WillOTheWispAmazon.com: You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (9780307269645): Jaron Lanier: Books.
I haven’t read the book. I know of Lanier from his views on the debates at Edge. His takes, as I have had occasion to discover, are refreshing, though you might not subscribe to the same.
Why am I talking about something that I haven’t read? Do I know anything about it? At all? The answer to that is – No. However, the link above leads to the book’s page on Amazon.com where a Q&A with Lanier is published. And the responses from Lanier are interestingly provocative – which, I suspect, is the whole idea behind the writing in the first place.
Expression. Communication. Internet.
Devaluation of the Individual. Now that’s a big belief / assertion. Since, like I mentioned, I haven’t read the book, I shall go along with his response – “There are so many things wrong with this, that it takes a whole book to summarize them“, along with the caveat that I find the statement following it quite dubious – “Web 2.0 is a formula to kill the middle-class and undo centuries of social progress”. It sounds just too much ideological. The problem with ideology is that there really isn’t any independent basis to for preferring one over the other. Just like a personal belief, no matter how well-informed it might be.
It gets interesting when he says that the internet has become anti-intellectual because Web 2.0 collectivism has killed the individual voice – he justifies this by pointing out that it has become increasingly disheartening to write about any topic in depth because people will only read what the first link from a search engine directs them to, typically the collective expression of the Wikipedia. I’m not comfortable with this rationale. If blogs be considered individual expression, then the state of writing, under no external coercion, indicates a few things – People like to communicate. People believe they are being expressive, in whatever form that they are. People read what is convenient and comforting to them. People are not ‘really’ interested in a quirky or considered take on a subject.
It could be distressing if you were to have been operating under a belief that the immediacy, freedom and architecture of the internet heralds new forms of expression and, consequently, behaviour. However, there is a different way of looking at it. You can jazz up the medium all you like – sooner or later, if the numbers scale up, you ought to be looking at an accurate reflection of what was, till now, offline – the way people are / have been. And that ought to be reassuring, I’d say. Nothing has really changed. People are still people.
The iPhone as a shining example of the individual achievement as opposed to the unremarkable nature of the collective’s fascination with UNIX and its variants, a three-decade old technology. I’m bemused at the choice of take here. At a more basic level, the iPhone still works on a layer derived from the same tech. It could not have, as a design, existed thirty years ago quite simply because the physics behind the hardware had not developed to the extent that it has. Next question – Is it a unique design? Or is the first, really polished, such design? Think of the alternatives available. The next thing to contend with is the summary dismissal of LINUX as something unremarkable. Sure. It does not do anything special that a lot of other polished, expensive, privately developed products do not - Windows, Mac. However, I feel the question is being asked the other way around – What is it about these specially developed systems that makes me want to opt for them over and above a rugged and reliable, albeit ‘unremarkable’, commercially-free system? And the answer to that, quite simply, boggles the mind – Nothing. As far as the question of being remarkable is concerned – What is it about a thirty-year old technology that still finds favour with its developers? Is the collective so blind to subsequent developments? That it continues to invest unpaid efforts in development and proliferation of the subject of its fascination? Isn’t that remarkable? I see that this opens up an entire discussion by itself and note that it is nothing new. Again.
A collective of programmers can copy UNIX but cannot invent the iPhone. Did they want to? If they did, could it have been possible earlier? The only meaningful question is that of manufacture -supported by R&D. And therefore, the only remarkable aspect of the invention of the iPhone is that someone was willing to put money into the project and oversee it till release into profit.
Lanier’s reduction of the Wikipedia and LINUX to examples of the delusions of the collectives they represent fails on a singular count. When you look at the web as it portrays the nature of opinions and affiliations to ideologies, would you not be surprised to find that we actually have two examples of reliable systems emerging from a diverse and often fractious set of communities? And the fact that they exist and are fairly invaluable, in spite of the same reason – isn’t that remarkable? It would also be interesting to note the percentage of webservers that run on Linux to provide your iPhone with stuff that makes it useful.
What do I feel?
Its only been about a decade and half for the internet. Taking a cue from my geographical location – there is a lot of Humanity that has yet to log on / connect up. It might be sensible to start forming notions of what the web is and can / must become, in individual and collective interests, if and only when that happens.
Till such time – I’m not likely to read this book.
