Jaron Lanier on the Semi-Closed Internet

Will Wilkinson writes "Jaron Lanier's recent essay, The Gory Antigora: Illusions of Capitalism and Computers, kicks off a discussion of 'Internet Liberation: Alive or Dead?' at the Cato Institute's new blogazine, Cato Unbound. In Lanier's essay today, find out how the 'brittleness' of software has kept the Internet from realizing its potential as 'a cross between Adam Smith and Albert Einstein; the Invisible Hand accelerating toward the speed of light.' Also, find out why, upon meeting Richard Stallman, Lanier's reaction was: 'An open version of UNIX! Yuk!'"

Comments

Re:Bunk.

[dada21]

I agree. The author holds on to old theories about marketplaces and interactivity and completely forgets that the web and instant global communications are opening up new ways to do previously unthought of tasks.

To point at the ways previous successes worked and try to see them in the future is a bad idea. The reality is that we won't know what is succesful in the future because we don't know what previously unlinked services or products might work better together.

Now my reply is as confusing as the article, sheesh.

My mouse is broken.

[Elwood P Dowd]

I'm confused.

Dumbasses didn't put clicky links on their image. Why not? So that you can dig, dig, dig and find the long winded articles?

Maybe they haven't figured out the internet as well as they think. Blogs with 5000 word essays tend to be a pain in my ass. I'm barely literate. How much do they expect slitscan to read?

Self promotion as the major accomplishment

[wintermute42]

I remember Jaron Lanier from the 1990s when he gained some fame from his pronouncements about virtual reality. Perhaps I'm ignorant of his real accomplishments, but Lanier, like Paris Hilton, seems to be famous as a result of self promotion, rather than anything he has achieved. In the world of pundits it appears that it is quite possible to create yourself from thin air (or perhaps hot air). Unless I'm simply ignorant of Lanier's accomplishments, why should we listen to anything he has to say?

Re:Self promotion as the major accomplishment

[monopole]

Jaron Lanier is the Vanilla Ice of the tech world all the way down to the dreadlocks.

Having ludicrously overhyped virtual reality, and his contribution to it, through the late '80s and early '90s he ran his startup into the ground with the VCs collecting all the IP. His predictions of ubiquitous VR were completely wrong while completely missing the rise of the Web and mobile computing.

My favorite example of of his utterly clueless pursuit of hype occured when his company was circling the drain. He announced that we could not let the millitary get their hands on VR technology and use it for destructive purposes! Of course, everything that Lainer had hyped as his new technology had been pioneered by the military at least a decade ago.

I nearly ran into him (literally) at SIGGRAPH two years ago. He had the air of a lesser rock star that had seriously gone to seed, I quickly backed off, got upwind, and made tracks to the other side of the exhibition hall.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Ironsides]

There isn't much in TFA except a nice point about how we should be able to "browse" video games in the way we browse through books or newspapers. Which does, in fact, make me wonder why stores don't allow you to rent a copy of a game, bring it back and decide whether or not to buy it. I've been doing that for years, but never with one store.

Because people will either:
1) Copy the video game at home and return it saying they don't want it, thus having the game without paying for it.
2) Play the game, beat it, return it, having "used" all the content without paying for it.

For the most part, I understand #1 is the main reason stores no longer allow returning opened games. As for trying out the games, isn't that what playable Demos are for? Such as the Unreal Tournament 2K4 demo?

snipe

[aachrisg]

"Also, find out why, upon meeting Richard Stallman, Lanier's reaction was: 'An open version of UNIX! Yuk!'" Richard Stallman has spent decades creating software used by millions of people. Jaron Lanier has created ummm...what again?

Translation

[Slashcrap]

The unfortunate Internet has only one peer when it comes to obfuscation due to an inundation of excessive punditry, and that peer is religion.

Translation - I've got nothing very interesting to say, but just look at the words I'm saying it with!!! Ain't I hip?

I'd be more scathing if it weren't for a nagging suspicion that the author is just taking the piss.

Re:Bunk.

[Ironsides]

Now my reply is as confusing as the article, sheesh.

Let me try to deconfuse your theory.

1) We don't know what will hapen with the internet.
2) Pointing to what happened with other older technologies does not always apply to newer technologies.
3) We don't have new ideas yet to revolutionize the world or we would have tried them already.
4) We're still learning what we can do with this thing, partly we're seeing what we can do online that we can already do offline, partly we're trying to see what we can do that no one has ever done before.

Askling the wrong questions

[RealProgrammer]

From TFA's thesis paragraph:

Are ideas like virtual citizenship beyond the nation-state, untraceable electronic currency, and the consciousness expanding powers of radical interconnectivity defunct? Is there untapped revolutionary power waiting to be unleashed?

The Internet levels the playing field for those who have access to it. A search bar, a blog, and ebay are all you need to find out almost anything, tell the world your take on it, or operate a business. And with so many sources of information, voices, and people selling things it is impossible for a monopoly to exist in any one of those areas.

We aren't to the point of virtual citizenship, but we may be in the middle of a trend toward borderless loyalty. People are becoming less loyal to the nation-state and more loyal to ideas and movements (religions, software models, companies, professions). I hope that the trend doesn't result in a single world government before the individual borderless movements get powerful enough to keep one in check.

Untraceable electronic currency doesn't have any chance: the people issuing the currency want to know where it is. It's enough that numbers are inherently abstract, though. It will always be necessary to launder your funds if you want their movement kept discrete.

As far as the conciousness expansion of free information goes, that too is the wrong question. (Some) people will always choose to be blissfully ignorant about (some) things, and you can't force them to learn. The network makes it easy to find information, but it's always going to be more like fishing than a floodlight. People have to want the information you have.

In general, it's too soon for Utopia but the world is getting newer all the time.

The Cato Propaganda Institute.

[RandoX]

Cato is infamous for questionable research that politicians have used to support some ridiculous claims. Nothing different from them here.

Re:The Cato Propaganda Institute.

[j-turkey]

Cato is infamous for questionable research that politicians have used to support some ridiculous claims. Nothing different from them here.

I don't think that the Cato institute has ever professed to not be a Libertarian think tank. They've always been pretty up front with their political stance. Some of their research is actually quite intriguing. Other research appears to just be Libertarian banter. It's up to the reader to place judgement on individual articles...however, it would be unwise to dismiss everything that the Cato institute has ever written (regardless of your political leanings). The link you posted tends to rely on citing inflammatory political topics and does not appear to be much more than a political soundboard. Why not take things at face value rather than first assessing whether or not the writer shares your political convictions?

Check out the Author's Agenda

[mpapet]

Yes, the article is full of bunk in every paragraph and then somewhere in it he claims some of it anyway is a farce. If you refer to his bio, there's a clue in there.

"Phenotropics," concerns rejecting traditional protocol-based approaches in favor of statistical and pattern-recognition techniques to bind software components together in order to improve large scale reliability.

The whole "software is brittle" agenda is cleary his own.

SLIGHTLY OT
I was watching a remake of "the music man" with my daughter yesterday and his whole "software is brittle" agenda reminds me of how the main character runs around the small town talking very nonsensically about how the new billiards hall is going to corrupt the citizens. Of course the citizens love controversy, so it becomes a "social problem." The main character has the solution, buy musical equipment from him. Now, if only Jaron would sing he can remake the Music Man... Again!

Re:Simple.

[indifferent children]

Because Jaron Lanier is an insufferable, pretentious, idiot. That's why.

And Stallman is an insufferable, pretentious, genius. No wonder they can't get along.

Re:Bunk.

[timeOday]

Well, you've missed the point of his command-line argument. He considers the familiar GUI to be a command-line interface:

First the person does something, usually either by typing or clicking with a pointing device. And then, after an unspecified period of time, the computer does something, and then the cycle is repeated.

(I think he should call it the "command-based" interface instead of the "command-line" interface though.)

Anyways, his complaint seems that command-based interfaces treat interaction as a linear sequence of discrete events, with actions normally initiated by the user. You might say they're "turn-based," whereas people don't normally interact with the world that way.

Now, he might or might not have a point. I'd like to hear him propose an alternative.

If there's anything wrong with the article, it's that any single paragraph would yeild more interesting discussion than the whole thing together.

Re:I liked the essay, but a criticism

[Kadin2048]

I think the biggest issue I take with Lanier's Luddite Revolution is that it doesn't consider human nature. Even if the proletriat's cost of living retreated more quickly than their income, so that their standard of living went up, it still would have a destabilizing effect on society if there is no clear path up the societal ladder.

American society is maintained, in part anyway, because there is a widespread perception that it is possible for a person to be a 'self-made man.' That is, no matter how poor or unskilled or stupid or whatever you are, it is possible -- however unlikely -- for you to own a 3-bedroom house and drive a Ford and have a wife and kids. And although we are becoming more cynical by the day and many of us would say that we don't believe in the 'american dream nonsense,' people act as though they are attempting to realize that dream all the time.

Also, there is a self-fulling prophecy at work here. When someone does manage to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and fullfill the self-made-person fantasy, they normally receive a certain amount of notoriety for it (at least in extreme cases). This publicity helps to reinforce the idea that such a climb up the social ladder is possible, and keeps people at the bottom at work every day.

If you were -- perhaps through germline genetic engineering or biological/technological fusion -- to create an unbridgeable chasm between the 'haves' and 'have nots,' so that it was no longer possible for a low-class person to even imagine that they might one day be able to join the ranks of the well-to-do, you would remove a lot of of the reason why people at the bottom of society go to work every morning. It would destabilize society, and could easily result either in a revolution, or in the upper-class being required to use force in order to constantly suppress the threat of one.

The fact that they can buy a refrigerator or a big-screen TV isn't going to keep people from strapping blocks of C4 and nails to their chests, when they know that there are people in society that have riches -- vastly prolonged lives, for instance -- that they can barely dream about and will never have. There is a strong human tendency to despise anyone who has something that you cannot get, and which we keep in check only by collectively believing in the notion that anyone can achieve anything if they really try. If we made that notion -- fallacious as it may be -- completely implausible, we'd really be in trouble.

Re:Bunk.

[Deskpoet]

Actually, you're spot on. I do believe that the Internet is the best form of anarchocapitalism that we've ever seen and I hope to see it instill some faith in voluntary cooperation (ie, capitalism) over time.

I'm sorry for picking a nit here, but there is no such thing as "anarchocapitalism" (that is, outside the fevered dreams of the David Freidman cult; see why anarchocapitalism is an oxymoron here), and expecting technology designed to control information to deliver a society without hierarchy is farcical. Of course, that is not the point for the "anarchocapitalist", is it? All they are after is immediate economic freedom for themselves, a kind of supply-side, trickle-down freedom machine whose obvious flaws will be visited on those who are unfortunate enough to not be in on the ground floor when this wonderful world manifests itself from the struggles of all the oppressed millionaires.

Any "freedom" predicated on technology is simply another form of control: if you can turn it off, or point it at someone, then someone, in a play to exert control, inevitably will. Capitalism is inherently hierarchal, and the Internet is, as well. To expect either to change into a truly anarchic state is simply overshooting any real probability; you might as well expect a fish to evolve directly into an antelope.