You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier – Book Review

(Cross-posted from my Goodreads content farming and free labor service.)

Summary: Innovation and culture evolution are being held back by the Internet, and you’re giving away free labor while it’s happening.

There’s a meme that’s starting to emerge: all this dot.technology we’ve fallen in love with stopped making big innovations about 10 years ago. We need something post-Internet, it seems to be saying. Our wonderment with the Internet is causing stagnation in our culture. Worse, it’s forcing old business models – or how creatives get paid if you wish – to evolve or simply go away.

You Are Not a Gadget operates in this nice space. Lanier is very polite in branding all the Facebook, Twitter, Google stuff as trash. Essentially, in my words, the Internet has just become trash, daytime TV. It’s not the PBS that The Well was. And while the Internet can be used as a communication tool for politics, it’s now no more special than any other tool and no less useful for truth or falsehoods. For every Iran, there’s dozens of swift boaters, sharpie speech noters, and Tea Party truther torpedoers.

In place of thinking the Internet is the end of communications innovation, Lanier wants to push you to think of new art forms, technological innovations, an just plainly moving our culture forward instead of stupidly funding the next dot.com billionaire.

He ends the book with some examples of what this post-Internet innovation could look like. His examples, drawn from his own imagination and work in virtual reality and obsession with octopuses, are all too science fictiony to take too seriously – but whether they seem probable or not, their very nature
of seeming absurd to those of us in the Internet generation illustrates his point: just because it doesn’t seem possible in the frame and reality that we currently live in (the Internet) doesn’t mean it isn’t. The Internet is just one part of our larger culture, not the constraints we have to operate in.

His writing is tedious and academic, but the book is short enough that you can power through it. The strongest parts are the first two thirds where he lambastes current Internet culture as being anything wonderful (though it used to be). The last third, as noted above, is weird and like reading epic, Victorian poetry: you feel like you’re supposed to like it, but you don’t.

Also, I recommend this Tech Nation interview with Jaron Lanier – his points about the way most ‘net business models steal dignity is a good one.

(The ironic part is that me writing a review in Goodreads is part of all this: free labor for someone else’s commercial enterprise.)