Deep Focus on the Hazards of Digital Culture

You Are Not a Gadget:

A Manifesto

By Jaron Lanier, Allen Lane, 210pp.

Reviewed: 20 March, 2010

This is the best book I have read on the challenges posed by the growth of digital online culture, and it is in a printed book that you can hold in your hand, dog-ear, annotate, or throw on the floor whenever the punchy aphorisms get too much.

Jason Lanier writes with love of the possibilities of digital media to represent and extend our experience of reality. But he writes with even more passion about the capacity of humans to abuse those possibilities in ways that demean human individualism.

He writes with the authority of one who has been at the technical forefront of the “digital revolution” for decades: as a pioneer of Virtual Reality, inventor of online avatars, developer of computer-assisted microsurgery techniques and big-selling video games, and as a long-term university teacher and industry columnist.

His central concern is that his fellow engineers are so infatuated with the possibilities of the digital realm that they are blind to threats to individual personality and to the social interaction of real people in a real world. Lanier sees these threats not as intentionally malign, but as inherent to the way software design is reductive of any experience that the software purports to represent.

Where Web 2.0 proponents talk about individual empowerment and information freedom, Lanier sees “a torrent of petty designs”, uniformly driven by targeted advertising platforms, where personalities are crammed into templates and “friendship” means no more than having a record in a database.

“Anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks and lightweight mash-ups” are not valuable creativity or genuine social interaction. Instead, they detain their participants in “neotony”, a state of immaturity based on play, rather than mature social contribution. Genuine personal interaction is replaced and demeaned by involvement in activities in which pretence is normal. The most successful participants in Facebook, he says, are those whose identities are faked.

Anonymity brings out the worst in us - the “inner troll”. Pseudonymous online discussions can quickly descend into abuse, and online bullying is by no means just a school-age phenomenon – scientists and philosophers can get just as down and dirty under a cloak of invisibility.

Lanier strongly resents the assumption by digital natives that, if “information wants to be free”, then anyone has the right to appropriate an author’s work and use it in any way, without reference or acknowledgment. He is also bothered by Google-type online library schemes that serve up a miscellany of “relevant” excerpts in response to a query, in which each minced excerpt has been classified by some remote, non-transparent algorithm, and authors’ words are divorced from their original context.

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Richard Thwaites has worked with computers, software and digital content for thirty years, but has 0 Facebook friends.