Book Review: You Are Not a Gadget
Email is an essential tool in the modern world. Cell phones are ubiquitous. Publications and blogs are consumed at dizzying rates online and social networking, for better or worse, has changed how we view the concept of friendship. Technology, without a doubt, changes us. Think about how much different life was a century ago compared to today, yet the human condition has not changed. The Internet has molded our culture in ways that are still not yet fully understood. It’s a rare day that a member of the technologically literate class of people doesn’t access the web. Much of the change is positive, but technology has a knack for biting back and rearing it’s ugly side as well. It’s thus of utmost importance to consider the economic, political, and philosophical questions that pertain to the modern digital culture. How did digital culture, as we now know it, come into being? Did it have to be this way?
According to Janier Lanier we are living in an age of “digital Maoism” or “cybernetic totalitarianism.” Lanier first coined the term in a thought provoking essay titled “Digital Maoism” on Edge.org back in 2006. The strange thing is that Lanier, a brilliant computer scientist amongst other things, actually helped create the system that enabled the modern digital culture. Lanier, however, warns that the reigning subculture of cybernetic totalitarianism has hijacked personhood.
You Are Not a Gadget is a provocative book that ultimately questions the purpose of technology. It’s refreshing and poignant criticism from an insiders perspective. Lanier’s central thesis is that the purpose of technology is to help humanity and it’s time for us to take a step back and examine the digital culture we’ve created on a deeply philosophical level.
Tim Berners-Lee is solely credited with inventing the particular design of today’s web. Did his design achieve the efficacy he had hoped for? On many levels, that’s highly debatable. At first, there were many reasons to be optimistic about the web. We actually learned a lot about human potential when it first came about. Lanier writes: “Who would have guessed (at least at first) that millions of people would put so much effort into a project without the presence of advertising, commercial motive, threat of punishment, charismatic figures, identity politics, exploitation of the fear of death, or any of the other classic motivators of mankind. In vast numbers, people did something cooperatively, solely because it was a good idea, and it was beautiful.” Something, however, has since changed, argues Lanier.
The main problems with the current web architecture are, according to Lanier, twofold: the culture of free and anonymity. The former has political ramifications that are rarely discussed seriously in public discourse. Googlenomics is in essence starving out the creative middle class. Except for the rare exception, most musicians, artists, writers, journalists, and film makers have lost the ability to make a living from their craft. Additionally, a system of anonymity, argues Lanier, brings out an ugly side of humanity that could be repressed if the system was designed slightly differently.
According to Lanier, the most troubling aspect of the current digital culture is its reductionistic to the point of absurdity. It’s easy to forget that nothing a search engine does is valuable unless there is content for it to query. It’s the humans who create content that make search engines valuable. Lanier explains this in a similar vein, “The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with mush. You then start to care about the abstraction of the network more than the real people who are networked, even though the network by itself is meaningless. Only the people were ever meaningful.” In this model, it’s crystal clear to Lanier that society promotes some form of collective consciousness at the expense of personhood.
He further argues that making information free is part of what degrades humans. Information is not alive and as Lanier says, “information doesn’t deserve to be free.” Part of what drives the new techno-religion is the idea that information is indeed alive. If you believe in the goofy idea of immortality through the uploading of human consciousness onto a computer then of course you are going to want information to be free. And you’re going to try to force others to follow your religion. Does this sound familiar? This is exactly why the economics of the web are currently the way they are. It doesn’t have to be this way though. Online techno-politics don’t have to be anti-human according to Lanier. It is indeed possible that there is more than one technological future and we should be focusing on how to help humans flourish instead of one with an immature quest for immortality.
Another aspect of the reigning digital culture is anonymity. According to Lanier, this brings out everyone’s “inner troll”, a term which is reserved for anonymous person who is nasty or abusive in an online environment. For this reason, Lanier suggest that you should never leave anonymous comments on the web unless you are in real danger. “Anonymity certainly has a place,” writes Lanier, ” but that place needs to be designed carefully.” There are indeed some spheres in which anonymity is beneficial, e.g., voting; however, there are many usages on the web when anonymity makes people act nastier than they would otherwise be.
Ultimately, Lanier reminds us of strange phenomenon that occurs under the auspices of cybernetic totalitarianism. “If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive.” The idea of a technological Singularity seems to be one of the driving forces behind the decline of individuality, which is strange. Namely because ideas like a technological Singularity and the noosphere sound a bit like Marxist social determinism and are frequently promoted by people with a libertarian bent. Lanier asks readers to consider the following question : what happens when the technophiles are crazier than the Luddites?
The current architecture of digital culture is without a doubt destroying the creative middle class. Follow the money and you’ll see that it flows through advertising instead of to musicians, journalists, writers, film makers, and artists. When we treat human created content like it’s worthless by thinking it should be free we’re degrading real humans. Lanier argues that there is a better way. In his version of new digital economics, you pay to access other peoples creative bits, but you in turn get paid when people access your creative bits as well. Personhood is celebrated and creativity flourishes. Luckily, according to Lanier, it isn’t too late for these changes to be made.
[click the following for amazon.co.uk and amazon.ca copies of the book]
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