DAVIN O'DWYERreviews You Are Not a Gadget: A ManifestoBy Jaron Lanier Allen Lane, 209pp, £20
ACCORDING TO Amara's Law, a particularly catchy aphorism from the late scientist and futurologist Roy Amara, "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." Well, after reading You Are Not a Gadget, the rather alarmist new treatise from Jaron Lanier, you will find it impossible to underestimate the future effects of the web and the communities developing online. In fact, if you were to accept his theory, you'd probably be in a hurry to cancel your broadband.
Lanier, often described as "the father of virtual reality" and a bleeding edge technologist, is one of a number of writer- philosopher-thinkers for the digital age. Others, such as Cory Doctorow, Doug Rushkoff, Dan Gillmor, Chris Anderson and Clay Shirky, tend to be tech-enthusiasts, optimistically envisioning how we will adapt to new online realities. Lanier, on the other hand, has become sceptical about the merits of online culture, and in particular the emphasis on the collective over the individual. You Are Not a Gadgetacts as a rebuke to Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybodyand Chris Anderson's The Long Tailand Free, three books that extolled the transformative potential of the internet, socially and economically.
Lanier’s thesis suggests that the dominant ideology of the digital world, what he calls cybernetic totalism, has prompted a “widespread practice of fragmentary, impersonal communication” that has “demeaned interpersonal interaction”. The attractions of “open culture” mask the supposedly dehumanising effect of this new collectivising technology. “The ideology has encouraged narrow philosophies that deny the mystery of the existence of experience,” he writes. “It naturally happens that the designs that celebrate the noosphere and other ideals of cybernetic totalism tend to undervalue humans.” There is an argument to be made about the potentially corrosive effects of anonymous blog comments or the unsustainable economics of a free digital marketplace, but Lanier isn’t really interested in the mechanics of these issues, but rather the philosophical implications they raise.
He doesn’t shy from coining phrases – digital Maoism, the noosphere, the Lords of the Clouds and Bachelardian neoteny are all bandied about. But all the jargon can’t hide the sophistic reasoning Lanier relies on – there are so many strawmen arguments in this book it resembles an Iowa cornfield, while his inability, or unwillingness, to distinguish between collectivism, imposed and oppressive, with collective action, voluntary and rewarding, is indicative of the sort of fallacies that riddle the book.
The book is strongest when dealing with the economic threats posed by the web, but instead of acting as a warning against a Matrix-like future where the machine has gained cultural superiority over the human, You Are Not a Gadgetreads like the complaints of a curmudgeon, convinced that things were better back in his day. Lanier makes much of his disdain for what is called Web 2.0, that buzzy term that doesn't actually mean much, is obvious, while making it clear that he's a Web 1.0 kind guy, or even a Web 0.7ish kind of guy. Back then, according to his logic, the collective ethos was admirable rather than detestable.
In Lanier’s mind, he is a Cassandra, but for all his words, the “unfortunate ideology” he criticises remains a phantasm, a nebulous accumulation of fears that Lanier can barely define, let alone convincingly argue against. Ironically, these important issues will be discussed in a far more cogent, insightful fashion across the web as online communities digest and analyse Lanier’s manifesto – and that will be the most elegant possible refutation of Lanier’s flawed thesis.
Davin O’Dwyer is a freelance journalist
