You Are Not A Gadget

by Jaron Lanier

a better portrait of the troll-evoking design is effortless, consequence-free, transient anonymity in the service of a goal, such as promoting a point of view, that stands entirely apart from one’s identity or personality. Call it drive-by anonymity.

Over the last century, new media technologies have often become prominent as components of massive outbreaks of organized violence. For example, the Nazi regime was a major pioneer of radio and cinematic propaganda. The Soviets were also obsessed with propaganda technologies.

It’s not crazy to worry that, with millions of people connected through a medium that sometimes brings out their worst tendencies, massive, fascist-style mobs could rise up suddenly.

The ideology of violation does not radiate from the lowest depths of trolldom, but from the highest heights of academia.

A summary of the ideology goes like this: All those nontechnical, ignorant, innocent people out there are going about their lives thinking that they are safe, when in actuality they are terribly vulnerable to those who are smarter than they are. Therefore, we smartest technical people ought to invent ways to attack the innocents, and publicize our results, so that everyone is alerted to the dangers of our superior powers.

Those who disagree with the ideology of violation are said to subscribe to a fallacious idea known as “security through obscurity.”

security through obscurity has another name in the world of biology: biodiversity.

Why did Usenet support drive-by anonymity? You could argue that it was the easiest design to implement at the time, but I’m not sure that’s true. All those academic, corporate, and military users belonged to large, well-structured organizations, so the hooks were immediately available to create a nonanonymous design.

Information systems need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality. Demand more from information than it can give, and you end up with monstrous designs.

What computerized analysis of all the country’s school tests has done to education is exactly what Facebook has done to friendships. In both cases, life is turned into a database. Both degradations are based on the same philosophical mistake, which is the belief that computers can presently represent human thought or human relationships. These are things computers cannot currently do.

The most effective young Facebook users, however—the ones who will probably be winners if Facebook turns out to be a model of the future they will inhabit as adults—are the ones who create successful online fictions about themselves.

THUS FaR, I have presented two ways in which the current dominant ideology of the digital world, cybernetic totalism, has been a failure. The first example might be called a spiritual failure. The ideology has encouraged narrow philosophies that deny the mystery of the existence of experience.

The second failure is behavioral. It naturally happens that the designs that celebrate the noosphere and other ideals of cybernetic totalism tend to undervalue humans. Examples are the ubiquitous invocations of anonymity and crowd identity.

a third failure is presented, this time in the sphere of economics. For millions of people, the internet means endless free copies of music, videos, and other forms of detached human expression.

Once technological advances are sufficient to potentially offer all people lives filled with health and ease, what will happen? Will only a tiny minority benefit?

The developed world might start to know how the most abject, hungry, and ill people in the poorest parts of the world feel today. Middle-class life expectancies could start to seem puny compared to those of a lucky elite.

It has been repeatedly confirmed, however, that leveling a playing field with a Marxist revolution kills, dulls, or corrupts most of the people on the field.

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.

One consequence of ascending the ramp of technological progress, as happened rapidly during industrialization, was that large numbers of people started to make a living from meeting needs at ever higher elevations on Maslow’s hierarchy.

The early generations of Marxists didn’t hate these elevated strivers, though they did seek to flatten status in society. Mao brought a different sensibility into play, in which only toil within the foundation layer of Maslow’s hierarchy was worthy of reward.

digital Maoism doesn’t reject all hierarchy. Instead, it overwhelmingly rewards the one preferred hierarchy of digital metaness, in which a mashup is more important than the sources who were mashed. A blog of blogs is more exalted than a mere blog.

The hierarchy of metaness is the natural hierarchy for cloud gadgets in the same way that Maslow’s idea describes a natural hierarchy of human aspirations.

Without technological progress, all the well-meaning political and moral progress in the world wasn’t enough to change the conditions of the lives of ordinary people.

People will focus on activities other than fighting and killing one another only so long as technologists continue to come up with ways to improve living standards for everyone at once.

expanding wealth is necessary if morality is to have any large-scale effect on events, and improving technology is the only way to expand wealth for many people at the same time.

During the past decade and a half, since the debut of the web, even during the best years of the economic boom times, the middle class in the United States declined. Wealth was ever more concentrated.

There is, unfortunately, only one product that can maintain its value as everything else is devalued under the banner of the noosphere. At the end of the rainbow of open culture lies an eternal spring of advertisements.

Ironically, advertising is now singled out as the only form of expression meriting genuine commercial protection in the new world to come.

A functioning, honest crowd-wisdom system ought to trump paid persuasion.

All that paid persuasion ought to be mooted. Every penny Google earns suggests a failure of the crowd—and Google is earning a lot of pennies.

If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless.

The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.

There are a few widely celebrated, but exceptional, success stories that have taken on mythical qualities. These stories are only possible because we are in a transitional period, in which a few lucky people can benefit from the best of the old- and new-media worlds at the same time, and the fact of their unlikely origins can be spun into a still-novel marketing narrative.

In the early days of so-called open culture, I was an early adopter of one of our talking points that has since become a cliché: All the dinosaurs of the old order have been given fair notice of the digital revolution to come. If they can’t adapt, it is due to their own stubbornness, rigidity, or stupidity. Blame them for their fate.

This is what we have said since about our initial victims, like the record companies and newspapers. But none of us was ever able to give the dinosaurs any constructive advice about how to survive. And we miss them now more than we have been willing to admit.

What free really means is that artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers will have to cloak themselves within stodgy institutions.

We forget what a wonder, what a breath of fresh air it has been to have creative people make their way in the world of commerce instead of patronage. Patrons gave us Bach and Michelangelo, but it’s unlikely patrons would have given us Vladimir Nabokov, the Beatles, or Stanley Kubrick.

What we idealists said then was, “Just wait! More opportunities will be created than destroyed.” Isn’t fifteen years long enough to wait before we switch from hope to empiricism? The time has come to ask, “Are we building the digital utopia for people or machines?” If it’s for people, we have a problem.

Open culture revels in bizarre, exaggerated perceptions of the evils of the record companies or anyone else who thinks there was some merit in the old models of intellectual property.

If we choose to pry culture away from capitalism while the rest of life is still capitalistic, culture will become a slum. In fact, online culture increasingly resembles a slum in disturbing ways. Slums have more advertising than wealthy neighborhoods, for instance. People are meaner in slums; mob rule and vigilantism are commonplace. If there is a trace of “slumming” in the way that many privileged young people embrace current online culture, it is perhaps an echo of 1960s counterculture.

The long tail does not raise the sales of creators much, but it does add massive competition and endless downward pressure on prices. Unless artists become a large aggregator of other artists’ works, the long tail offers no path out of the quiet doldrums of minuscule sales.

The usual pattern one would expect is an S curve: there would be only a small number of early adaptors, but a noticeable trend of increase in their numbers.

A new kind of professional musician ought to thunder onto the scene with the shocking speed of a new social networking website.

To my shock, I have had trouble finding even a handful of musicians who can be said to be following in DiFranco’s footsteps. Quite a few musicians contacted me to claim victory in the new order, but again and again, they turned out to not be the real thing.

The people who are perhaps the most screwed by open culture are the middle classes of intellectual and cultural creation.

They used to live off the trickle-down effects of the old system, and, like the middle class at large, they are precious. They get nothing from the new system.

While there is a lot of talk about networks and emergence from the top American capitalists and technologists, in truth most of them are hoping to thrive by controlling the network that everyone else is forced to pass through.

No one in the pre–digital cloud era had the mental capacity to lie to him- or herself in the way we routinely are able to now. The limitations of organic human memory and calculation used to put a cap on the intricacies of self-delusion.

There are so many layers of abstraction between the new kind of elite investor and actual events on the ground that the investor no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of investments.

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.