You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier

I think Lanier's concerns about a wide open internet are not his own original thoughts. He's disappointed with a Facebook generation that gets its music for free. We've heard this before in various arguments about socialism - that there is no incentive for creativity in a socialist society bla bla bla more cold war era rhetoric ad nauseum. Well I've got news for him. We will enter into a new dark age if the neoliberal baloney continues on for very much longer. The world is on a globalizing road to serfdom following the political-economic ideology that was embedded in Lanier's mind years ago, and probably without his realizing it. A new age renaissance of enlightened thought will come more slowly if the ideologues remain in control of things in general. Lanier is another one who thinks the world could not have turned out so well without his individual contributions. He's full of himself.

Yes I should probably read it first. I think the web could be a lot better than what it is, which is an evolving mass of globalizing communications. I'd like to see a certain share of bandwidth allocated for serious purposes. Higher education and access to knowledge should be real cheap by now. And there are examples of ordinary people accessing advanced degree learning over the internet in countries ranging from Cuba and Spain to Scotland. Information should be cheap right now and not controlled by financial institutions taxing and making information and knowledge scarce through compound interest and usury.

I've read two prefaces to Lanier's book. Apparently he is an advocate of individual creativity and genus and considers copy rights an important part of nurturing the same in future. He lauds people like Steve Jobs and others for their great contributions to digitial economy. And that's fine - people like them have made significant contributions and are talented people no doubt about it. But would human creativity and genus cease to exist without the state enforcing copy rihgts for the sake of enriching a handful few?

[url=http://www.slate.com/id/2239466/pagenum/all/]The Geek Freaks[/url] Why Jaron Lanier rants against what the Web has become by Michael Agger

Quote:

The problem is that the Web is much bigger now, and both Jobs and the bedroom oud player must, in their own ways, strive for attention from the hive mind. And the results can arrive like lightning: Just a few weeks ago, a man in Uruguay was given a $30 million dollar movie deal after posting a sci-fi short on YouTube. No one likes to become obsolete or cranky, but my sense is that Lanier doesn't want to play on this new field. The talents and insights of Lanier and his peers were aimed at a tech-savvy elite whose impact will never be the same again. The innovative momentum is now about democratizing the Web and its uses—Flickr, Twitter, and, yes, Facebook. It was a lot of fun at the beginning, but virtual reality has moved on. It's time to take off the goggles and gloves, and join us here on Earth.

I will save my judgment for after I've read the book, but, again, I think Fidel is right. I think he will argue, just as Fidel pointed out, that innovation is only possible within a capitalistic, ownership society. But the lesson of the Internet is just the opposite. The fastest growing and most successful Internet businesses are leveraging free and open sourced technology and making the Internet, despite the best efforts of Microsoft and friends in congress, the freeest place on earth. The instantaneous distribution of recent videotape of the US killing journalists in Iraq all over the world was only possible because of the Internet and because of the freely available technologies. Are any of us less human for posting here?

Well, technological development is inextricably linked to capitalism and war. What is the internet except a military project sold to corporations for commercial expansion? When thinking about communications technology it's always prudent to remember Remington. Famous for two things: popularizing the typewriter and the firearm.

But from what I've read of Lanier's book so far (not much), he's not interested in that--although he probably has a soft spot for capitalism like most Westerners. But he does rehash old arguments: humanist, nostalgic, revisionist. "Fragments are not people" (unless you're T.S. Eliot, Modernist conservative). I do enjoy how he identifies certain IT conceits that for one reason or another get locked in as standards, and then the rest of the Internet is organized around it. An example early in the book is MIDI: "MIDI now exists in your phone and in billions of otehr devices. It is the lattice on which almost all of the popular music you hear is built." But for Lanier, this is objectively a bad thing--limiting--as if all of evolution is not built on bizarre, necessary yet elegant solutions. I wonder if he feels the old cock and vajayjay is a "lock-in", a "rigid, mandatory structure" one can't avoid. I suppose it is, but I don't mind it.

Anyway, this is only to highlight that technology is, above all, human before it is anti-human. Could the automobile look like it does without the human? What would the cockpit (ha!) be for otherwise? He can lament for what might have been all he likes, but 'tain't gone change.

And, incidentally, I have to object to the use of the word "manifesto." His book is less revolutionary than the Dockers Khaki ad that came out a few months previous. This is a manifesto. And this. Lanier should learn the meaning of the word before he tries it on for size.

The Local-Global Flip, or, "The Lanier Effect"

Quote:

... "The Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, we're moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where it's not as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools, and even though you can become a seller over the network, you have to pass through Apple's gate to accept what you do, and your chances of doing well are very small, and it's not a person to person thing, it's a business through a hub, through Apple to others, and it doesn't create a middle class, it creates a new kind of upper class. ... Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is they've said, "Well, since Moore's law makes computation really cheap, let's just give away the computation, but keep the data." And that's a disaster.

... If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it's a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can't be any rights of authorship. However, you need a big search engine to even figure out what it is or find it. They want a lot of chaos that they can have an ability to undo. ... when you have copying on a network, you throw out information because you lose the provenance, and then you need a search engine to figure it out again. That's part of why Google can exist. Ah, the perversity of it all just gets to me.

... What Wal-Mart recognized is that information is power, and by using network information, you could consolidate extraordinary power, and so have information about what could be made where, when, what could be moved where, when, who would buy what, when for how much? By coalescing all of that, and reducing the unknowns, they were able to globalize their point of view so they were no longer a local player, but they essentially became their own market, and that's what information can do. The use of networks can turn you from a local player in a larger system into your own global system.

... The reason this breaks is that there's a local-global flip that happens. When you start to use an information network to concentrate information and therefore power, you benefit from a first arrival effect, and from some other common network effects that make it very hard for other people to come and grab your position. And this gets a little detailed, but it was very hard for somebody else to copy Wal-Mart once Wal-Mart had gathered all the information, because once they have the whole world aligned by the information in their server, they created essentially an expense or a risk for anybody to jump out of that system. That was very hard. ... In a similar way, once you are a customer of Google's ad network, the moment that you stop bidding for your keyword, you're guaranteeing that your closest competitor will get it. It's no longer just, "Well, I don't know if I want this slot in the abstract, and who knows if a competitor or some entirely unrelated party will get it." Instead, you have to hold on to your ground because suddenly every decision becomes strategic for you, and immediately. It creates a new kind of glue, or a new kind of stickiness.

... It can become such a bizarre system. What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated. It's an anti-liberty system, and I know that the rhetoric around it is very contrary to that.

... Essentially what happened with finance is a larger scale, albeit more abstract version of what happened with Wal-Mart, where a global system was optimized by being able to build data that could be concentrated locally using a computer network. It tremendously enriched the people who ran the network. It seemed to create savings for people initially who were the end users, the leafs of the network, very much as Google, or Groupon, seem to save them money initially. But then in the long-term it took away more from the income prospects of people than it could offer them in savings, very much as Wal-Mart did. ... This is the pattern that we'll see repeated again and again as new applications of computer networks come up, unless we decide to monetize what people do with their hearts and brains. What we have to do to create liberty in the future is to monetize more and more instead of monetize less and less, and in particular we have to monetize more and more of what ordinary people do, unless we want to make them into wards of the state. That's the stark choice we have in the long-term.

...if you're adding to the network, do you expect anything back from it? And since we've been hypnotized in the last eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldn't expect anything for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our own contributions aren't worth money, very much like we think we shouldn't be paid for parenting, or we shouldn't be paid for raking our own yard. In those cases you are paid in a sense because there's still something that becomes part of you in your life, for all that you did. ... But in this case we have this idea that we put all this stuff out there and what we get back are intangible or abstract benefits of reputation, or ego-boosting. Since we're used to that bargain, we're impoverished compared to the world that could have been and should have been when the Internet was initially conceived. The world that would create a strengthened middle class through what people do, by monetizing more and more instead of less and less. It's possible that that world could have never come about, but that was never tested. If we are absolutely convinced that this third way is impossible, and that we have to choose between "The Matrix" or Marx, if those are our only two choices, it makes the future dismal, and so I hope that a third way is possible, and I'm certainly going to do everything possible to try to push it.