Posts Tagged: Jaron Lanier

Jaron Lanier is an old revolutionary, looking back on his radical work and wondering ‘What went wrong.”

In “You Are Not A Gadget”, he waxes quite passionately about his mistrust of ‘The Hive Mind’, his disappointment with internet mash-up culture and the skepticism he directs at the burgeoning techno-faith in computers and software. He rails on and on about the continuing coarseness and lack of creativity he sees in the arts and in programming culture. And he warns that we are being stripped of our humanity as we continue to embrace technology.

There are valid arguments. I’ve thought many of these things myself. But Lanier veers way to often into grumpy nostalgia. It’s a major turn off and it undermines his considerable experience and insider knowledge. My eyes glazed over tvery time he began to wax rhapsodic about the ‘good old days’ of the internet. I remember the ‘internet hey-day’ of the late 90’s, and the internet was decidedly worse (not better.) It was dirt slow – remember the grinding screech of that cheap ‘dial up modem? He remembers harmonious list-serves where heady ideas were bantered about. I remember crude, digital war zones, full of the same long running arguments you find in a current messageboards or comment section. This internet was a remote, barely explored place inhabited by early adopters, scientists and code-heads who loved all things technological. In the late 1990’s, to my Mom or Dad, a list serve on the internet could have been the dark side of the Moon for all they knew.

And that’s part of my main criticism of Lanier. His beef seems mostly based on the fact that the internet has changed in ways that are ‘potentially’ bad. And his man criteria for ‘bad’ seems to be ‘not like it used to be.’ But ultimately I say ‘so what.’ I acknowledge that in the long march of human history, we have lost old wisdom in the pursuit of ‘advancement.’ I am sure that the automobile made the average 20th century human a lot less connected with nature. But I am also sure that I would not exchange the automobile to get back closer to nature. I would not exchange books for the mental accuity necessary to retain knowledge in an oral culture. And if the super-specialized way we work means I don’t know how to build a house by myself from scratch, I’m fine with that if it means I can get super markets, national retail outlets and 7-11’s.

Why? Because we have time machines, there is no point in looking back, as Lanier constantly does. His whole world view seems built on the ‘primacy of the past.’ That’s incredibly ironic – I’d always believed you had to be a futurist to be a technologist. Apparently not, in Lanier’s case. He seems to believe that the answers lie ‘back there somewhere.’

My response? If the past was so great, humanity would not have struggle so hard to get where we are now.