You are not a gadget.
I finished reading Jaron Lanier’s long awaited book – You are not a gadget – a few days ago and can’t stop thinking about it. He talks (more intelligently and from a much more informed position) about a number of different things that I’ve been interested in over the past few years. For a start, the foundational premise of the book is that we are shaping the Web in ways that are destructive to our humanity and individuality.
“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. Therefore, crucial arguments about the human relationship with technology should take place between developers and users before such direct manipulations are designed. This book is about those arguments.”
I couldn’t agree more with this, many of the basic building blocks of the Web like Pagerank and popularity favour mainstream information that’s less likely to be really new or innovative. In addition the increasingly digital nature of our communication is eliminating a lot of the subtlety and nuance that human communication typically includes.
Lanier also views the economic underpinnings of our progress as equally damaging. We have created an environment where no one expects to pay for anything of value and are basing all of our development upon advertising being the primary revenue source for the entire Web ecosystem:
“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.”
His big thesis, however, is that we are excusing ourselves from taking responsibility for ethics and morality on the Web by draping everything with a banner of “open,” “free,” or “populist.” For example stealing music which we would never do offline, has been given a sheen of respectability online by spinning it into a form of protest against corrupt record labels. Or the fact that we regularly celebrate hackers who are able to break into corporate networks and bring down parts of their infrastructure. Or the feting we give researchers who spend two years trying to kill people remotely via their mobile phones. We have developed a different and skewed sense of ethics and morality that also contribute to the loss of our humanity.