Jaron Lanier (photo:Jonathan Sprague)
YOU ARE NOT A GADGET : A MANIFESTO by Jaron Lanier (Knopf,2010)
With his dreadlocks and barrel-shape, Jaron Lanier looks like a cross between Peter Tosh and Jabba The Hut.
Eccentric, nerdy types like him were at the forefront of the first wave of the internet ‘revolution’ and are now being slowly marginalised by the suits with their business models.
This book could be subtitled ‘the geek strikes back’ as he rails against this new breed of web entrepreneurs, warning that these “Lords of the cloud” are taking the soul out of the net by monitoring and controlling how we lowly “peasants” interact online.
The hive mentality (“the hivey league”) which brought us Wikipedia and Facebook is seen as the chief reason why the intellectual potential of the net is being dumbed down, a process Lanier calls “digital flattening”. His central point is that “empowered trolls” and a collectivist mindset has come to supplant individualism with the effect that ideology replaces creative achievement. Continue reading
