transforms self-esteem and social self-perception.

It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering.

When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program. When they design an internet service that is edited by a vast anonymous crowd, they are suggesting that a random crowd of humans is an organism with a legitimate point of view.

We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (web-cams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). These become the structures by which you connect to the world and other people.

We tinker with your philosophy by direct manipulation of your cognitive experience, not indirectly, through argument. It takes only a tiny group of engineers to create technology that can shape the entire future of human experience with incredible speed.

A single person, Tim Berners-Lee, came to invent the particular design of today’s web.

Berners-Lee’s initial motivation was to serve a community of physicists, not the whole world. Even so, the atmosphere in which the design of the web was embraced by early adopters was influenced by idealistic discussions.

The brittle character of maturing computer programs can cause digital designs to get frozen into place by a process known as lock-in.

The process of significantly changing software in a situation in which a lot of other software is dependent on it is the hardest thing to do. So it almost never happens.

One day in the early 1980s, a music synthesizer designer named Dave Smith casually made up a way to represent musical notes. It was called MIDI.

MIDI was made of digital patterns that represented keyboard events like “key-down” and “key-up.” That meant it could not describe the curvy, transient expressions a singer or a saxophone player can produce.

In spite of its limitations, MIDI became the standard scheme to represent music in software.

Standards and their inevitable lack of prescience posed a nuisance before computers, of course.

The London Tube was designed with narrow tracks and matching tunnels that, on several of the lines, cannot accommodate air-conditioning, because there is no room to ventilate the hot air from the trains.

But software is worse than railroads, because it must always adhere with absolute perfection to a boundlessly particular, arbitrary, tangled, intractable messiness.

A mere annoyance then explodes into a cataclysmic challenge because the raw power of computers grows exponentially. In the world of computers, this is known as Moore’s law.

After MIDI, a musical note was no longer just an idea, but a rigid, mandatory structure you couldn’t avoid in the aspects of life that had gone digital.

Science removes ideas from play empirically, for good reason. Lock-in, however, removes design options based on what is easiest to program, what is politically feasible, what is fashionable, or what is created by chance.

We have narrowed what we expect from the most commonplace forms of musical sound in order to make the technology adequate.

A lot of the locked-in ideas about how software is put together come from an old operating system called UNIX. It has some characteristics that are related to MIDI.

UNIX is based on discrete events that don’t have to happen at a precise moment in time. The human organism, meanwhile, is based on continuous sensory, cognitive, and motor processes that have to be synchronized precisely in time.

The file is a set of philosophical ideas made into eternal flesh. The ideas expressed by the file include the notion that human expression comes in severable chunks that can be organized as leaves on an abstract tree—and that the chunks have versions and need to be matched to compatible applications.

It’s worth trying to notice when philosophies are congealing into locked-in software.

the corresponding philosophies of how humans can express meaning have been so ingrained into the interlocked software designs of the internet that we might never be able to fully get rid of them, or even remember that things could have been different.

Lock-in makes us forget the lost freedoms we had in the digital past. That can make it harder to see the freedoms we have in the digital present.

The rise of the web was a rare instance when we learned new, positive information about human potential.

In vast numbers, people did something cooperatively, solely because it was a good idea, and it was beautiful.

The way the internet has gone sour since then is truly perverse. The central faith of the web’s early design has been superseded by a different faith in the centrality of imaginary entities epitomized by the idea that the internet as a whole is coming alive and turning into a superhuman creature.

Every element in the system—every computer, every person, every bit—comes to depend on relentlessly detailed adherence to a common standard, a common point of exchange.

An endless series of gambits backed by gigantic investments encouraged young people entering the online world for the first time to create standardized presences on sites like Facebook.

The way we got here is that one subculture of technologists has recently become more influential than the others. The winning subculture doesn’t have a formal name, but I’ve sometimes called the members “cybernetic totalists” or “digital Maoists.”

The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless.

A self-proclaimed materialist movement that attempts to base itself on science starts to look like a religion rather quickly.

The Singularity and the noosphere, the idea that a collective consciousness emerges from all the users on the web, echo Marxist social determinism and Freud’s calculus of perversions.

The new designs on the verge of being locked in, the web 2.0 designs, actively demand that people define themselves downward. It’s one thing to launch a limited conception of music or time into the contest for what philosophical idea will be locked in. It is another to do that with the very idea of what it is to be a person.

Emphasizing the crowd means deemphasizing individual humans in the design of society, and when you ask people not to be people, they revert to bad moblike behaviors. This leads not only to empowered trolls, but to a generally unfriendly and unconstructive online world.

Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.

In most arenas of human expression, it’s fine for a person to love the medium they are given to work in.

But in the case of digital creative materials, like MIDI, UNIX, or even the World Wide Web, it’s a good idea to be skeptical.

There was an active campaign in the 1980s and 1990s to promote visual elegance in software.

That’s why we have nice fonts and flexible design options on our screens. It wouldn’t have happened otherwise.

A similar campaign should be taking place now, influencing engineers, designers, businesspeople, and everyone else to support humanistic alternatives whenever possible.

THE IDEAS THAT I hope will not be locked in rest on a philosophical foundation that I sometimes call cybernetic totalism. It applies metaphors from certain strains of computer science to people and the rest of reality.

computers and robots will be able to construct copies of themselves, and these copies will be a little better than the originals because of intelligent software.

The process will repeat. Successive generations will be ever smarter and will appear ever faster. People might think they’re in control, until one fine day the rate of robot improvement ramps up so quickly that superintelligent robots will suddenly rule the Earth.

Humans might then enjoy immortality within virtual reality, because the global brain would be so huge that it would be absolutely easy—a no-brainer, if you will—for it to host all our consciousnesses for eternity.

The difference between sanity and fanaticism is found in how well the believer can avoid confusing consequential differences in timing.

if you believe the Singularity is coming soon, you might cease to design technology to serve humans, and prepare instead for the grand events it will bring.

Antihuman rhetoric is fascinating in the same way that self-destruction is fascinating: it offends us, but we cannot look away.