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Jaron Lanier Rants Against the World of Web 2.0
hao3 writes "In his new book, You Are Not A Gadget, former Wired writer Jaron Lanier bemoans what the internet has become. 'It's early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons,' it begins. The words will be 'minced into anatomized search engine keywords,' then 'copied millions of times by some algorithm somewhere designed to send an advertisement,' and then, in a final insult, 'scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers.' Lanier's conclusion: 'Real human eyes will read these words in only a tiny minority of the cases.' He goes on to criticise Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, open-source software and what he calls the 'hive mind.'"
Lanier, being someone involved heavily in the music scene, should know that this isn't the first time music has stalled out. Back in the early 20th century, the classical world of music didn't know where to go, which is what led to atrocities like atonalism and serial music. I love nearly all kinds of music, but 12 tone rows really try my patience. By the late 19th century composers had exausted most of the possibilities with "academic" type of music thinking, forms like Ragtime became popular and it wasn't really until the arrival of early Jazz that it obvious where to go. Thus began an era less rooted in rules. Now we've nearly exhausted all the possibilities of this ruleless era of music and someone (Like Gershwin) will need to show us the way to another era in music. Its interesting that both musical "stallings" have happened around the same time as revolutions in technology. The first one at the height of the industrial era and this one at the height of the information era.
This dude was the epitome of "digerati" poser hype acting as some kind of digital prophet spouting buzzwords and hot air during the web 1.0 bubble. He's been riding the 15 minutes he got from his work on the failed VRML for way too long.
Anyone could sit back and smoke a lot of joints and come up with new ways of talking about old things, but it doesn't mean they are necessarily interesting. This dude is the poster boy for what everyone hated about the dotcom era - a lot of hype and no substance.
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
"He does propose a solution to the difficulty of how to compensate artists, artisans, and programmers in a digital era: a content database that would be run by some kind of government organization: "We should effectively keep only one copy of each cultural expression—as with a book or song—and pay the author of that expression a small, affordable amount whenever it's accessed." According to the article, Lanier wants a pay per use SOA, the very strategy Microsoft has been trying to implement as a strategy for years. It's the ultimate greed based mashup of DRM and cloud technology possible, all mandated by the government. I wouldn't be surprised if this happened in the near future.
I saw him speak at the University of Michigan around 1999. I knew him only from his Wired articles and was interested to hear what this guru had to say to an auditorium full of open-minded students.
His most memorable point in that lecture was that digital music can never be as rich as analog music because whereas an analog instrument allows infinite variation in how each note is played, a digital instrument has only a finite number possible outputs. I saw several weaknesses in that argument: 1) The quantization of a digital device blurs into a continuum when the increments are small enough. 2) Analog devices operate by physics which is itself quantized. 3) Combinatorics means that even an instrument with only a dozen notes, ten amplitudes, and a hundred durations could produce immense numbers of different songs. Just look at what can be written with the few characters of ASCII. A finite vocabulary hardly limits what a language can express.
Based on that lecture and everything I've read by him since, I'd have to moderate the guy as "Not interesting", "Not informative", and "Not insightful". His role in life seems to be to take a contrarian position on some point of modern culture and then act smug and enlightened about it. It would be poetic justice if it's only the gadgets that find his book interesting and we humans just ignore it as we continue creating and communing in our digital domain.
I just pulled myself facebook, I got sick of all that faceless and meaningless interaction. I had nearly 300 friends and I informed everybody I would be leaving so they could give me their details and we could meet up in real life. Out of those 300 people, only 2 people gave me their details. That says a lot to me as it turns out nobody was really bothered, human interaction has become passive activity (when it should be much more important) and probably with a lot of people I was just a number.
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