This book, a manifesto from veritable guru Jaron Lanier, was one of the most thought-provoking and relevant things I've read in years. I acquired it out of sheer curiosity a few months ago and read it during the quiet lapses while I've been travelling across western Europe for the last two weeks.
Content-wise, there's not much I'll say about it because there would be far too much to say beyond a rough overview of the topic and points. Jaron Lanier has been one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley for decades, primarily researching into virtual reality and human relationships with digital systems, and as such he has a huge amount of very worthwhile things to say about those relationships. Basically, in the last decade or so, the trends of technology and the internet have started taking that relationship down a road that he's uncomfortable with, and this book is his cry to call attention before it's too late for us to steer our increasingly-internet-dependent societies in a better direction.
The problems he sees are many and varied and extraordinarily well-articulated, and if you're interested in the internet and its effect on people and potential dangers or hopes for change then I can only point you to his book and exhort you to read it. Seriously, he knows his stuff and presses some challenging but difficult to contend conclusions. At the core of Jaron's argument is that digital systems innovated this century, especially in spheres such as social networks, crowd cooperatives, and cloud-sourcing media, dehumanise their users and devalue their content. This is largely to do with confusions about what constitutes personhood and identity; the difference between an individual and a profile or between information and knowledge; the problem of anonymity in usership lending no obligations to respectful behaviour; the problem of monopolisation in distributors of creative services; and many others.
Like I said, the book touches on dozens of deep intriguing problems centred around our ties to the digital world - I'm barely scratching the surface. Each topic is very in-depth and poses further questions to the reader, and since this blog is supposedly about my thoughts in reaction to a book rather than just a plain book review, I may as well go over some of my main thoughts, though in keeping with what I've been saying I'll try to focus on my responses instead of summarising his arguments that I responded to. The chapter on creative media struck me; it's currently very difficult for independent entertainment producers to make money through their work. Outside of a handful of unrepresentatively lucky examples, mainstream success requires huge corporate backing investment, cloud streaming services give a pittance to the artists, physical sales are tough as digital availability is so easy (either pirated or by download from giant firms big enough to subsidise them), and even being paid for "real" things like live performances is hard to come by without an strong artist profile, which one can't really get without being able to succeed in visibility, which given the other factors, a lot can't. My response? I've stopped downloading music (my iPod's full enough anyway that I can survive off newly-bought CD's or the occasional gig), and started feeling guilty about certain dependencies. Ah well. What else did I have an interesting reaction to? Seemed like at least once every two pages I pulled a face in confused mindblown suspicion as I wrestled with obscure phrases ("Bachelardian neoteny" was my favourite of these) or compellingly weird points (he argues towards the end, in a spur of slightly-irrelevant genius, that if octupuses had childhoods they'd be the dominant species, which was delightful I thought), but most of the book is so far wound into a particular topic that unscrewing one's train of thought from what it was at time of reading without having to reread is proving difficult. It didn't help that we were travelling through Europe while I was reading this, so there were distractions aplenty - in fact the day I finished it, we went to a giant beergarden in Munich and made friends with a Texan socialist over several litres of German lager so tasty that the prospect of leaving for France the next day made us teary. Anyway, I digress.
This is a great book. Be warned: though his writing style is comfortable enough, once he's introduced a particular term for a concept up for discussion he will casually reuse it and mash it together with existing or priorly-invented terms to aid the flow of his argument and somewhat confuse the less involved reader. It's quite intellectually strenuous, many of his chapters delving not only into relatively advanced computer science but also psychology and philosophy of mind. A bit of a challenge to read, and challenging ideas-wise too, but if mankind's relationship with the increasingly-independent internet interests you, look no further.
Content-wise, there's not much I'll say about it because there would be far too much to say beyond a rough overview of the topic and points. Jaron Lanier has been one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley for decades, primarily researching into virtual reality and human relationships with digital systems, and as such he has a huge amount of very worthwhile things to say about those relationships. Basically, in the last decade or so, the trends of technology and the internet have started taking that relationship down a road that he's uncomfortable with, and this book is his cry to call attention before it's too late for us to steer our increasingly-internet-dependent societies in a better direction.
The problems he sees are many and varied and extraordinarily well-articulated, and if you're interested in the internet and its effect on people and potential dangers or hopes for change then I can only point you to his book and exhort you to read it. Seriously, he knows his stuff and presses some challenging but difficult to contend conclusions. At the core of Jaron's argument is that digital systems innovated this century, especially in spheres such as social networks, crowd cooperatives, and cloud-sourcing media, dehumanise their users and devalue their content. This is largely to do with confusions about what constitutes personhood and identity; the difference between an individual and a profile or between information and knowledge; the problem of anonymity in usership lending no obligations to respectful behaviour; the problem of monopolisation in distributors of creative services; and many others.
Like I said, the book touches on dozens of deep intriguing problems centred around our ties to the digital world - I'm barely scratching the surface. Each topic is very in-depth and poses further questions to the reader, and since this blog is supposedly about my thoughts in reaction to a book rather than just a plain book review, I may as well go over some of my main thoughts, though in keeping with what I've been saying I'll try to focus on my responses instead of summarising his arguments that I responded to. The chapter on creative media struck me; it's currently very difficult for independent entertainment producers to make money through their work. Outside of a handful of unrepresentatively lucky examples, mainstream success requires huge corporate backing investment, cloud streaming services give a pittance to the artists, physical sales are tough as digital availability is so easy (either pirated or by download from giant firms big enough to subsidise them), and even being paid for "real" things like live performances is hard to come by without an strong artist profile, which one can't really get without being able to succeed in visibility, which given the other factors, a lot can't. My response? I've stopped downloading music (my iPod's full enough anyway that I can survive off newly-bought CD's or the occasional gig), and started feeling guilty about certain dependencies. Ah well. What else did I have an interesting reaction to? Seemed like at least once every two pages I pulled a face in confused mindblown suspicion as I wrestled with obscure phrases ("Bachelardian neoteny" was my favourite of these) or compellingly weird points (he argues towards the end, in a spur of slightly-irrelevant genius, that if octupuses had childhoods they'd be the dominant species, which was delightful I thought), but most of the book is so far wound into a particular topic that unscrewing one's train of thought from what it was at time of reading without having to reread is proving difficult. It didn't help that we were travelling through Europe while I was reading this, so there were distractions aplenty - in fact the day I finished it, we went to a giant beergarden in Munich and made friends with a Texan socialist over several litres of German lager so tasty that the prospect of leaving for France the next day made us teary. Anyway, I digress.
This is a great book. Be warned: though his writing style is comfortable enough, once he's introduced a particular term for a concept up for discussion he will casually reuse it and mash it together with existing or priorly-invented terms to aid the flow of his argument and somewhat confuse the less involved reader. It's quite intellectually strenuous, many of his chapters delving not only into relatively advanced computer science but also psychology and philosophy of mind. A bit of a challenge to read, and challenging ideas-wise too, but if mankind's relationship with the increasingly-independent internet interests you, look no further.
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